I played Yakuza 0 for the first time earlier this year (February?) which was my first introduction to the Yakuza games. It wasn‘t until today, two whole calendar seasons later that I realized Goro Majima’s voice actor is like…… a voice actor. He fit the character so perfectly that I never for one minute considered the character and va as separate entities, which has never happened with me before. Normally if a va gives an impressive performance, the first thing I notice is how impressive it is, and appreciate their talent (which did happen for other characters in Yakuza 0). Majima‘s was so seamless that there wasn’t any room for me to interpret him as anything besides the character. I almost don‘t even want to look up who the voice actor is because it’d be weird seeing him in other roles. What are some other video game characters that wouldn‘t be the same without their voice actor because they’re cast so perfectly?
Reuben Langdon has come to embody Dante from Devil May Cry after voicing the character and performing motion capture from DMC3 onward.
Same for Nolan North as Nathan Drake, and this whole thing with Tom Holland playing Drake in the movie is incredibly weird.
Auron in the English dub of FFX has a world-weariness to his voice that is a good match for his character and, to my ears at least, is missing from the Japanese original. I know the Japanese voice actor is well-respected. For my tastes though his reads are a little too overtly macho.
I'm partial to many of the English voices in FFX over the original Japanese, especially since the tech was rudimentary enough that you're still getting plenty of immersion break from lip-sync issues in the Japanese anyway. Although, sorry 2 James Arnold Taylor, but Japanese Tidus is 1000x better
I'll get the big, obvious ones out of the way:
IDK why I usually have trouble remembering games that I enjoyed the non-jp VA in before Dark Souls, but one came to me just now… Gitaroo Man had awesome VA!
DC Douglas did such a fantastic job with Albert Wesker from Umbrella Chronicles onwards that even though he wasn‘t the first to play the character, wasn’t the first to give him an English accent, and wasn‘t the first to really nail that quiet aloof menace in his voice I can only hear the way he delivers Wesker’s lines whenever I think of Resident Evil 