As most of us have seen the new KHIV trailer, Sora looks much older than he does after KH3. It may be a little early to get into the voice acting aspect of the game, but I hope this eventually reaches the SE Localization team to have Sora sound back or close to his KH2 voice. I've always appreciated Haley's work, but having Sora sound as a kid as he's getting older is getting old. His voice went from kid to teenager to kid again and I'm not sure why it continued after KH3D. Since KHIV deals with "Reality" with even better visuals than KH3, I believe it time to make Sora's voice more realistic. Haley has done an amazing job voicing both Sora and Vanitas throughout the years, so recreating Sora's voice to sound older like it did back in KH2 and even KH:ReCoM would make much more sense to use in KHIV. There's still ways to vocalize the cheery Sora voice, but as the story gets more deeper and serious, so should the tone of the characters.
I know a lot of people are going to think about how much people wanted a "copy and paste" KH2 version into KH3, but this post isn't about that. It's about how the tone of character's voices are getting butchered. Riku basically sounded completely monotone in KH3 ReMind, and it doesn't seem fair to have a game look as great as it does and have a story be as great as it is to have the characters sound dull. Same in KH:MoM where it felt the same way and rushed, At this point most of the emotion from KH comes from the music, and it should have a balance of both music and emotion put into a character's voice. As a fan, I would really appreciate if the localization team would allow not only Haley, David, Alison, and many other voice actors who do a great job at the game give more emotion into their characters.
I'm not sure if the voice actors are watching the scenes or not as they are doing their voice acting, and I figure no because of the NDAs they sign to not say anything about these kinds of projects. If they did sign NDAs then it would make no sense to have them voice act without seeing the expressions of the character's face they're playing. At this point I'm not even sure if they just have them say these lines and send them over to the team that develops the scene over the voice overs. All I'm saying is that 20 years into the series, don't let the voice acting make a game fail, especially when Sora is going to look, be, and feel older. It's the same with us, growing out of a "child's" mindset and growing up to face "reality." This is just my opinion, but I will just leave this post here.
I know a lot of people are going to think about how much people wanted a "copy and paste" KH2 version into KH3, but this post isn't about that. It's about how the tone of character's voices are getting butchered. Riku basically sounded completely monotone in KH3 ReMind, and it doesn't seem fair to have a game look as great as it does and have a story be as great as it is to have the characters sound dull. Same in KH:MoM where it felt the same way and rushed, At this point most of the emotion from KH comes from the music, and it should have a balance of both music and emotion put into a character's voice. As a fan, I would really appreciate if the localization team would allow not only Haley, David, Alison, and many other voice actors who do a great job at the game give more emotion into their characters.
I'm not sure if the voice actors are watching the scenes or not as they are doing their voice acting, and I figure no because of the NDAs they sign to not say anything about these kinds of projects. If they did sign NDAs then it would make no sense to have them voice act without seeing the expressions of the character's face they're playing. At this point I'm not even sure if they just have them say these lines and send them over to the team that develops the scene over the voice overs. All I'm saying is that 20 years into the series, don't let the voice acting make a game fail, especially when Sora is going to look, be, and feel older. It's the same with us, growing out of a "child's" mindset and growing up to face "reality." This is just my opinion, but I will just leave this post here.
