I only know English and Russian. I can tell you that Zarya’s Russian is not very good. The VA is also not Russian, she is Polish.
Also, Overwatch hired a voice actor for Hanzo who doesn’t speak Japanese. He apparently had a lot of trouble voicing just the ultimate voice line. He has no other lines in Japanese, even though Hanzo is Japanese.
There may be others I am not aware of.
Given that Overwatch had a gigantic budget, and given that they HAVE hired at least some really prominent voice actors, such as Keith Silverstein for Torb, (he’s got massive range and has been prominent in giant mega-games such as Skyrim and Fallout 4,) this doesn’t make sense. Why not get a voice actor of the character’s nationality and who is fluent both in English and the character’s language? Would have been easy for Bliz to get that.
But they didn’t.
Does anybody know why?
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They picked who sounded the best. They just need to teach people the lines and have a dialog coach check if it sounds right.
Well, if you can afford Keith Silverstein, you should be able to afford a fluently-bilingual Russian woman for Zarya, or a fluently bi-lingual Japanese man for Hanzo. The problem is they DON’T sound the best.
I think they said that while having the duality would be great to have that they care more about the actor’s ability to do well and match the character’s personality/feel they wanted to have.
When choosing someone who will be an english VA with some 1-off bilingual lines that 90% of people won’t understand the language due to not being apart of that language it makes sense the bilingual part is not as important.
The other thing too is you are going to have VAs for other languages. What about the Spanish + Japanese Hanzo for people who speak predominate Spanish, but will have Japanese voice lines? It becomes incredibly hard to find these type of people for all translations and portray the person as well.
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Probably because they never meant to speak the language outside some worded ability that just sounded cool like Hanzo’s ultimate (even though the grammar is off?). Outside that, they really didn’t speak much of another language. I remember some early concerns or complaints about a lack of fluency or whatnot and so Blizzard started to get the voice actors to add in lines and phrases in another language. And if I remember correctly they changed some voice actors around, maybe for Mercy (idr why).
I also find that this is a very American thing to talk about with regards to representation. Heroes in other languages don’t really have the foreign accents or much phrases in their own respective language from what I can tell. In Japanese and Spanish it’s a lot of tropes based on physicality (a large man is just gruff for example). So, again it’s my assumption they probably didn’t find it that necessary to convey the most accurate fluency of a hero from their respective country of origin or ethnicity. They probably focused on personality and stylization more (with a hint of stereotypes).
I only speak english so I cant really speak for how good the accents are. But man, anyone can tell Kiriko’s VA was a rubbish choice. Despite growing up with genji and hanzo, she sounds completely american?
I actually like all the VAs other than kiriko and i think they sound lovely. Most notably, Mcree, MOIRA and lucio.
I’m brazilian and lucio speaks it very well!
I think I remember reading that Lucio’s VA learned Portuguese just for his role as Lucio.
Pretty impressive if true.
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He clearly is giving 300% effort in every line
This is a good question but some characters do have a matching voice actor in their native language like Brigitte Widowmaker and Kiriko