English voices in fighting games
These days, pretty much all Japanese-created fighting games have dual English/Japanese voice options. However, back in the day, the only two fighting game franchises to have this feature were Tekken and Soul Calibur, both created by Namco. While the very first Street Fighter game had an English dub, which let the characters call their attacks by their English names, the western localizations of all subsequent games left the voices in Japanese, up until Street Fighter IV, when Capcom finally decided to implement this feature into its game, taking a page out of Namco's book, though certain characters, particularly those from Asia, still use Japanese names for certain special moves amidst otherwise English dialogue. Also, while the original Dead or Alive 2 did not feature English voices, the Ultimate edition did, but Tecmo would not implement this feature into the series again (excluding the Xtreme side series) until Dead or Alive: Dimensions, and the upcoming Dead or Alive 5 will also have English voices. Since then, all other fighting games by all other companies have began implementing English voices into their games full time, along with subtitles for introduction and victory quotes, but also allow the player to switch back and forth between English and Japanese voices, as well.
Whenever I played all those earlier fighting games with Japanese voices (excluding Tekken and Soul Calibur, since they already had full-time English voices for a while), I always wondered exactly what they were saying, since I don't understand Japanese (and I'm pretty sure that a lot of you on this forum don't, either). When I started playing Street Fighter IV with the new English voice option, at first, it sounded a little strange, since apparently we've gotten so used to the Japanese voices for so long, but I understood it better, and over time, I actually began to like it. Nowadays, whenever I get a new fighting game that allows me to decide between English and Japanese voices (which pretty much all recent fighting games feature), I always set the voices to English. Of course, some of you will stick to Japanese voices, because the addition of subtitles has eliminated the problem of not understanding what the characters are saying, at least in their introductions and victory quotes. However, battle quotes during actual gameplay matches are not subtitled, so you still wouldn't understand what they are saying during gameplay (a lot of you will tell me that it doesn't matter, since the action itself is most important, but still, you should get my point).
With all of that said, whenever you play a fighting game, if it has the option of allowing you to decide between English and Japanese voices, which one do you prefer? And if you had to play with English voices, which voices from which games do you like, and which do you dislike? Also, what are your favorite quotes from certain characters from certain games? Let's talk about it here.
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Originally Posted by Lionx
