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[BANGS]

Star Fox 3DS, Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes, and others have totally redone their voice acting despite not having enough new dialogue(or any at all) to justify such a thing. These were obviously done because the original sound files were compressed and would sound pretty shitty, but don't they have the pre-compressed source material to work with?

Right now we have a similar situation with the Shenmue port, where they are keeping in the compressed voice files. Couldn't they just recut the source files and copy/paste? A daunting/tedious task for sure, but shouldn't be too difficult. We know the voices were recorded in a higher quality because we can hear them in the Shenmue the Movie disk that comes with Shenmue 2 on xbox...

Does anyone know the real reason for this, is it as simple as they lost the source materials over time? And not for nothing, but why wouldn't they protect all this stuff in a vault considering how big these projects were? I can't imagine working so hard and spending so much money on a project and then just chucking away the source materials when I'm finished...

 

[Vawn]

I would love to see the Resident Evil 2 remake use modern facial animations and motion capture along with the voice overs of the original, because that'd be hilarious.

Maybe they can do that for another remake of RE1. That game has the greatest acting performances in any form of media ever.

 

[Helios]

I don't know the issues those games had but I remember Silent Hill remasters having the same problem.
There were multiple issues in that case like the voice actor for James Sunderland, Guy Cihi, wanting royalties and Konami refusing, Konami lost the source code for SH2/3 and some of the old voice actors refused to have their voices in the game reused(I think in the case of SH3).
As a side note I think it's funny that Troy Baker at the time defended Konami's decision on not giving Guy Cihi royalties. The same Troy Baker 3-4 years later would go on a strike with SAG-AFTRA demanding royalties from companies.

 

[Mochilador]

In the case of Twin Snakes the GameCube audio was superior to the PS1 and you could even listen to the nearby traffic from the studio where they recorded it. That's why they had to redo the dialogues.
And sometimes the source files are lost.

 

[Shifty]

It entirely depends on whether the developer / publisher still has the source files.

Given the horror stories about code being printed out and archived on paper at some of these companies, I'd imagine that process for audio content would be just as bad.

 

[Shifty]

Maybe they can do that for another remake of RE1. That game has the greatest acting performances in any form of media ever.

Boy do I ever have some good news for you:



(Modded Steam version)

 

[VulcanRaven]

Star Fox 3DS, Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes, and others have totally redone their voice acting despite not having enough new dialogue(or any at all) to justify such a thing. These were obviously done because the original sound files were compressed and would sound pretty shitty, but don't they have the pre-compressed source material to work with?

Wikipedia says this about The Twin Snakes voice acting:

"The main reason for the re-recording, according to an interview with Hayter, was because the increased audio quality allowed by the GameCube picked up outside noise from the original recordings that were inaudible in the PlayStation version."

"The revised voice acting is used in Metal Gear Solid 4 during Snake's reminiscence as the English-language voice-recording used in the original game was not recorded in a sound-proof studio."

 

[Mr Hyde]

Mainly because they suck ass, both in quality and performances.

 

[BANGS]

Mainly because they suck ass, both in quality and performances.

While this may be true, one could argue the redone voice acting is so much worse in performance that we'd be better of with the quality of the old... Star Fox 3DSis the perfect example of that. Especially since all voice acting with the exception of the end cut scene is done via radio transmission anyway, the quality being compressed actually makes more sense. The new voice acting, while good in quality, is so cringe worthy and awful in performance that it really makes me miss the old voice acting...

 

[wvnative]

I believe in most cases its due to the low quality of the older voice files.

 

[ChuyMasta]

Boy do I ever have some good news for you:



(Modded Steam version)

Gamecube version for comparisons sake:

 

[Do Make Say Think]

Sometimes it makes sense.

Mei Ling in MGS grew up in the United States, her having an accent doesn't make any sense. But she loses so much charm without the accent

 

[Hotel Security]

Could be many reasons:

-Voice-over person wanted royalties. They didn't want to pay.
-Contract with voice-over person was up...maybe too much of an issue to arrange a new one.
-Audio quality issues.
-Contract stipulates they can't re-use the voice or can't put it out in certain formats.

Could be a number of things...

 

[Pot Meet Kettle]

American unions in creative fields often demand, beyond their basic demands for their member rights, quite a lot of things from their members and the corporations in question compared to unions from the rest of the world, often because they consider those demands essential to their "unique situation" so that their negociation power isn't undermined.

For example, corporations are not allowed to hire non-union members (and on old GAF when someone discussed the implications for european dubbers who are obviously not members of the american voice actor union, they said "duh, those actors should just ask for a regional offshot of the american union to be created, or ask their local union to join it, and then become members of it), and union members are not allowed to partake in projects that use non-union talent or corporation is a persona non grata for that union... which caused a bunch of voice actors in the anime industry who wanted to reprise their roles to do so illegally, uncredited or under pseudonyms.

In that overall context, most videogame projects nowadays slant heavily for non-union talent whenever they can (because they don't come with all the restrictions union workers have). But that wasn't always the case in the past. Voice acting unions didn't care about anime and gaming in the past but started to in the past decade.

For re-releases, while the original recordings were very clearly work for hire performances fully owned by the companies that could rerelease them if they so desired, the fact that:
• Those voice actors joined unions, and are willing to stir a hornet nest that's several years old (renegociating old contracts is never fun, there's a reason why games based on movies rarely get rereleased at all)
• Demand royalties (some Shadow of Destiny, Silent Hill VAs), which since unlike Japanese seiyuus they didn't clearly lay out in the contract back in the nineties aren't entitled to them, but still all the lawyering and suing could make the rerelease not profitable
• The voice performance isn't that good to begin with: poorly translated, poorly performed, poorly directed, poorly recorded, poorly stored... and this could be a good occasion to rerecord it all (like they did with Castlevania SOTN PSP even though they reunited the old cast, and used the original voice acting in later versions)

Suddenly keeping those old recordings isn't even worth it.

Japanese developers work with voice acting agencies that demand royalties and distribution countries be clearly laid out in the contract, and occasionally traditional work-for-hire contracts. So for their rereleases to be missing voice acting, it's often because they were incompetent when laying out what they can do with that performance and it has to be renegociated but the time and money to set that up isn't worth it anymore. Sometimes they still rerecord lines and music but that's rare and usually because:
• The original voice work contains offensive words by today's standards (not gonna mention which RPG, don't wanna give controvery ammo for everyone)
• The voice actor or the composer has a personal life scandal or was accused of plagiarism (some composers for Dragon Ball Super Butoden 2 and Super Robot Taisen L)
• American branches asked for alternate takes (happens in the Megaman series, but also infamously when Nintendo Treehouse asked the japanese seiyuus to dub their censored lines in Japanese for Tokyo Mirage Sessions)

Licensed music has a ton of restrictions about its use, especially western pop music. It's often cleared for legal just for that single print run and period in time, so it's usually omitted or replaced.

 

[Iced Arcade]

........quality

 

[KonradLaw]

Sometimes the original files don't exist anymore or are in low quality.
And very often it's simply the rights. Remasters and remakes are most of the time treated as new games, so they're not covered by original contracts. Meaning you would have to obtain licenses from all voice actors all over again.
Quality, licensing and union stuff often happens all at once, meaning it's just cheaper and easier to hire new actors.

 

[KevinKeene]

It's worse when it happens to movies. The German version of Arielle (as well as other Disney-movies) got new voice-acting. Guess if it's an improvement. :/

 

[SutekhTheDestroyer]

Rights issues with the voice actors and royalties.