Valkerion

Some dubs are surprisingly well done while others appear to have come out of someone's worst nightmare. Subs really depends on how good the subtitles are. One thing I did notice through the years is dubs for foreign films are done quite poorly.

 

This so much.

 

Subs have and always will be more convenient, but that race to be first sub group out has had some serious quality drops. There are just grammar errors and sentence structure problems all over the place now, simply from careless mistakes. When reading casually our brains just skim over stuff like that, but when there is an error, sometimes it catches your attention way to much haha.

 

On the other hand dubs have come a long way since the early 2000s, and for those like me who remember anime even before its big global boom, WAY better lol. However it still is based on which actors are used, and most importantly the translation and editing of the script. Making it flow right, and most importantly making it have "context" to the area its being translated for is super hard, but when its done right, it's amazing.

 

Great examples of that are, FLCL, Disgaea video game series, and more recently Gundam Unicorn. FLCL had all its Japanese references taken out that 99% of people would not understand, but were replaced with what would be their English equivilant. Same with Disgaea. The joke or meaning remained and the effect was not lost, but the context was changed for the better. Gundam Unicorn benifits from being dubbed at the same exact time as the Japanese version, and a high enough budget that the translation simply must be done well lol. Having the actors for both sides next to each other giving tips on how to convey the character is having a major effect on the quality too!

 

Personally prefer dubs for conveying ages. In Japanese dub lets face it, you are either 6 years old or 45 lol. Using Gundam Unicorn again, Audrey sounds 16~mid 20s in English, in Japanese she sounds straight up 40 haha. Also English dubs tend to do antagonists extremely well too, like Char and Full Frontal have great voices, tons of "gravitas" when they talk, which is EXACTLY how the characters should be.

 

While I watch Unicorn in the dub (since it comes out the same day as the Japanese version) Its just impossible for me to accept the ENG dub of Gundam 00. Which mostly comes down to "what you hear first." I don't think enough people consider that when they prefer one version to another. Then again sometimes some voices are annoying in both languages (cough Shinji in Eva cough)

 

Either way, its all still a crap shoot. For every great Japanese dub, there is an awful one that Japanese people hate too haha. Same for English. Pretty much both sides agree that sometimes, the other regions dubs are better.       

^ Agreed I don't see this single selling THAT much but will hopefully give her some much deserved exposure.

 

The live version she did on MUSIC JAPAN today/yesterday was pretty good too. Had a rough start but sounded better than the actual single imo. Still typical boring "safe" solo debut song, a bit to similar to Yukirin's but has potential, and hopefully its not a one or two single deal. 

I has an issue with FF series: they can't call themselves RPGs, because they're too linear (granted it may be needed for them to effectively tell the story)

But RPGs should really put the player in the protagonist's shoes, so it's better to give players nonlinearity & freedom of choice in a free-roaming open world
Like the ES series, fallout 3, & dragons dogma

 

Thats kinda a newer way of looking at it though. The FF series and basically all other RPGs from Japan are linear and always have been, but ever since Oblivion hit the consoles people suddenly realized there are more RPGs out there other than FF and DQ and made a random and sudden divide between them, JRPG and WRPG. They are all RPGs in my mind lol. Either way, now its "does a random number go up when you beat an enemy/ do something? then its got RPG elements" haha. 

 

Anyway, really liked 12, agree the ending could have been better. The whole thing was just them following the main character Ashe around more or less. Love the Ivalice world though and hope SE keeps going back to it every now and then. Don't really like the save the world plots and more since they seem brain dead. 

 

Question: how do caucasians manage the Japanese language so fluently? (their accent just adds the charm)

 

I'm southeast asian who's bilingual in english & mandarin & I found even Japanese Elementary 1 difficult already

A lot of the sounds in Japanese are not hard for "westerners" to pronounce or get used to. Most of the language does not have any sounds that are... odd for us. The words and phrases are longer, but the sounds contained in them are similar and easy for most people who speak english or spanish to sound out. A few people I know who speak both spanish and japanese, say speaking Japanese was easy for them.

 

I don't think its a caucasian thing its just a natural language and accent thing. 

Happy to see the "Live on 10,000 yen for one month" Show is back this season, and our girl Kasai is on it this time! Wonder how she will fare living a month alone with that little money lol.