30 Days of Gaming: Day 26: Best Voice Acting

Day 26: Best Voice Acting

I could have gone back to the well once more and written about Metal Gear again, because the voice acting has really been pretty excellent throughout the series and Snake, of course, has one of the most recognizable voices in games. On Day 26 of 30, though, I'm gonna talk about a game that I haven't gotten to yet but that absolutely deserves to be mentioned something in this thing...

Bioshock



"It wasn't impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else."

(some spoilers)

I've made no secret of my love for Metal Gear, but I can understand how the sheer amount of time you spend watching the massively complex narrative unravel and not actually playing the game would be off-putting to a lot of people. Bioshock is a pretty fascinating in that it manages to tell a pretty deep story, despite being a pretty traditional first-person shooter with almost no cutscenes and very little person-to-person interaction of any kind. The story is told through grainy black and white videos like the one that welcomes you to Rapture in the above video, or through audio tapes you find scattered about as you explore, and through the radio conversations you have with Atlas, Andrew Ryan, and a few other people. The voice acting, then, is really important to telling the story, simply because you're hearing people's voices much more than you're actually seeing them.

The standout voice is that of Andrew Ryan, the free-market worshiping father of Rapture. His voice has just the right amount of commanding presence and the right amount of disdain for all the no-good, lecherous, peons trying to ruin his utopia. His final monologue ("A man chooses! A slave obeys!") is great, and memorable and instantly recognizable enough for it to be subject of parody. Atlas's voice actor does a great job dramatically shifting from sincere to sinister after the central plot twist of the game is revealed. And then of course there are the voices of the Little Sisters, the various Slicers roaming about the deserted city, and the apparitions you see when you wig out on occasion are all sufficiently really fucking creepy. Bioshock is a lot of fun to play, but a huge reason why it stands head and shoulders above most first person shooters is that it created a truly unique world. The visual detail that 2K Games put into the ruins of Rapture matter a lot, but it matters at least equally that they created dynamic characters to inhabit it and that they got excellent voice actors to portray them.

The Dammit, They Tried Award:

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

The voice acting in SotN is really... it's not good, but I love how grandiose some of it is, and I love how in this scene, even though whoever is playing Richter is pretty much just phoning it in, Dracula just goes all out. "What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!!"



Next: Day 27 - Most epic scene ever