9 Recent Hilarious Voice Acting Fails In Video Games

7. A Campy Tradition - Shenmue 3

If ‘bad voice acting’ and ‘Shenmue’ ring serious bells for you that’s because the English dub for every Shenmue game has been notoriously poor.

Often falling squarely into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category, some players enjoy the stilted, oddly-delivered voice acting as it’s all part of the unique Shenmue charm.

If you haven’t seen Shenmue II’s performance that is supposed to be a five year old child but sounds like an inebriated Texan woman, please check it out.

Despite arriving in 2019, a full eighteen years after its predecessor, Shenmue 3 decided to shirk the industry trend of implementing way better voice acting and instead keep its wildly weird and occasionally painful performances. The story of Shenmue 3 had plenty of fans so it’s a shame the primary way of accessing it is through bizarrely written and acted dialogue. Dialogue that is often repeated over and over in uninspiring conversations that go on for way longer than you want them to.

One of the most glaringly odd performances is for that of protagonist Ryo who delivers many of his lines with exactly the same intonation no matter what he’s saying.

At least he’s consistent? That said, there are a couple of theories as to what’s going wrong here. One is that the localisation team are doing their best to represent the fact that Ryo is Japanese while everyone around him is not, even though everyone has to speak English.

Another is a strong suspicion among fans that given they got a handful of seriously talented voice actors on board, the stilted, awkward voice acting and writing is actually deliberate, but I’ll let you be the judge.