Hallow.7368

Personally, I've never heard of him before this game. However, I believe that just because someone has previous good works doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticized. If it's not his best work he should absolutely be made aware of this, in a way that's not toxic, so that he can improve. If he simply just wasn't inspired for the character then he's not completely to blame, but if you want to be respected as a VA imho you shouldn't be taking jobs that you just won't perform well for. The other part falls on Anet for paying for subpar work just for a name. To me, he barely even sounds like a noble. Faren sounds way more like a noble should sound. The voice just lacks character to me.

The thing is though that I don't really care about how respected someone is if their work doesn't feel like a quality effort. The female human sounds absolutely amazing and isn't "bland" as you described the male to be. The male character sounds like a dad who's about to be finished telling a bedtime story and tuck little Jimmy into bed he doesn't sound like he's actually partaking in the story. Showing emotion that fits the context would be perfectly fine. He shouldn't sound like a robot when finding out his sister's alive or when he's about to fight the god of war to save the world albeit just a temporary fix. Regardless none of this shows his sexuality or who he's romantically involved with or any of that. I would be more understanding if all the race's voices were like this, but specifically, the female counterpart sounds perfect. Besides that the fact that the majority of characters made in this game are female despite the audience more than likely being overwhelmingly male throws being "relateable" completely out the window. If I wanted to relate to my character I wouldn't have made my elementalist female, but I did simply because the male voice acting is atrocious and the female voice actor makes the dialogue feel seamless. Also, let me just tack on that those other characters sound amazing. So either he was uninspired for the male human or Anet did one heck of a job with his voice in an audio editor.

It straight up just sounds so out of place in the game. All the other characters can sound in place during the situation whether they're frightened or frustrated or confident, but the male voice actor just sounds the exact same emotion wise regardless of if it's just because he found out his sister was still alive or if it's because he's about to fight the god of war to save the planet. The female voice actor actually sounds like she put in the effort to match the emotional context of her dialogue, but am I crazy when I think that they could have found someone so much better to voice act one of the genders of what would likely be (and is) the most popular race?