Can you hear it? A voice, booming and boisterous, blowing in upon the cool winds of autumn. A voice that beckons you to come sit a spell and play a good ol’ videogame. “They don’t make ‘em like this no more,” it says. “Well…most don’t. That’s why we need to sell a bunch’a copies, so they’ll get right to making Zwei 3! Yes siree, with Falcom’s storied lineage of action RPGs, it’d be a slam dunk! Ghahahaha!” That voice…is my voice, broad as the sea and hearty as a meal that consists solely of potatoes and slabs of meat.

That’s right, true believers, it’s Nick, here once again to share with you the myriad fascinations of working in videogame localization. If you’ve been keeping up, this is the fourth blog I’ve written about the upcoming release of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection. The first entry gave a basic rundown of what the game is like and what you can expect from it, while the second entry went into more depth about the localization work and the nuances of character writing. The third entry was a progress report, detailing where we were in the QA cycle and why we’d be missing our summer release date.

Today, I’d like to tell you a story: the tale of how Zwei: II ended up with the expanded English voice acting it now boasts. Although this news has been known ever since we officially announced the game, I haven’t seen much discussion surrounding it, but the process of how “let’s add voice acting” went from pie-in-the-sky thought to reality is one I think you’ll find fascinating.

See, the interesting thing isn’t that we added English dubbing to Zwei: II. We weren’t able to secure the rights for the original Japanese voices, so it was pretty much a given we were going to do a dub. No, the most interesting part is that the dub adds a LOT more voicework than was present in the original. Why did we do that? How did we decide what to dub? And how much more is there, exactly? This and more I shall unfold for you, dear reader!

Zwei: II was designed without voice acting in its story scenes, and it holds up perfectly well that way, as classic RPGs do. But, that said, Zwei’s story is very driven by its outsized personalities. The characters really sell the scenes, and while I wrote for each of the characters in such a way as to accomplish that without the need for voice acting, their sometimes-cartoonish gusto and theatricality seemed like they’d be even more colorful when brought to life by VAs. I talked with the big boss, Ken, about the prospect, and he told me to put together a script so we could have the studio price out how much it would cost us.

To be honest, I’m still kind of surprised Ken was open to it. After all, Zwei: II isn’t a console release of a modern title – it’s a PC release of an older title. Maybe that goes to show how well-received Japanese games have been on PC in the last several years. Personally, I think a well-received game like Cold Steel leading the charge as far as “adding additional voice acting to a PC port” did a lot to open the door for a more modest title like Zwei to get a significant bump in voice acting. But success here provided my first challenge: putting together a script.

Now that adding more voice acting was on the table, the question then became, “Okay, so what do we actually voice?” All the battle stuff was covered at a bare minimum due to the fact that it was in the Japanese voice script, so the natural answer was, “Let’s just voice all the main story.” That’s a reasonable target, and not exceedingly difficult to pull from the full game script, since many of the main story scenes are positioned just before and after the game’s major boss battles. I began to assemble a “story scenes” voice script with all the scenes I thought most essential to conveying the game’s narrative, breaking it down scene by scene. After handing off a first draft to the studio and getting their estimate, I was given the green light, since it had apparently come in under what we were expecting.

But of course, ever being one to press my luck, I said, “Wellllll…actually there are a couple more scenes I COULD include!” And with a resigned sigh from Ken, I went back in and added a few scenes I had opted to leave on the cutting room floor during my first draft. As things stand, the new voice script’s coverage of story events isn’t perfect – there’s still one boss battle that has its before/after scenes unvoiced (I chose that one to drop because I felt that what was expressed there is also expressed in other voiced scenes well enough), but such are the choices one has to make at the crossroads of idealism and budgetary limitations.

The whole “voicing scenes before and after boss battles” approach worked well because it set up a good amount of consistency as to when players could expect to hear something voiced. It also, by the very nature of the scenes chosen, is really good at building the personalities of the game’s antagonists – which is helpful since they do a lot to spur Ragna and Alwen’s growth.

The unfortunate downside to my scene-selecting methodology is that I didn’t get to include many scenes outside of those. There are only two voiced scenes that aren’t tied to before/after boss encounters – one in which Ragna talks about his past (which I thought gave good insight into his character), and a key one at the very start of the game in which Ragna discovers that Alwen is, in fact, a vampire, and they have their first long discussion about their blood contract and how Ragna wants to be equal partners. That’s such a defining scene that sets up both protagonists perfectly for everything that is to come that there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted that one voiced.

At this point, let’s stop for a moment and examine the script. The original Japanese script was 808 lines. The number of lines in the new voice script, however, clocked in at 2807. That’s basically 2000 newly voiced lines, all story. And while it may not seem gigantic in light of a game like Trails of Cold Steel, you’ll certainly be able to feel the presence of the voice acting as you play through the game. Ragna and Alwen in particular saw massive increases: from 88 and 89 to 724 and 548, respectively. We even picked up an entirely new character who had no lines in the original Japanese voice script but did factor into several of the story scenes I had selected!

When casting, I conferred with both Tom and Kris to get their general impressions, and to solicit suggestions in cases where I didn’t have any particular VA in mind. Zwei: II is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve, so I was casting with an ear toward a “Saturday Morning Cartoon” feel – expressive voices that have a touch of exaggeration in them. It was a different feel than we’d chased when casting for Trails of Cold Steel, but it got us the sound we were looking for.

Recording took six days, with a stream of VAs coming in to lend us their talent. John accompanied me for the first couple days, while Tom helped in the latter half, both lending some much-welcomed aid by helping me keep track of any changes we made to lines during recording while I was focusing on the line deliveries. To level with you a bit here, I’ve never been the most organized person, so the voice recording process, with its focus on having everything triple-checked and accounted for, has always felt pretty daunting to me. After all, there’s always that cold dread that you’ll have an actor in the booth and suddenly, some problem with the script files will pop up, costing you precious time when every minute has value. Thankfully, there were no complications with Zwei’s recording – it was actually a pretty smooth, pleasant time (though very busy). Some of our VAs I had worked with before, so seeing them again and trying them in different-sounding roles was fun. Other VAs I was meeting for the first time, and I enjoyed getting to see them at work, as well as seeing what kind of vocal ranges they could pull off (always helpful when we’re brainstorming voice casts for future projects).

Our voice director was someone I’d met before, and in fact someone I requested by name after discerning how deep his knowledge ran concerning things of the nerdy persuasion. For Zwei, I didn’t want to take a chance on a director that only had a surface-level understanding of anime – I wanted to be able to throw out oddly specific requests like “Play it more like X from the series Y!” and have them understand the voicing intent behind that and translate it into instructions the VAs could make sense of.

Talking with him over the course of the project was a mile-a-minute ride, but among all the really nerdy stuff we talked about, one common thread that really stuck with me is his identification of Zwei as a “pulp story.” Before then, I’d approached Zwei in my mind from that anime-centric perspective it so clearly embodies, but our conversations got me wondering how, as a fan of pulp-style stuff, I’d never consciously made that connection before. In another universe where Zwei wasn’t a Japanese videogame, it feels like it’d be a natural fit as a weekly radio serial. The character influences I mentioned in my second blog post all led to “pulp” too, when I followed the strings back.

Back at work, I reviewed all the voice files and marked the ones that needed filters applied, as you do when, for instance, someone is talking to a character telepathically or is possessed by a demon (y’know, your general RPG happenings), and we got them into the game. There’s something of a sense of trepidation that comes when you finally drop all those voices into the game proper. You hold your breath, thinking, “That was so much work… I reeeeeeally hope this sounds good!” Fortunately, our VAs didn’t disappoint, and hearing some of my favorite scenes brought to life through performance really helped sell the emotion of the scenes, just as I’d hoped at the outset.

Now, maybe you’re not fond of dubs. Or maybe you’re a purist, wanting to experience the game without the addition of a bunch of voice acting that wasn’t in the original. Believe me, I totally understand you. Thankfully, the voice volume is on a separate slider, so you can crank it down and read through at your own pace, with the voices you imagine the characters to have. That kind of experience is fun too, I think, and I’m interested in what those of you who play it both ways think about the ways in which the dub shapes how one perceives the story and characters.

Of course, for you fans of RPG dubs, I’m also interested to discover which characters will become fan-favorites and which lines will be the most entertaining and memorable. Our programmer, Sara, has even gone above and beyond with filled-out lip flap for the dubbed scenes! In the original game, there’s a brief lip-flap that’s tied to the scroll-out speed of text in a character’s text box. What that means in practice is that their mouths move for about a second while the text is displaying, then once it’s all there on screen, their mouth doesn’t move anymore. It’s a perfectly sensible setup for a game without voiced story lines, but in the cases where lines were voiced, I wanted the lip flap to continue as long as the voiced line was still playing. From the sound of it, it took some real doing, but the lip flap does indeed now track to the length of the voice clip in cases where story lines are voiced. It might seem to be a minor detail, but I think it’s details like this that help make the experience feel well integrated and authentic.

In any case, you won’t have to wonder too much longer what the game sounds like, because it’s finally out in less than a week, with a Trueblood vampire-approved release date of October 31st. I hope you’ll enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it. After all…everyone could use a little more PASSION in their souls!