Another English voice-actor-related controversy has been brewing, although it seems to be the publisher’s fault this time, as the shoddy English dub for the Naruto spinoff Narutimate Storm Connections has people wondering about the state of production and possible AI use.
The issues began being brought up when the game was first released earlier this month, with people pointing out the bad voice direction for the cutscenes with the tone of lines not matching with what was happening. Naruto English voice actor Maile Flanagan unexpectedly chimed in on the issue, stating that she definitely didn’t voice the line that way. (She later deleted her Tweet after people began using her opinion to bash the game.)
People began to point out that the dub lines actually got worse between the trailers and the full game, with Kawaki from Boruto being one of the examples. Kawaki’s English dub actor Michael Schwalbe also voiced out, pointing out that the lines he voiced were better in the trailer:
However, it seems that it’s possible that AI is at play, maybe explaining some of the discrepancies. Schwalbe asked a friend to run the lines through the AI detection program ai-spy.xyz, with results returning with partial AI use or full AI usage.
Either way, it seems like, in this case, publisher Bandai Namco may have been pulling some strings in the background for the English dub of the game.
Fucking A.I. Voice
Boruto game(still called Naruto because its better for sales) being played on eng dub…man that is as shitty as it gets, subhuman dub lovers deserve the garbage quality, maybe they’ll learn to enjoy the original voices; but I’m hoping too much of these subhuman scum.
It’s funny that just today just heard that A.I. is being used to write news articles and how garbage the quality control team is. Same situation here with over paid VA who get replaced with A.I. and the company being cheap asses who don’t want to pay for a follow up.
I never liked my anime games with english dubb anyway… I always play with japanese voices, and if possible, maybe in my “not english language” voice as well.
Maile didn’t go clown mode which is the usual for these western VA types when A.I is mentioned however the fact that she deleted the tweet says something. Of course on Twitter most of these people are parrots and take everything at face value so i can see how she would get annoyed seeing all these bums use her words as justification to dunk on the game. It’s an awkward line but that is par for the course with dubbing it isn’t even the most egregious example ever.