best voice acting of all time?

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To me, the main cast in this game really makes the characters come alive for me.
Female V is amazing. But also Male V (from what I heard), Judy, Panam, Victor. I even think Takemura is voiced quite nice.

But most of all, I would like to put a point in the basket for the NPC gangers with some of their fairly unique phrases that range from stereotype angry "I'm gonna kill you" to the "I'm scared shitless" type.
Specifically the Tygers with that half-on-half japanese/english talk I find enjoyable as the Valentino's with the hispanic mix, specifically the female Valentino's sometimes sound really scared when I pick them off unseen.
With the maelstromers I find their more frenzy-like sputtering very enjoyable and while I'm no fan of Voodoo boys, I do like the haitic speech they mumble.
 
So in French, it's great (for me at least).
But generally, in french, for the most of games/studios, it's only the "minimal work"... And it's if we are lucky, sometimes, just subtitles for big games seem to be sufficient (yep, we know reading...) :rolleyes:
It's not really difficult to be "the best" when there is not too much competition :D

So yes, in my case, in french > "best of all time" :)
(and I also really love female V voice in english version, seem to be great)
 
I think the voice acting is very, very strong throughout, helped by a script that doesn't suffer George Lucas syndrome of being written the way people write, not the way they speak.

On Keanu, I actually loved his performance because he's using his natural "stoner" delivery to present the opposite of his normal characters, instead of trying to take his voice into territory it does not naturally inhabit. He resisted the temptation to give us a**hole Keanu by exaggerating his manner, and the character is better for it. For me, it worked, when with Silverhand there was always the danger of an actor going super hammy and aggressive and making Silverhand irredeemably unbearable.

Also a little love for male V, whom I think played it with a lot of sensitivity and a general air of V's being lost in what was happening and struggling to take control. I also think female V is an exceptional job, but by comparison I found her slightly too hard-edged for how I interpret the game.

Yes, there are lines that are over or under emphasised or don't sound right for the context. That's pretty much par for the course in video games where you can play things in unexpected orders / lines can be switched up after recording / it's not quite clear at the time of recording what the intent behind a line is. I thought the voice direction, nonetheless, was impressive.
 
I thought it was good. Definitely not the best in my opinion. Female V is very good, and I like Jackie as well. I think his voice actor did a good job with the character. I agree with the comments that Keanu Reeves isn't very good here.

I think Horizon Zero Dawn has the best voice acting in any game that I've played. The main character (Aloy / Ashly Burch) is superb. The main supporting character (Sylens / Lance Reddick) is equally outstanding. The rest of the supporting cast were also excellent.

Other games that I would rank ahead of CP2077 in terms of voice acting: Witcher series, Mass Effect series, Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic.

Edit: I'd also give honorable mention to Dragon Age 3. Some of the actors were very good, and some were great. Probably about equal to CP2077.
 
I gotta say I'm very impressed by Keanu Reeves work here. Probably one of his best works I've experienced so far. His and Cherami Leigh performances are central to the story being as gut wrenching and soul crushing as it is. I legit don't think I've ever felt more emotional about video game characters before. The rest of the cast also have incredible performances, they really outdid themselves.

I'm holding out a tiny tiny hope that Keanu and Cherami will return for the expansions.
 
Hey,
I really enjoy all of it - Takemura, Saburo, Yorinobu, Hanako, Fingers, Judy, Panam, Jackie, Dex, Placide, Brigitte, Oda, Kerry, Johny, Smasher, Evelyn, V, Viktor, Misty,...

The accents are really, really well done. And there are also many of them.
I also like the dialogues with emotional contexts, like Panam's yelling being caps-locked, and I think they should utilize them more :)

Also, I think that Johny's voice sounds better when he has something to say.
Don't get me wrong, the dialogues are exceptional, though his everyday babbling is sometimes hard to...tolerate.
Though maybe it's a good thing :) I don't really know.
 
I gotta say I'm very impressed by Keanu Reeves work here. Probably one of his best works I've experienced so far. His and Cherami Leigh performances are central to the story being as gut wrenching and soul crushing as it is. I legit don't think I've ever felt more emotional about video game characters before. The rest of the cast also have incredible performances, they really outdid themselves.

I'm holding out a tiny tiny hope that Keanu and Cherami will return for the expansions.
Totally agree. I wasn't sure what to expect from the character of Johnny. I was really surprised and engaged by it. Great stuff!
 
VA in CP2077 was on top notch I enjoy listening every conversation with every character you interact with. This was the best moment of the game. Next was Shadow of mordor or Middle Earth, has a great VA as well and it is so good. RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 was even so great! I love the western accent and everything in it's world! Witcher 3 VA also good. specially for the main characters and other side character interactions... ME: Andromeda also holds one of the best VA too... and don't forget VA of Beyond 2 souls and DETROIT and lastly the MAFIA 1 to 3 series!
 
For me its hard to beat Mass Effect when it comes to voice acting. Every character is voiced and acted amazingly well.
More I read these kind of opinions, more I start to really think that Bioware have make the "minimal work" for non-english speaker... Like simply for been understand, because honestly, there is no comparaison possible...
In french at least, it's like if I compare a fast food and a "3 stars" restaurant, there are light years between them (or sparkling wine and champagne, a MaiMai and a Caliburn).

Edit : And more I think CDPR have made a awesome work for voice acting :)
 
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Joker is played by Mark Hamill.
He delivers such great performance.
I forgot about the Batman games. I agree, the VA is as good as you can get. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are VA legends for their long time stellar work as Batman and Joker, respectively. Steve Blum is equally amazing, as usual. Grey DeLisle (Griffin) is awesome in anything she does.
 
More I read these kind of opinions, more I start to really think that Bioware have make the "minimal work" for non-english speaker... Like simply for been understand, because honestly, there is no comparaison possible...
Can't comment about voice work on other languages than English, as that's the version we get for our games here, but there are matters of taste, which is far made more complex by how different players feel about scenes in game and what sort of expectations people have. Mass Effect series I can comment as that's something I actually played and IMO they had very good voice cast, but voice directing was off sometimes. In games they used very dramatic interpretations of dialogue, while subtler takes were also recorded, at least for what I recall reading about it back in the day.

Native speakers always has advantage but for me Cyberpunk 2077 is something that presented different challenges. There's a post in this topic I made months ago and I mention scene with River and his nieces where V plays VR game with them and I don't think anything like that has ever been done before in video games. Then go to something entirely different say Peralez, those NPC has been written very well, they have different kind of problems, their speak differently as they think differently "Read between the lines" is good example and all work there, modeling, body language and voice acting reflects that. In Mass Effect, NPC gives player a task, a lot of things come to player through exposition slipped in dialogue and that works for Mass Effect but that wouldn't work for CP 2077. IMO there are movies and tv shows that aren't on level with CP 2077.

It's still a bit stunning to even think about. Think of how cinematic scenes in games take things from movies and shows and while CP 2077 has that sort of scenes, player might be sitting but game also realizes that player can be doing something else, like looking how to neighborhood looks like when playing VR game with River and kids or studying Peralez apartment. So these NPC's are there and via voice work believable even when player isn't necessarily looking them at all, we are not experiencing say private investigator through static experience and certain anticipation like in a movie or novel, but V is there. This is realizing what only video games can do and embracing what this format of story telling can do.

I'm bit surprised that this hasn't been high lighted more in this topic, at least what I quickly browsed through this, but perhaps that's because things in game work in a way that just vacuums people in LOL. I mean there are expectation and those expectations become met in a way that just feel natural.
 
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More I read these kind of opinions, more I start to really think that Bioware have make the "minimal work" for non-english speaker... Like simply for been understand, because honestly, there is no comparaison possible...
In french at least, it's like if I compare a fast food and a "3 stars" restaurant, there are light years between them (or sparkling wine and champagne, a MaiMai and a Caliburn).

Edit : And more I think CDPR have made a awesome work for voice acting :)
Can't comment about voice work on other languages than English, as that's the version we get for our games here, but there are matters of taste, which is far made more complex by how different players feel about scenes in game and what sort of expectations people have.
I totally get this. I actually played The Witcher 1 in Polish. I couldn't stand the voice acting in English. Even though I couldn't understand pretty much anything, the acting that was being done by the Polish cast was leaps and bounds better. Just listen to the opening cinematic in English...then listen to it in Polish. The Polish version is so much more nuanced and tonal. That delivery is awesome! The English version is okay, but still sounds totally phoned in to me, by comparison. This was even more noticeable in-game, though. There were characters that sounded downright silly in English...but so grounded and believable in Polish.

Nowadays, though, I think there's simply enough appreciation for it that producers and studios are willing to spend the time and money to give all languages the full treatment. And yeah, TW3 and Cyberpunk knock voice acting right out of the park. I would say that most games, Bioware included, up to this point were doing really well if they could land a level of writing, acting, and delivery on par with sitcom or network TV. I can quite easily pick out scenes from both TW3 and Cyberpunk that are cinema levels of good.
 
A lot of effort went into it. From some minor characters to our big boys and girls it's top notch. Johnny's monologues and dialogues with V especially carry so much weight.
In Judy's voice you can hear cracking when she's desperate, the sheer confidence and being lost at the same time in Panam's. Even River who I honestly spent the least amount of time with has so much emotion in it.
 
Nowadays, though, I think there's simply enough appreciation for it that producers and studios are willing to spend the time and money to give all languages the full treatment. And yeah, TW3 and Cyberpunk knock voice acting right out of the park. I would say that most games, Bioware included, up to this point were doing really well if they could land a level of writing, acting, and delivery on par with sitcom or network TV. I can quite easily pick out scenes from both TW3 and Cyberpunk that are cinema levels of good.
Listened to those clips and Polish version is tonally clearly different from English version. It's impossible for me to speculate about it further as languages are both, simple and very complex. For example, emphasizing one word in sentence can change something in context of sentence. Can't really comment the Witcher series either, I only really ever played but the first one.

There are things in CP 2077 that are really huge and very dependent of how those things are delivered and I really hope that it's possible in other languages too. Our language group is too small for that sort of localization, but in principle I appreciate the way say, French and Germans do most things via dubbing while we rely on subtitles.

In game set in alternate history USA, English version could be used as benchmark and let's take Kerry Eurodyne and scene where we are on the boat with him when he is playing guitar and chatting with V.

There's dialogue bug in that conversation that I didn't notice during my first playthrough, someone else spotted that though and now I can't unhear that and it was still there at least in 1.23 but let's not get stuck on that, it's useful for something else in context of this topic.

Why I didn't I spotted it, even I have experience? First is that I'm not native English speaker but second factor is that I was so involved what was happening there. My V didn't had any romantic angle there but it was still captivating segment a lot thanks to Kerry's voice actor. His story unfolds and it's intimate moment but it's also intellectual. Kerry goes on and tells about background of certain song, "People think it's about sticking it to corpos but..." and this is something very important because while it's impossible to make blanket statement behalf of every musician out there, it's in fact even banal that things are misinterpreted, context isn't understood. Think of real life, say "Killing in the name" from Rage Against the Machine. It's not about rebellion against every institution there is but police brutality and such, "they killed the king" refers to Martin Luther King. Things like that, I don't know, when me and my brother were kids we used to listen to Iron Maiden among other bands but it took years to figure out that "Two Minutes to Midnight" looks like it's about military industrial complex and not just some nonsense.

So Kerry is this someone who is familiar with that and made peace what that and focusing to becoming the best version of him. There's so much in that scene, I was thinking Jimi Hendrix and how he probably had certain humor regarding some of the audience, they didn't come to hear the music but to see if he burned his guitar LOL.

So it's this emotional scene and how Kerry shows trust towards V by telling things, some of that are very true to real life. I mean my brother still does music and we discuss about these things every now and then. Kerry's voice actor and voice direction, you could put me or my brother in box with a mic but we couldn't do that and there was someone, think late December or January, musician who wrote about the same thing. Voice work here delivers on level that is difficult to achieve even with real serious hobbyist or even pro's, doesn't get any better than that.

Cinema is exactly right word IMO, as cinema tends to be not only about how but also about what. That part of Kerry's story line gives access to think critically about things that might be driven by generational experiences, say Woodstock and Vietnam war and European pop music in the 80's and how the Berlin Wall finally came down. Culture was part of things but we can't take them as universal and Afghanistan is very good example of how we can't change things in real life just by thinking of things or writing songs (and misunderstanding even those :p)

Where that puts CP 2077 is that despite age ratings, people find ways, someone might be 12 someone 16 but it's very different product as it can be different experience if someone is say 16 now, plays this game 10 years later. Graphics can get obsolete, but writing and voice acting, they do not. But it's huge task to make this work on different languages as some places, France and Italy, way they think about pop culture, rock stars and that, might be very different than other places around the world and voice actor needs to be some sort of middle man, finding the right tones that deliver that experience Kerry has to that audience that doesn't necessarily view rock culture in similar context as say Northern Europe and English speaking countries. Would be curious to know more about that, if anyone would be willing to share.
 
I think Keanu fit perfectly for Johnny. Its a bit similiar low/medium energy most of a time which fits someone who is a construct for years and years and process things at his own pace.

But if I could change some things in voice acting in cyberpunk it would be to have better quality of a NPCs which are usually just some random crowd or happen in some small gigs. A lof of times I can hear someone who is acting to a game rathen than just acting. It usually comes with kind of happy and high pitch tone familiar in a lot of games and it doesnt fit cyberpunk world at times. I would love to hear more Dex type of characters with deep, strong voices.
 
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