Do you play your games in your native language whenever possible?
Do you play games in English despite your native language being something different?
Do you play games in a language you’re learning?
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timely thread for me - usually play games in english (my co-native language) but will play any particularly french games in french (my ‘target language’ for learning, as the kids say) and i’ll play anime stuff in japanese because the english dubs are usually intolerable[1]
have not yet found a game with a tamil dub, sadly
[1]even the ‘good dubs’ end up being this sort of overacted nickelodeon style that i really dislike (prozd does this bit really well)
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If a game has a lot of incidental voice lines that don’t get subtitled, I’ll usually go with English. Otherwise, I like doing the game’s original language so I can hear the original performance. When it’s a language I don’t speak, it also makes it easier for me to skip voiced lines of dialogue. Like, if I run into a GIANT text box in a Yakuza game, I can usually read it faster than the voice actor can say it, and if I skip to the next line before the actor’s done, it’s a bit less dissonant than it is when it’s English audio.
Honestly, I usually prefer when games DON’T have every line voice acted, so with those that do, anything that makes it easier to skip voice lines is a blessing.
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I cases where I replay a game and it’s an option, I like to pick Spanish in a vain attempt to stay in practice.
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I rotate off Spanish / French / Italian VA in AAA games because I seldom find their English voice work particularly good or compelling enough to want to hear it in my native language, and my Spanish, French, and Italian comprehension are all OK and I like to keep them up
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usually am going for the dub versione that sounds best, and switch on subtitles when language skills are not good enough to understand what’s going on.
Gets me into interesting edge cases where some games provide interesting VO options, yet due to their developer/native language option i want to play it as they intended, case in point being Stellar Blade with Hangeul option, yet the french dub whispering 'chooose meeeee, and i must…resist… ze draw, mon dieu…
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I choose the language that fits the setting usually. Otherwise I’ll go English
text - English. me read gud
VO - okay so usually I default to (default language based on where game was developed), but sometimes I go insane and pick another dub.
in FF14, I grew increasingly annoyed that the entire Japanese VO had the most stereotypical casting, to the point where I could look at a character and know how they would sound. and then the English had everyone with a British accent, which is just cruise control for fantasy. so I eventually settled on French
the best Zelda BotW (and I guess, by extension, all of the Calamity era games) dub is the German dub. just trust me here.
when I play my dumb anime phone games, I use the Japanese dub even though the games are nominally Chinese because they throw money around to get voice actors I know and stan, except since those games usually live on multiple devices, I usually have a different dub on each one (they have English, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean dubs a download away most of the time). sadly the Hoyo games don’t let you pick and choose language by character/unit like some other games do (I have recently been awakened to Genshin’s Korean dub and man I think I like it)
I strangely defaulted to playing ZZZ with English VO but despite being a non-union project, it’s been hit with numerous recastings (I think it’s at 7 now?) and I’m just like “why would I want to get attached to any specific performance if it’s so easily discarded in the name of the the live service machine” (which, again, it’s a non-union dub recorded in a at-will state, it’s totally within their rights to recast, but after two patches of replacements of voices I liked, I’m over waiting to see who got hit)
(I generally think the ongoing strike is good and support it but SAG may have goofed up a little)
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This point I just burn through Japanese games in Nihongo and accept I’ll understand 80%. Japanese games in English without heavy localization drive me nuts at this point. If I can instantly translate the line back to Japanese I’d rather just force myself to read the whole game in Japanese.
That said my patience for items and item descriptions in a second language is near zero.
English games for English though. Like FF16 is an English game. Maybe the first FF in English (well that and Stranger In Paradise.)
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