Appreciating the Disembodied Voices

Image Credit: Bandai Namco Studios

Okay, so my last couple of articles have been a bit too introspective for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, I loved writing them, and I wouldn’t change anything about them. But I want to dial it back a bit this month. Today, I want to give some love to the characters that you don’t see in a game. Look, it was either this or Mario Party boards, and I think that this is the more interesting choice.

I’ve always been fascinated by the disembodied voices in video games. There’s a lot to be said about having a good host, and a good announcer to carry your game, or even just to add some extra flair that you can’t get from just the characters that you do see. They can also be used to give an extra layer and personality, and help capture the tone of the overall vibe of the game.

Fighting Games

Image Credit: Nintendo, HAL Labs

Now let’s start off where all of my freestyle articles want to start. FIGHTING GAMES! As a genre, this is easily the one that is the most intrinsically tied with announcer voices. From all the way back in the arcades with Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. Look, it’s not even a fair comparison. Mortal Kombat’s announcer completely ate Street Fighter 2’s lunch and left no crumbs. 

Mortal Kombat’s announcer was voiced by Ed Boon, one of the creators of the Mortal Kombat franchise, so it checks out that he’d know the vibe he wanted his game to have. He isn’t doing a hype-man voice. Rather it’s more like a gruff, almost whispering commentary. Mortal Kombat isn’t about friendly fights, but rather death matches where only one can come out alive. There’s no excitement from the announcer. He’s just giving you the state of the match. Plus, this was the birth of the iconic “Finish Him” line.

Now let’s jump ahead a couple generations to a game that very much dominated my childhood. Super Smash Bros. Melee! The whole vibe of SSBM has always been a little bit unsettling to me. This game is filled with a bunch of stuff that just happens and exists with no real explanation. Stuff like the Metal Mario Bros, the Fighting Wire Frames, Giga Bowser, Battlefield and Final Destination floating in these giant voids. It’s all just a bit unnerving for a kid growing up in the early 2000s.

To go along with this weird, unexplainable vibe is the announcer, voiced by Dean Harrington. I think that Dean gives my favorite performance of all of the Smash Bros. announcers. He hits this perfect middle ground of energetic, but not overtly friendly. And there’s also this filter put over his voice that makes it sound kind of staticy, almost as if he’s talking to you over a bad microphone from the other side of a one-way glass.

I also love listening to the way he pronounces certain names and phrases. The inflections that he puts on names like Mario, Pikachu, Ganondorf, and Ice Climbers will always be stuck in my brain. And the way that he calls out the game’s name at the end of the opening FMV is an iconic part of my childhood that gives me chills every time I hear it.

Soul Calibur is another franchise that puts their announcers to work. Of course they need to deliver some variation of “Welcome to the stage of history”. But these games also do something very cool and have the announcer give you a brief description of the background of the stage that you selected. It’s a nice touch that makes these places feel like historic battlefields, rather than just places for you to have a fight in. 

Street Fighter 6 did something very cool. In addition to the menu announcer for selecting your characters and modes and all that, they added in-battle commentary to the game. It’s corny, and sounds scripted as all get-out, but I also can’t bring myself to hate it. And the fact that Capcom went out of their way to pull in three professional commentators from the Fighting Game Community (TastySteve, James Chen, and Vicious) is a level of dedication to the bit that I have to tip my hat to.

And the last fighting game that I want to bring up is Under Night In-Birth 2. This is an incredible game that came out last year, and didn’t nearly get the recognition it should have. Rather than making you stick with the default announcer for the whole game, you can set the in-battle commentary to be done by any of the characters in the roster. I think that this is an awesome choice to give the player, and while the whole game is still voiced in Japanese, just having the variety is enough for me.

Running Commentary

Image Credit: Platinum Games, Sega

One thing that I always find interesting is when a game decides to implement commentary through the whole run. This isn’t something that is done very often, but it can be very effective if it’s done right. The most notable example in recent years would be Baldur’s Gate 3. 

Now, if you’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons before, there’s a certain level of importance that the Dungeon Master (the DM) takes. It’s their goal to try and keep the party moving on the track that they want them to be on. Listen to any episode of Critical Role or Natural Six to get an understanding of what DMs Matt Mercer and Harry McEntire have to put up with while trying to keep a story moving.

Baldur’s Gate 3 opts for a narrator that only occasionally chimes in. Voiced by Amelia Tyler, the BG3 Narrator exists to provide insight to what is going through the player’s thoughts, as well as introducing scenes and characters when you see them for the first time. She does an incredible job of keeping a calm, neutral tone through the whole run, understanding that she’s here to help move the story along. 

She isn’t the focal point of the game, but in a cast of incredible voice actors, she’s probably my favorite to listen to. The way that she reads off the descriptions of scenes is just so engrossing. And if you’ve never heard Tyler’s outtakes from the recording sessions, do yourself a favor and listen to them. She brings the perfect DM energy that is required for the thankless job of herding cats (AKA, controlling your players).

On the complete other end of the spectrum, you have the game MadWorld. For the uninitiated, this is a Wii game made by Platinum Games where the premise is about a televised killing game, and features running commentary from Howard “Buckshot” Holmes (voiced by Greg Proops), and Kreese Kreely (voiced by John DiMaggio).

These two are the heart and soul of MadWorld, and help keep the energy of the game going. The general gameplay loop is finding new and creative ways to kill your opponents to unlock the boss fight for the level. It gets to the point where you want to start experimenting with your kills just to hear what else these goobers have to say. And you’ll very rarely get a repeated line of commentary from either of them.

In an interview with IGN, Proops and DiMaggio mention that they had each worked with the voice director, Jack Fletcher, prior to working on MadWorld. They state that while some of the lines for them were planned out, a lot of them were ad-libbed, constantly trying to up the ridiculousness of the setting. As for the direction, they were told “Keep it real. Then be funny. Then do it better.”

Check out the full interview here.

The humor in the game is very crass, and it can come off a bit dated at times. But honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. MadWorld came out in 2009, and the in-game commentary, and any questionable lines by today’s standards were a product of its time.

Miscellaneous

Image Credits: Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, Genius Sonority

I’m gonna cap this article off by talking about games that don’t fit in anywhere. Starting off with Marvel Rivals, your commentary for this game is brought to you by Cassandra Lee Morris as Galacta. It feels like the whole point of Galacta is to give nothing but sass to the player, even when they’re doing well. Given that she’s the daughter of the God of the Marvel universe, that makes a lot of sense for her character.

This is purely a personal problem because I suck at shooters, and hearing Galacta go “Well, you can’t expect to win them all”. It’s just the kind of thing that adds insult to injury, and kind of deters me from wanting to continue.

Keeping in line with this, let’s talk about Team Fortress 2. Your matches in this game have commentary provided by Ellen McLain. She does an incredible job matching the high energy of the nine playable characters, getting more and more manic as teams get closer to either victory or defeat. 

I also love that in-game it sounds like she’s on a microphone. It makes it feel like she’s watching this from high up, reacting like this is a Sunday football game for her. And again, being able to match the energy of the zaniest cast of nine characters I’ve ever seen.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the Pokemon Stadium games. The two N64 Stadium games have battle commentary provided by Ted Lewis, a classic voice actor from the 4Kids era of dubbing, providing the voice of James, Tracy, and Giovanni in Pokemon, as well as Bakura, Bandit Keith, and Jack Atlas in Yu-Gi-Oh.

Lewis’s performance has such good energy to it, that makes him sound like he’s actually broadcasting these battles to a crowd. Not to mention how many lines would’ve had to be recorded for every situation that could have possibly happened.

Going back to the Wii, there’s also Pokemon Battle Revolution to look at. Sadly, Ted Lewis did not come back to do commentary for this game. We did however get a great replacement in Rodger Parsons. Parsons isn’t much of a voice actor, but he was the narrator for the beginning and ending of each episode of the Pokemon anime to the end of “Pokemon Journeys”.

Parsons’ approach to commentary differs from what Lewis did back in the Stadium games. Rather than going with 110% energy, making every moment seem big, Parsons has a more subdued commentary style, but will get excited for big moments, like one-hit KOs, or when powerful moves get used.

At the time of writing this, we don’t know really anything about what that Pokemon Champions game is going to be like. However, I would like to at least have the option to toggle commentary on and off. I know that it would be a ton of effort, since even without alternate forms of Pokemon, there are over 1,000 of them, but it would go a long way, and make it feel like more than just a battle simulator. Maybe even go the route that Street Fighter 6 went and get VGC commentators like Aaron Zheng and Rosemary Kelley.

Closing

I wanted to use this article to give some love to the voices of characters that you don’t see in games. This is also a bit of an atonement for a mistake that I made a couple of years ago. Back in the 2023 HGOs, I almost put Amelia Tyler on my list of best VAs. I ultimately decided against it at the last minute, in favor of Neil Newbon. The safe choice, instead of the unique and interesting choice.

This article also exists to get you to start paying attention to your commentators. Not just in the games, but also in the esports tournaments or speedrun marathons that you watch. It’s hard to tell when commentators are doing a good job, but very easy to tell when they’re doing a bad job.