Directeur Shigeru Ohmori geeft uitleg.
Net zoals vorige Pokémon titels zal Pokémon Sword & Shield geen voice acting bevatten. Je zult de teksten die personages zeggen gewoon moeten lezen, terwijl de Pokémon zelf hun traditionele sound effects houden.
In een interview met directeur Shigeru Ohmori werd door Metro gevraagd waarom er ook deze keer geen voice acting aanwezig is. Zou het feit dat de game naar de Switch komt niet het perfecte moment zijn dat om dat te introduceren? Shigeru gaf aan dat dit vooral ligt aan de enorme hoeveelheid werk wat dit zou opleveren, Pokémon kan immers in een heleboel talen gespeeld worden. Daarnaast willen ze graag de ideeën die spelers in hun hoofd hebben niet verpesten door voice acting te introduceren.
“There’s sort of two main reasons, so firstly this is a RPG with a whole lot of text that we’re then localising and releasing in nine different languages at the same time. So from a purely practical point of view actually getting that organised and carrying out all the voice recording, the corrections and so on in nine different languages for release on exactly the same day is something that would be incredibly difficult. So, that’s one reason why we haven’t chosen to do it this time around.
But the other reason is one of character image, in the sense of when you play a game, if you’ve got a voice on that character that instantly provides to the player an image, a feel for that character that they don’t generate themselves, it’s pushed on them from the development side. Whereas if we have really flavourful text, for those characters, but no voice the players can kind of create their own image of who that character is as they’re playing. And that’s something we really like to encourage as we’re creating games.”
Op de vraag of de animé stemmen niet gebruikt konden worden had hij het volgende te zeggen:
“There’s similar linguistic problems – there are some where all of them are the same, such as Pikachu, where that would be fine, but other ones have completely different names across all languages. And another point to consider is that in the game we’re focusing on them as being living creatures, so having them making a sound like a living creature – rather than just shouting out their own name – is quite nice.”
