If you’re an English speaker who has been looking forward to the upcoming Fairy Tail game—a JRPG based on the rather popular anime and manga series—then you better be ready to read. In an interview with Nintendo Everything, Fairy Tail producer Keisuke Kikuchi mentioned that the Japanese voice actors will be reprising their roles from the show, but the game won’t have any English voice acting. This doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to understand it. The entire game will have subtitles so you know what the characters are saying if you don’t speak Japanese natively. But there won’t be any English audio at all.
This may not come as that much of a surprise to fans of anime games. Many of them choose to hang onto the Japanese voice actors that portray the characters in the shows, but most don’t bother with English localization for audio, even if the show happens to have an English dub. In fact, more games from Japan are leaving out English voice acting as a whole. The Yakuza series had rather infamously awful English voice acting (despite Mark Hamill’s contribution to the game) for its first entry, and all future entries that made it outside of Japan chose to stick with Japanese voice acting and English subtitles afterward.
The topic of dubs vs subs is a topic of hotly contested controversy among anime fans. Some fans believe that it’s better to preserve the original Japanese voice acting and just provide translations on what’s said. Others find the lack of English voice acting and the need to read subtitles to be annoying and would take dubbing over the extra effort required. Either way, I’m sure no one will show up here to tell us which of the two is better for the upcoming Fairy Tale game.
[Source: Nintendo Everything]
