The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is one of many games coming to the Nintendo Switch (and beyond) by 3rd party developers this month. In fact, it’ll be launching alongside NEO The World Ends With You on July 27th. However, the process to get this game made was anything but an easy process from start to finish. Because a key element had to be worked upon in a very special way…the English Dub.
The Ace Attorney franchise has had various amounts of voice acting in the past, but with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles they wanted to go more in-depth, and that wasn’t easy…especially during the pandemic. Localization director Janet Hsu talked about this process during a blog post and went into incredible detail showcasing what it’s like to get a game like this an English translation:
“From the beginning of the project, I’d had a few ideas in mind about what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to use a UK studio, and that I wanted to cast actors with similar backgrounds to the characters in the game. As you can probably already guess, this is related to my want to make this title as authentic as possible.
It may seem strange, but up until the last couple of years, English game voice dubbing was primarily done in the US, specifically Los Angeles. But with the London setting being such a core element to the story this time, I wanted to be able to aurally paint with the entire pallet of accents that we were already using in the in-game text. ”
The pandemic though nearly derailed the entire English dub though. Fortunately for them, they found out that many actors had their own studios at home or were willing to make them in order to get jobs, so everything was back on. Albeit, with an acceptance that the voices might not be from people of “accurate descent” like Hsu originally wanted. But by her own admission, everything worked out well eventually. Especially with her team making sure that the voices fit the characters:
Going back to the casting process, we received around 4 – 5 demo reels per character from the casting directors and conducted a blind audition in which we didn’t know who the voice actors were. A few of us on the team listened to each and every reel, trying to figure out who we though sounded the most like Ryunosuke, or Iris, or Juror No. 3. Then, we compared notes and came up with our final list of top 2 picks per character.
Thankfully for Hsu, they were able to get the actors into the sound studio due to a small break in the pandemic window. And after some work the English dub was able to be made.
