Several Voice Actors Leave The Sonic Franchise

I honestly think they will just hire a cheaper voice actor. Didn't they already do this with TSR? I think it's unlikely that they will hire Ben Schwartz seeing as he's probably expensive and they've been cheaping out on Sonic for well over a decade now.

From my understanding of VA work, they do as much as humanly possible to earn enough money for a living, so it's almost certain that Smith was fired. And yeah, it is disgraceful, although no moreso than most companies. VAs are just treated appallingly by the industry.

The game industry is bad and exploitative, news I know

 

It's always seemed to be the case the SEGA play hardball with the VAs. The only reason we got Smith in 2010 instead of Drummond returning to the role is that he wanted a union or something and SEGA basically told him to fuck off. We saw Colleen Villard take over the role of Tails from Kate Higgins from Boom onwards, and I guess that was probably for similar reasons. Baseless speculation though. TSR then saw both of Travis Willingham's present roles (Knuckles and Zavok) replaced and the same for a Laura Bailey's (Blaze and Omochao). Those two are married, and to see them both leave the series at the same time is suspect. Could be entirely personal reasons and I know someone said they were having a kid, but they continued other roles around the same time.

All three of those VAs are fairly high profile, and their replacements are less-so. So my money is on Smith leaving because SEGA is once again willing to prove how much they aren't interested in taking care of the Sonic brand.

 

Drummond is part of a job union basically, so Sega would have had to put out more money to use him which they obviously weren't willing to do. Same deal with Kate Higgins, and all of the other high profile VA's they've had.

But yea, it basically boils down to being unwilling to actually invest in the brand and cutting as many corners as possible.

 

I do find it funny how game companies will pour millions into the graphical fidelity of games and then cheap out as much as possibly on VA work if they can get away with. I do think games are art, but it really compromises the artistic integrity of the developers when this happens.

 

There's a thread here that explains what happened with Drummond. It's pretty shocking, but it's also sadly common in the industry.

Back in the day there were rumours that Sega was particularly bad at this. Especially with the Adventure games, where they only gave the VAs their lines (and not the whole script, so there was no context for their performance) and they hurried them to do everything at an unreasonable time frame (e.g. like in a day).

 

This is depressingly common sadly. Voice acting just isn't respected in America the way it is in say, Japan. Voice actors are very much treated as expendable by the company that hires them and they're paid minimum wage on top of it. Roger even said that voicing Sonic didn't really earn him much, he just really liked being in the role.

You get some like Laura Bailey and Troy Baker (who ironically worked in Sonic as Blaze and Espio back in 2010) who manage get mainstream success, but they're the exceptions, not the rules. And Sega being the cheapskates that they are would be more than willing to compromise integrity like this, look at all of the VA changes we got in the past decade alone.

This is just the most notable one because its the main character of the entire franchise, and the longest standing voice actor to date for said character. Its like if Nintendo just up and decided to drop Charles Martinet at Mario's voice one day to save money.

 

From what I had heard, they were given one take to do a line, no context in the greater story, and that's what they used. I don't recall this being a thing with the Japanese VA; the context I had heard this in was regarding the English voice acting.

Also, I am goddamned immensely sick of Sega being so miserly with Sonic. What is even the point of having a mascot if you're not going to give him the same love and attention other properties get? You can't have good media empire without even halfway decent games.

 

I don't have trouble believing that, but from what I've seen game and anime dub actors say, that's actually the norm, as surprising as that may sound. Actors are brought in one-by-one, given a completely contextless list of their character's lines and nothing else (and not even in order), and often literally nothing about their character but maybe a few sentences of description. Then they do each line one-by-one, and it's up to the voice director to tell them how they have to act the line. I think actual western games like God of War, Assassin's Creed, etc. do things differently, this is just how ADR (dubbing) works. Only using one take is definitely pretty substandard and shitty though.

Japan is notable in that they don't do this ever, and usually have all the actors in a room with full scripts, doing their lines as if they were doing a table read for a play.

 

hah, the most notable example I've heard of that was that somehow bethesda decided to give the VAs for Oblivion their lines in alphabetical order

 

Yeah that's apparently pretty common. It's rare for VA's to actually get lines in the order they act them--apparently they will go from "generic hello during a throwaway conversation" to "extremely emotional crying over the death of another character" and they will have literally no idea who the character they are crying over the death of is. Or maybe they go through the chapters/episodes/whatever in order (for anime/shows) but the lines will still be scrambled.

Of course, with an original show like Steven Universe or Adventure Time, the actors logically do their episodes in order so it's a lot easier for them to build up and get to really know their characters, and they don't have to match lip flaps. It's amazing that dubbers put out good work at all given how awkward this whole system sounds.

 

Well yeah, Japan has entire schools dedicated to VA work and give people bit roles in shows as background characters to start off with and work them up.

 

I'm almost certain it's just the direction he was given. He's done plenty of serious roles before (most notably Batman and Ezio in Assassin's Creed) - so it's not a case of him being unable to act.

 

Worth noting that VO for the Sonic games has been non-union since the 4Kids cast took over in 2005, and most of the voice changes over the last decade (Troy, Laura, Travis) have been the result of the actor shifting to work solely on union projects. This, however, is most likely a similar situation to Sonic X where Sega want Sonic to sound like he does in the movie. As a result, they're going to either start doing Sonic union (like they already do with the Yakuza dubs) and get Ben Schwartz, or they'll stay non-union and hire a Ben Schwartz soundalike. Either way, expect whoever is cast to also play Sonic in the Netflix show too.

 

It's worth noting that Ryan made an appearance on one of EmuEmi's streams and said he's interested in reprising and looking into it, but didn't promise anything. I'll update with a timestamp and video when the stream's over.

 

I didn't like Roger's voice originally, I thought he sounded too old, but I think he really grew into the character. And his voice really grew on me. I would be ok with Ben Schwartz coming in a doing the voice, but I imagine he's too expensive for miserly Sega to pay for. If they do, they better make games that actually are successful and likable.

 

Idk about all the sound alikes but wasn't Knuckles' main voice actor taking time off at that time to raise his kid?

God I hope they make quality replacements. TSR was also budget game all the way, who knows what the next game will be like. I feel like this can end in 2 ways. 1. Sega is cheap and is cutting corners where they can or 2. Sega's actually trying to fix this mess. They've had some sort of quality control over the new comic, so I'm hoping they're trying to fix the games too.

 

The problem is that Sonic has been on a budget since the failure of Lost World and Boom.

 

I'd imagine they earned a lot back from the movie's success, but then the Covid situation came and smacked them down so I dunno....

 

Do we know if Ben Schwartz is voicing the upcoming Netflix show? It's possible they may do something similar to when they brought on Griffith to keep continuity with Sonic X, and I haven't seen anyone else point out the possibility that whoever voices Sonic for the Netflix show could be the new voice actor for the games.

 

All we know about the Netflix show at this point is that it's coming in 2022, it will be 3D animated, and it will not be based off of the IDW comic. Given that the movie sequel is scheduled for that same year it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be based off the movie-verse and they get Schwartz for the series, but that's just my speculation.

I'd be surprised if Sega got Schwartz for the games in an attempt to establish consistency since, as said earlier in the topic, Sega doesn't have that kind of money.