Should the Zelda games use voice-acting?

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There's a difference between bad voice-acting and good voice-acting, though. Good voice-acting is one of the things that made Fallout 3 and Risen great RPGs. It also made the many adventure games (eg. Gabriel Knight) a helluva lot better.

Nobody claimed that the CD-i games were canon, though. They are a product of Phillips getting a license to use Nintendo figures in five games, as a compensation for a failed deal regarding the SNES CD drive.

What I'm saying is that the Zelda creator, won't acknowledge them as being zelda, that's what I meant by "canon".

Of course, there's invariably a difference between bad acting and good acting, that's what I'm saying. I don't think taking the chance that the actors would be bad at voicing classic characters is a good idea. It pretty much killed the mood of Other M and now people are wondering if that will happen with other good games as well.

The games you just mentioned required a certian level of good voice acting to be considered "good", if some bad voice actors had done fallout 3, for example, it would probably have tanked... badly. Nintendo's games, such as zelda, are already good enough to play through them, even without a bunch of voice acting. So at this point, voice acting would probably take away from the experience, especially if the voice actors suck.
Just imagine if any of these voice actors were in a zelda game:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yssnXJAsS0[/youtube]

That would seriously impact the quality of any zelda game to almost cheesy levels, I couldn't take nintendo seriously anymore if they let a zelda be that bad.

no no, god no.

It would just make it a cheap sell out like all the new crap these days.

Nintendo needs to fix other issues with the current state of Zelda before even considering such a polarizing feature.

Such as consistently fast text speed, plot pacing and assistant characters. Midna was a nice balance, why did they have to go and ruin things with the insufferable Fi?

While we're on that subject, I think they should also fix the constant, annoying text that pops up when you pick up a collectable for the first time after re-entering every area, after 30 times of picking them up, they should realize that the player knows what it is by that point. It just became a constant interuption of gameplay. After the first time of notifying the player to what it is (in the whole game), it shouldn't be restated after every time you re-enter the land. Often I'd pick one up by accident in the middle of battle and it would interupt the battle and leave me open to attack afterwards, which in skyward sword can be potentially lethal, depending on enemy. It's almost off-putting to the point of not wanting to play it.

I can say with confidence too, that if skyward sword had voice acting I likely wouldn't have even played it all the way through, let alone a second time, simply because of all of the other annoying things (like item notification) there are in the game.

I heard about that. It's only with Skyward Sword. I never got a Wii and I never played it. I wanted another traditional Nintendo console. The motion controllers alienated me.

Anyway, other Zelda games don't work that way. The first time you pick up an item is the only time you get a notification. It doesn't reset every time you leave and re-enter an area.

I saw a screenshot of Skyward Sword demonstrating the terrible writing. In addition to the poor grammar and terrible dialogue I also noticed that the text isn't presented in a visually appealing way. Voice acting might have helped that game simply by replacing the eye sore text. The games I've played work just fine with text. I barely even notice I'm reading it and it's not a visual nightmare.

Zelda needs no voice acting. The little grunts and facial expressions are enough to show appropriate emotion.

Not to mention that it wouldn't be right to hear every other character speak while Link only continues to grunt throughout the game.

Don't ask me you know my views on Nintendo and their fan base, it's nice you won that system in a colour in comp Sorry when your that Sega sterotype ie trailer trash and your severly bullied by the Nintendo sterotype in latter life you tend to have "issues' with that company . I can not bring myself to play a Nintendo game

BTW have you played Deadly Premontion ,it's so unlike any other game or as you put it "all the new crap these days" you simply must check it out 10/10!

www.destructoid.com/review-deadly-premo ... 5168.phtml

Maybe I could ay it more precise. The earlier games were based on memorizing every little details, and there were much of that details, sweet ones, many riddlic ones, so you created a huge map in your brain, with all that little details and you were waiting for exitement until the story of the game went on, and you could experience other details of that again. (So as example, you remembered, when there was a wall, where you needed special bombs afterwards, but yet had none and so on.) It was full of that riddles and gimmicks, and for me that was the game itself, tons and tons of riddles and gimmicks, that you could solve.

With the new techniques they added other qualities to the game, the quality of "fingerwhirling" as I call it. The success of the game earlier was based on, of you were able to memorize many different levels of an temple, including the holes and lift and switches and ... while technical finger skills were no factor, you simply had 4 directions and 2/4 buttons. While later with whindwaker, you suddenly had to do "fingertwisting" for being successful, and for many people that simply sucked, because of it completly changing the game technique. So you had a game you truly loved, the world and they way it was presented, and then it got ruined because of you not being able to play "Mortal Kombat" in it.

And that simply completly sucked, as it would such for people playing CoD, when the new CoD suddenly would force them to base their success on them building up a civilisation and town, mining ressources to create buildings, that would allow you again to build different kind of weapons, with farms that you would need to build, so that you can feed the workers you need to build the buildings and teh workers you need to create that weapons, your character in the end wears.

CoD Player expect from a CoD game, that it focuses on being a shooter. No economical-strategy game. Zelda the Windwaker, had all the things a Zelda game needed. Lots of that little riddles, and details, and a sweetiepie story and gadgets...

But for that f*****g 3D-rolling around, Super Mario jumping s**t, I could kick that developers with a spiked footballshoe into their balls, because it simply ruined the game for me. Thats why there are people fed up with that new techniques. And I simply dont want to blabber to my computer or console, I want to play Zelda. ^^ Nintendo saved it a bit with the games, they developed for their handhelds, that were again simplier with the handling. But many people simply would wish that they would develop that games, with the same technique, for the console. So the handheld games rocks. But the small display and the lousy graphics suck. ^^

Call me old fashioned but I prefer the lack of voices in traditional RPG's. I liked to imagine the voices of the characters when reading books and it's the same for games. I feel sorry for a generation of gamers that have to have that sort of imaginative thinking spoonfed to them. Perhaps some people just prefer voice acting because with today's standards it's uncommon to leave out voice acting, and that's fine IMO.

I prefer Nintendo's traditional approach, however, where they give a one word vocal dialogue or a sound effect to give you an idea of what the characters may sound like.

Indeed, there's a game that I'm developing that uses that approach as well (though I don't have enough voice actors or clean samples to do most characters). I've always prefered that in most games of that type above the voice acting.

No voice acting in Zelda. It's better that way, as a bad voice actor can ruin the entire experience. Plus they still manage to get the feeling across with just grunts, which gives enough of an idea of what they're supposed to sound like.

A good example for it would be what they managed to do with Kid Icarus. But they should not do it for Zelda, currently the same voices for Zelda games exist across the language translations, they have their own alphabets, the truth is that they are speaking their own language, so it would be wrong for them to speak English. The most they could do without taking away the canon of the sounds they make would be for characters to at most say someone's name, or make the language, but then you will have speaking Hylian, which would be sad.

Not to mention the games tend to let you choose your own name for Link.