Zelda: Wand of Gamelon
The Legend of Zelda fans don’t really like to talk about those terrible Zelda CD-i games, like this one, Wand of Gamelon. They’re known for having ugly visuals, embarrassingly awkward voice acting, and repetitive gameplay.
The animated cutscenes in Wand of Gamelon are all voice acted, which was pretty neat for its time, but the scenes were all super short with only a few lines of nonsensical dialogue.
Link speaks like a 16-year-old surfer boy, Zelda’s voice is lacking any sense of urgency, and all of the side characters are just creepy as hell, but also slightly comedic.
Thankfully, The Legend of Zelda has decent voice work now, like in Breath of the Wild for example, but we still won’t forget how bad Wand of Gamelon’s voice acting was.
Resident Evil
Now, the original Resident Evil is actually a good game, starting off what would be one of the best horror series of all time. The series isn’t as campy as it used to be, but Resident Evil 1 has some of the best quotes, like the famous line uttered by Barry towards Jill Valentine: “You were almost a Jill Sandwich.”
Barry also calls Jill the “master of unlocking” when he gives her a lockpick at the beginning of the game. Maybe Barry just likes to make funny jokes/puns, I mean it definitely helps ease the tension in the zombie-infested mansion.
Resident Evil 1’s campy-ness will go down in history as some of the funniest voice acting ever, I wonder how the series would have been today if Capcom continued down this path of dad jokes and absurd quips.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Voice acting isn’t the easiest job; as an actor, these people have to put their all into every character that they play, even if it’s just a one-liner for a side character.
In Oblivion, there are tons of NPC’s that will talk to the player to give them advice, tell them about their life, or assign quests. There’s a lot of work that goes into making sure that each line is delivered properly, which brings us to this video.
The developers straight up forgot to edit out one line of the character’s speech in which you can hear the voice actor requested to perform her line over again, breaking all of the walls of immersion.
Chaos Wars
Chaos Wars is a single-player tactical role-playing game that is known for having horrid voice work in the localized version that came to the west in 2008 for the PS2.
The voice acting is shoddy as hell and the actors sound they were picked up off of the street. Every single line that comes out of these characters’ mouths is laughingly terrible, with no emotion at all. The result is something that sounds familiar to kids being forced to read from a play in English class.
Apparently, the voice cast was found to have the same last names as the developers, causing assumptions that the acting was performed by relatives of the people who worked on the game… which makes complete sense if you listen to only two seconds of the video above.
Mortal Kombat 4
This fight between these two Mortal Kombat characters is one of the cringiest moments in Mortal Kombat 4. People are falling off cliffs, fighting for their lives, and performing fatalities in the most awkward way ever.
Mortal Kombat 11’s voice work is much improved (thank goodness) but who knew that this game had such terrible performances.
It’s honestly laughable as hell and makes no sense. The character’s movements and death animations, alongside the corny dialogue, makes this particular ending in MK4 a total disaster.
Last Alert
And last but certainly not least, we have the top-down shoot-em-up, Last Alert, that released for the TurboGrafx-CD around 1990.
In the video above, you can see a couple of the scenes from the game and check out the voice acting for yourself. It’s incredibly campy, oddly quiet, and sounds like a bunch of drunk guys got together and recorded the lines in one long night.
Every time the player encounters a new boss in the game, they always have some sort of confident monologue before the fight begins, and it’s just honestly embarrassing.
Thanks for reading! If you would like to check out our other feature on the 10 best games with voice acting, then you can check that out here.
Also, if you have any memories of video games with bad voice acting, let us know in the comments below!
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