there are no standards for VA anymore holy shit
If there's any consolation, she only voiced a part of a character that already have a voice actress that isn't "I got picked for funsies", and even then it isn't saying much.
Context: Ironmouse voiced Dormouse, which is a talking rat trap weapon/summon thing that was used by the human rat ear character Vikala. Vikala is voiced by voice actress Hayden Daviau who already have some decent list of casting (recent one being the protagonist of that Vtuber Legend anime's dub).
I was going to comment about it was probably a small issue, but then I realized that:
- Said VA for Vikala is also doing vtuber as side-gig (Sylla Aria)
- She also married to one Alejandro Saab, aka vtuber Cy Yu
.... Suddenly them hiring Ironmouse kinda make sense... ish. Still though, it shouldn't be an issue since Ironmouse's role as the VA of that character's weapon is quite small compared to the other VA voicing the character itself.
honestly still wondering what ever happened to their original group. But I'm not going to fault the company for going all in on the Indonesian market since it seems like it was how they got big in the first place.
The original kinda got sidetracked due to them adoption of ID talents pretty much overwhelming the original ones. And even as lucrative the Indonesian market were, they really only get tractions when they start working with ID's idol group AKB48 to assist said group's own vtubers and that they managed to get ID indies that already have decent enough followers before they went into AKA.
Not only that, pretty sure most of them went MIA or something, so it's hard to tell whether they still doing things or not. The focus on the ID ones didn't really help either.
Has there ever been standards in EN voice acting? It's pretty much always came down to star power and whoever else was willing to do the job, if someone bothered to put in a good performance you were lucky. If anything it used to be worse.
Most of them iirc ended up having the same, similar standards of "hire the ones we know and don't change things around", making it sound same-y without any sort of changes. Of course there are good ones in the recent years (Dungeon Meshi's dub is fine imo and EN dub of Alya from Alya tsun-speak-commie anime is pretty neat because the VA is also fluent in russia), but most of them time it just felt... same and probably relies on notable VA or even popular voices to get some sort of interest (like say, hiring Gianni Matragianno because he make meme videos or obligatory 'hire a vtuber' thingie that was discussed above)
Probably the best one that I can imagine to have the best standards would be the dubbing in some gacha games like say, Arknights or Reverse:1999, since those two games at the very least tried to emphasis less on 'recognizable voices' and more on 'getting it to sound
right''.
In Arknights case, while their earliest attempt was mostly making them sounded british (to the point of it becoming a meme), recent dubs has them hiring VAs that didn't come from NA/Canada in order to get the accents while still having the fluency of english speakers while also making the usage of 'gratituous foreign language' trope works since, well, the VA are fluent in said foreign language as well. Same thing pretty much also done on Reverse1999 as well, but not to the same extent as Arknights.
