Aside from scenario considerations, I definitely didn’t want to make anyone put on an accent they didn’t feel comfortable doing, and I didn’t want to use some stereotypical, fake accent either. Obviously, the reason why I wanted actors of Japanese descent was for authenticity as well. Still, it was important to me that we had actors of Japanese descent to play our main characters, so I had to strike a balance and take the more realistic route by asking for Ryunosuke and Susato as ‘musts’ while the other characters would be ‘optional’. But in the middle of the pandemic, it was highly possible that we wouldn’t be able to record in studio, which would’ve greatly reduced the pool of actors from which we could choose. When SIDE asked if we had any preferences in casting, I wanted to answer that I wished to cast people of Japanese descent for all of the Japanese characters. Our studio picked, we set about casting our voice actors. To this day, I am thankful beyond words for all they did. But in the end, it was thanks to the hard work and cooperation of our recording partner, SIDE UK, that made this high-quality English dub possible. We didn’t know how many actors had home studios or some other sort of recording environment capable of doing remote recordings, and we didn’t know what kind of contingencies the sound studios themselves would have – there were so many industry firsts to figure out. Given how the pandemic was playing out and how severe the lockdowns were, we even floated the idea of using the Japanese dub and simply re-dubbing the necessary lines to Herlock Sholmes – it really was a situation in which no one had enough information about anything. One day, back when Japan was still relatively unaffected, the team leaders and I sat down to talk about what to do. This is not to say that there aren’t talented actors all over the world who can’t put on a mean British accent or two, but for the variety of accents and characters we were going to be portraying, I figured the largest pool of talent was going to be in the UK.īut before we could pick out an exact studio, the pandemic struck, and the dev team and I were left wondering if we were even going to be able to record an English dub. 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. It may seem strange, but until the last couple of years, English game voice dubbing was primarily done in the US, specifically Los Angeles.
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