Katawa Shoujo Forums

I dunno. The only VN i played prior to KS is Monmusu Quest, and the voice acting parts were only for the 5 main bosses of the game (for their respective cutscenes). It would definently add to the game, but i read too fast to take advantage of that anyhow.

Also, when i saw the movie Eragon, i was disapointed partly cause the voices didnt sound like i thought they should. Novels should stay as novels.

I think it'd be cool to see what the community could come up with- a podcast style thing could be really interesting. Would it be amazing-perfect? No, but as a radio-style show I still think it would be pretty cool to at least try.

I have my own va cast and i would like it but it's not necessary

Honestly, I don't think there needs to ever be voice acting in KS. I've noticed that in every VN I play, I read WAY faster than the actors deliver their lines, and wind up skipping half of the audio in the game. This isn't to say I don't enjoy hearing how they sound, but I find myself too impatient to care about listening to the whole thing. It's just my opinion of course, but from that point of view, why even ask the creative team to include it if I only skip it?

On the other hand, I really liked listening to fandubbed lines or the video clips like "things Lilly/Misha/Rin would never say." It's fun listening to interpretations and finding that one that you really like.

The main problem with voice acting is that no matter who you get to do the voice, people would have their own ideas as to how the characters sound.
To me, you can't voice Jigoro. In my head, he's going to sound like
A. Dr. Robotnik (
B. Brian Blessed (

The only way it would work is with Morgan Freeman narrating as every character.

"Well, where else could I get beaten with a phone and not remember it? The ass?"

This will only work if Kenji has the same VA as Kamina.

AdventSign wrote:Voice acting would not break the game, but I think it would make it worse. I like imagining what each character would sound like and the wrong set of voices can really ruin a character's personality.

This for me. I think the animated parts of the game adds immensely to it instead. So if there were an addition to the visual novel it should be the mini-movies. It doesn't have to be completely symbolic to the route like the originals either

If they were to add it now, I might be against it. An added voice would change the way you view a character. If they would have added voice to the game before it's release, I'd be fine with it.

I dunno, I kinda like assigning people different voices in my head. If the VAs selected didn't sound right, I'd be inclined to turn them off.

It'd be rather difficult to find the right VAs, too, since many of them I made sound like people I know. For instance, Emi's voice always sounds like Kelly, a friend I made through WoW whom I've never met in person. Lilly sounds like Wendy, the sister of my long-time friend, Danny. Kenji actually sounds like my brother Chris (though admittedly it's him doing a voice for a character of his, but that counts).

I think it's great the way it is. The voices, to me and probably everyone else, are idealized. They sound exactly as we'd expect the characters to sound. Adding voiceovers would remove the personal aspect of this game, at least partially.

I'd prefer to go without voices. Like many others here, I know what Emi, Hanako, Lilly, Shizune, Misha and Rin sound like in my mind, as well as Mutou, Nurse, Kenji, Yuuko and the rest. Hearing a different voice now would be jarring.

If KS had been created originally with voices...I don't know. It's hard to say. Another VN I'm playing right now has a couple of spots where the characters' voices are acted, and I'm not crazy about all of them, but now I can't separate the characters from the voices they were given. So I think it would only have worked for me if they were there when I first played...

But there's still a risk. I just finished reading Azumanga Daioh, which was hilarious, so I watched a few clips of the anime on YouTube. So...many...high-pitched voices... It hurt.

When I imagine Akira's voice, I think immediately of Rebecca Crane, the technician girl from Assassin's Creed. Here's a video:

There's no way to really add voice acting now, of course, but let's assume for a moment that it had been possible to produce something of decent quality during development. The biggest problem would have been making it work with the written text. yeah, there's choosing a good actor to do it, but let's be honest here; as long as they got someone passable for a given character, we probably would have been okay with it.

So written text. As stated before, lots of people read faster than speaking speed, and the static images don't give a whole lot to look at while you're waiting for a line to finish. If I were the one doing it, I wouldn't have voice acting on every line. I would reserve it for important lines, and have the text lock to the speed at which the line is being spoken. Valkyrie Profile did it to good effect, I think (and probably some other JRPGS as well, I'm not exactly a scholar in this field). Most of the dialogue is silent quick-scrolling text, but then a character begins to have a particularly pivotal moment and you suddenly can't just skip past, the voice actor cuts and and you know Shit Just Got Real.

Since a VNs stints of reading are much longer than an RPG cutscene, this would have to happen more often to establish the player's expectations for a character's voice. I'm guessing maybe two or three times in a particular act would be enough for players to listen to it naturally. At that often, it could have been done on a shoestring budget. I know KS was done on a less-than-shoestring budget, but hey, if Kickstarter had existed then...

FAKE EDIT: they probably wouldn't have done kickstarter, actually. I think they had other reasons for not scraping together money beside feasibility...