< So Bad It's Horrible

So Bad It's Horrible/Voice Acting

"YOU MUST WECOVAH AWW THE ENEGY IMEDILY, W-MEGMAN!"
—Dr. Light, Mega Man 8

There are games that you just don't wanna play and some anime and western cartoons that you just do not wanna watch. But don't worry, (most of) these titles are safe for playing and viewing. But probably not safe for listening to. Whether it's sleep-inducing boredom or massive ear-grating, these games are best played with the Mute function readily available, and these animes and western 'toons best watched with a subtitle track.

Contrast with Superlative Dubbing.

Important Note: We don't list entries on the basis of "Dubs gone wrong". If you are going to list someone, be sure that your entry isn't essentially boiling under "He/She's an English dub voice actor, therefore he/she sucks" or "Complaining about English dubs you don't like".

Tropes used in So Bad It's Horrible/Voice Acting include:

Anime

  • While the Escaflowne dub wasn't awful, it did have one or two dodgy performances that had long-time fans going rabid — most notably, the voice of Dilandau, whose Japanese actress made him sound masterfully Axe Crazy, but whose English VA made him sound like a spoiled brat. (The fact that it was the English VA's first role ever, and that he was going through puberty at the time probably had a lot to do with this, and it's said that his voice acting got a little better as time went on.) Also, Merle's 35-year-old-sounding English VA is cringe-inducing.
  • Speaking of original Japanese, Lovely Complex. Kenjiro Tsuda, the voice actor for Suzuki gave him a voice that makes him seem as lively as wallpaper paste. It's so bad, it destroys your Willing Suspension of Disbelief; you can't conceive a situation where a girl as snarky and self-aware as Koizumi would hang around him for even a minute once he opens his mouth.
  • The Bible Black English dub doesn't seem to have any exclamation points, up to and including Rika's suicide. Add the fact that everyone sounds about thirty years older than they should and you've got a pretty horrendous experience. One would have to come to the understanding that hentai probably isn't going to be dubbed very well, but Bible Black is a special case — it's horrible dubbing even by porn standards.
  • Manga Entertainment tried to get as much of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series' dub cast as possible for their dubbing of the films. Sadly, it was one of the ones they couldn't get that did them in the most—Matt Greenfield turned down the role of Makoto Hyuga.[1] Who do they replace him with? Keith Burgess, whose husky, low voice was not only completely unfit for Hyuga, but emotionless and slurred as well, killing most of the character's scenes.
  • Macross: Do You Remember Love? Or maybe it should be "Do you want to remember the legendarily-bad English dub Macross in: Clash of the Bionoids?" For the uninitiated, here's a sample.
  • Dragon Ball has wrestled with all manner of bad dubs:
    • The UK dubs for both Dragon Ball Z,[2] with its beyond-shoddy translation and its small pool of voice actors who do several roles at once without sounding fit for any of their roles, or even deciding who does what character, and Dragon Ball GT, in which Vegeta sounds like he gargled with battery acid before recording and 18 has no emotion whatsoever. Kid Goku, Mr. Satan, Shenron and Baby are about the only four with decent voices, and everyone else either phones it in or hams it up.
    • The Funimation cast's first performances in Season 3 of DBZ. Special mention to Sean Schemmel's blocky, wooden and painful attempt at voicing Goku.
    • However, both of those dubs pale in comparison to the utter abomination that is the English Malaysian dub of the DBZ movies[3]. Witness the horror for yourself.
  • The Malay dub of Gundam 00, One Piece and Get Backers, just to name a few, are fucking horrible. The voices either sounds annoying or sounds like the VA just phoning it in.
  • The RTM 1 dubs of the Transformers series Headmasters, Victory, and Super-God Masterforce were done in Malaysia by a cast with little knowledge of the source material. It doesn't help that characters are given bizarre new names — Spike is called "Sparkle", Metroplex is "Phillip", etc. More info at TFWiki here.
    • Added to that, the cast sounds like they came right off the set of Space Thunder Kids given that some of the characters sound suspiciously similar. (Sixshot sounding like the Dark Emperor, Brainstorm sounding like one of the Space Thunder Kids, etc.) overall some of the performances have their good or at least decent moments but for the most part its so absurd that it goes right into being So Bad It's Good though Your Mileage May Vary on that.
  • Male Maze in Maze Megaburst Space is supposed to be an athletic, aggressive teenager. Instead, in the English dub, he sounds like a chunky truck driver in his forties, complete with gravelly voice. Truly wince-worthy.
  • Soichiro Hoshi's crying in Gundam Seed. To put it charitably, it makes even Baby Kira Yamato cry.
  • Adult!Nel keeping her toddler voice in the original Japanese Bleach. She was supposed to have a lisp and all, but come on! The English dub seems to have fixed this at the expense of making Toddler!Nel sound older.
    • And it just makes it worse that she cries out "ITSYGO!" [sic] every two minutes, more when he's getting his ass kicked. At least the dub has her say his name correctly. It's supposed to sound cute, but not after forty freakin' episodes of it.
  • The voice acting for Garzey's Wing (which, by itself, isn't really good) is a nice mix of bad acting and lack of emotion, with a side helping of Narm. It's surprising to see how lines like this one haven't been subject to Memetic Mutation:

"I must somehow make sense of our convoluted situation!"

  • The Singaporean English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh!! is very useful because it gives the actual lines and story of the show, but it features some infamous choices for the voice acting. Most noticeable example: Seto Kaiba sounds like Nappa from Dragon Ball Z.
    • Talking about Kaiba, Kenjiro Tsuda's voice is as much sexy as it is inexpressive.
    • When you hear that the Singapore dub gave Ryou Bakura a Southern accent to indicate his politeness, you'd think that he'd sound like a refined gentleman a la Rhett Butler. You'd think. Unfortunately, poor Ryou ended up with the "redneck hick" variation instead. It's really hard to think of anyone as intelligent and polite when they sound like a cross between Herbert from Family Guy and the Squidbillies.
    • What about Joey's voice? The guy's almost out of high school, yet his voice sounds like a boy just now coming into puberty.
    • Marik is probably the worst offender, being voiced by a girl who sounds like a high pitched emotionless little boy on helium. What's worse is she uses the EXACT SAME VOICE for Yami Marik as well, which sounds really jarring and out of place to say the least.
  • Although in both cases most of the actors settled into their roles after a while, Pokémon featured truly awful VA work early in the series and just after the change in cast. The Mastermind of Mirage Pokemon is almost unwatchable. The lead group (Ash, May, and Brock in particular) were utterly grating to listen to.
    • Where the other voices took a medium-sized handful of episodes to fall into place, Ash's new voice actress took multiple seasons to progress (and arguably, it still isn't any good!)
  • The dubbing of Fight! Iczer-One is terrible, appearing to have been read by at most three women cold from scripts.
  • While most of the dub cast of Eiken sounded like they were phoning it in the whole time, Bryce Papenbrook's screechy Densuke and Rebecca Forstadt's portrayal of Chiharu are especially bad.
  • Dubbed at the same studio as Eiken, Green Green's dub features lazy writing, terrible acting for most major characters, and a complete inability to pronounce names right or even consistently from scene to scene. Fortunately, the show itself is bad enough that the impact of the poor dubbing is lessened.
  • Among the many complaints leveled against the 4Kids dub of One Piece, the worst aspect has to be its voice acting and casting, the most notable one being David Moo as Sanji. Forgiving the fact that they gave him a Brooklyn-accent, they made him sound like those lollipops had given him a severe case of smoker's lung, ridding his voice of the suave quality the original had.
    • The Japanese version of One Piece: Unlimited Cruise had a cringe-worthy performance where the giant Hulk-like Nightmare Luffy speaks in a ridiculously high-pitched helium voice. Luckily they realized how incredibly stupid that was, since when Nightmare Luffy debuted in the actual anime Mayumi Tanaka used a deeper, much more fitting tone.
    • Odex's Singaporean English dub script is actually MORE accurate than the FUNimation dub, but ended up worse than the 4Kids dub. How did this happen? Plain and simple: the voice acting. Luffy's actor sounded like some stoned surfer dude, the recording quality sounded worse than a fandub, the cast had only a few actors on board (no pun intended) that voiced multiple characters and kept randomly changing as the series went on. Poor Nami went through THREE voice actors in the space of only 104 episodes. Thank god the mess only lasted those 104 episodes before broadcast was cancelled.
  • The Japanese voice of Byakko in Yu Yu Hakusho. Seriously, have you heard his pathetic "roars?"
    • Cyberdramon's "roars" (Japanese version) in Digimon Tamers are just as bad.
  • The Italian dub of Fist of the North Star falls flat because all the voices sound similar. A fan joke is about how the roles are supposedly shared by the studios — "You do Hokuto, you do Nanto, you do fats, you do slims and women".
  • The Hungarian dub for Jetix's version of Naruto started out as this, thanks to the incredibly-annoying voice the title character received, and the fact that the supporting cast switched their voice actors around a lot...but then came the second dub by Animax, taking the original Japanese anime as its basis, with an arguably better translation and a hell of a lot more consistence in its voices. There was...still some complaining, but less.
  • Mariasama ga Miteru, c/o Animax Asia. The voice actors wouldn't be accepted into a highschool drama club for their performance, for all of the broadcasts, and their efforts top at merely passable. Exhibit A.
    • They also pick the wrong people to voice some of the characters, like here and here.
  • When Cloverway took over the dubbing of Sailor Moon, a number of voice actors were switched out in the process. The one worst off of the bunch was Usagi/Serena herself, whose VA attempted to mimic her predecessor's voice ticks, but somehow made the character sound older than she should be. And the parts where she screams...! Ironically, the VA for Chibi-Usa/Rini was actually better than her original, so it seemed like an odd trade-off!
  • Heritage From Father received an English dub... supplied by the original Japanese VAs. While the English does seem to be up to scratch, the actors all have accents thick enough to render their lines nigh-incomprehensible, and they can't seem to find the punctuation marks.
  • Dean from the English dub of Supernatural The Animation. While the show managed to get Sam's actor from the TV show, this show is Dean's voice actor's first role, and it shows, as he delivers every line in the same emotion, whether expositing about the Monster of the Week, to telling his brother about how he got the good life while Dean didn't. A small sample of it here.
    • Jared Padalecki sounds fantastic and in-character, while Jensen's replacement sounds like a Californian surfer dude. It would seem that he only bothered to capture the facetious aspect of sounding like Jensen Ackles without actually emoting or anything actory like that. Or that was what the casting agency focused on in finding Jensen's replacement instead.
  • It's been generally agreed on that the Hungarian dubbing of Sailor Moon had great voice casting, but the translation work was, in turn, horrid (it was translated from the French version, apparently by someone who hardly spoke even that language), and considering the episodes have been dubbed out of order, it's no wonder the actors reportedly had no clue what was going on in the story.
  • Mew Mew Power: While YMMV on the voice casting (not the Bowdlerization) as a whole (opinions about the characters' voices are all over the place, ranging from not-that-good to pretty fitting), most people agree that Scottie Ray's Mark (Aoyama) just sounds... wrong. It's far too deep for a preteen/teenager character, and he never tries to act in any way beyond an "old man storyteller" kind of intonation.
  • The English Dub of Metal Fight Beyblade: The names are mispronounced, the voices sound so goofy, that you'd swear this were an Abridged Series, and the acting is abysmal, especially from Yu Tendo.
  • The Latin-American dub of Kaleido Star was done by a Colombian studio whom, for some reason, have all their cast talk on ridiculously high pitches, often in detriment of acting. People who watched the show ended complaining of genuine ear pain. The sheer low quality of this dub was pointed as the reason Kaleido Star went from being one of the most hyped series of their year to one of the most obscures.
  • The Mexican dub for Cardcaptor Sakura is in the realm of Superlative Dubbing, save for the horrible voice of the guardian beast Kerberos in his plushie form Kero. His voice is way too nasal and weirdly accented, as if the voice actor tried to do the Mexican equivalent of Kero's Kansai accent while speaking in high pitch, in all and all quite inappropriate for the character. The reason of this was that the studio decided to make the same actor do the voice of both Kero-chan form and his grown up version, when usually both roles are cast to different actors (despite being technically the same characters) due to the different vocal requirements. As Kerberos, the actor sounds delightful, but as Kero, it's a complete disaster since he simply has not got the range for mascot characters.

Film

  • This dub for a film called "Hard Gun".
  • The Hungarian dub of Beetlejuice. Where to start? It is a Hong Kong Dub, and as such, the lip-sync is generally off, at times with the characters just flapping their mouths without saying anything (the worst offender being the third "Beetlejuice" cry at the end, which is simply omitted). Random grunts and shouts can be heard whenever the voice actors felt like paying attention, but no effort was made to conceal how terribly they stood out from the audio track. What more, the title character received Power Echoes, which, along with his fast-talking and low-voiced dubbing actor, made him difficult to understand. He doesn't even sound the slightest like the original—imagine Dr. Finklestein mumbling in an echoing cave: that is the Hungarian Betelgeuse. To top it off, the dialog also offers examples of mistranslation (giving a toast became giving a bread toast), and the music and sound effects are so silent, you can barely hear them over the voice track. How... how could they screw this up so bad?
  • As another page put it, "Transformers in Hungarian is screwed beyond comprehension", and the dubbing of the Transformers Film Series played a big part in prompting this observation. Though mostly the first movie's. On a positive note, it used the original Transformer names introduced in the G1 comics, but apart from that, it was just cheap and lazy. The voice actors of Sam and Lennox sound way too young, their voices are almost comically high. The translation work is a mess -- Michael Bay films are infamous for their generally shallow dialog, but here, it's even more watered-down. A handful of lines are missing (what little intelligible dialog Frenzy originally had was either cut or left in English), while what is there tends to be off by half a second or so. And Ironhide's VA simply sounds bored out of his mind. So much, that he says his famous line about exterminating Sam's parents only after the other Autobots have reacted to it. Thankfully a lot of these shortcomings were dealt with in the sequels, but sadly those continued in the trend of randomly omitting lines, and left various names in English in several scenes.

Live-Action TV

  • Oh god, the Ultraman 80 English dub. The voices were done by Malaysian actors who sound like they were randomly pulled off the street. The previous Malay Ultra dub of Ultraman Taro comes close with the wannabe British narrator, but Eighty's dub takes the cake. Thankfully, only 10 known episodes were dubbed in English, the rest in Mandarin Chinese.
  • The guy who did the promos for The Hype on The WB's "All-New HYPE NIIIIIIIGHT!" It was the same guy who did everything for Disney in the 1990s, and was the voice of that EXTREME bubble tape in that one ad.
  • Hungary's Top Gear dub, if it can even be called a "dub". Initially, they had a very small cast with only two or three actors voicing everyone besides the main trio...and even the voices the presenters got didn't quite suite them. All that changed at around Season 5 or 6, when the entire voice cast was recast. But that was the only change. The translation...a painful Wall Banger. The voice timing and lip sync...way off. Much of the entertainment value of the original...lost.

Video Games

  • It's very rare that video games will have the entire voice cast present during dubbing. In dubs where the ADR director isn't doing his job, this will often result in hilarious / awful sequences where a voice actor knows his line, but not how the character saying it is supposed to be feeling or what the line is a response to. As an example, reading "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero" as a congratulation, so one character ends up reacting glumly to being told off while the other thanks him heartly for breaking it.
  • The main quote for this page comes from the english track for Mega Man 8.
  • One of the many, many problems with Ultima IX is the atrocious voice acting. The Avatar either sounds annoyingly dumb or like he couldn't care less about what's happening. Most of the other NPCs are done by actors who put absolutely no effort at all into their lines, and can't stick to a consistent accent. You could bump into people (that are all supposed to be from the same city) who have French, Scottish, American and British accents.
  • The Dutch version of Earth 2140, the obscure predecessor of Earth 2150 had the unit's voices dubbed in Dutch. This is already odd, as games not aimed at children below the age of 6 generally keep the English voices. But what made this odd was the spectacularly bad job they did with all the cloned super-soldiers being voiced in the most wooden, monotone, stilted voice that by a man who sounded like he was in his 50's and worked in a nursing home with easily excitable heart attack patients. After the humor wore off, you'd switch to the UCS campaign, since all their soldiers were machines and only made bleeping noises.
  • Duel Masters for the PlayStation 2. The main characters' voices were passable, but when talking to an NPC the voice sample would either not play at all while the character flapped their lips about...or worse.
  • Samurai Warriors (and Koei's Warriors games in general) has never been known for amazing voice acting, but there was a particularly horrible example in the case of Ranmaru Mori. The Japanese voice actor for Ranmaru was blatantly female and made no attempt to hide the fact. This still beat the English voice actor's frog-in-throat annoyance.
  • Pretty much every game torn apart by Audio Atrocities, with convenient samples of particularly egregious examples. Some of the games are So Bad Its Horrible on their own to boot. These include:
    • The #1 example? Last Alert. The game itself is an enjoyable shooter. The scenes where people actually spoke are cringe-inducing. Perhaps the best line is one in which a character calls another character "stingy". The voice actor pronounces it as if it rhymed with "stringy".
    • There's some speculation that the reason the casting department for Chaos Wars did such a half-assed job on the dub is that they were required to have one by Sony and knew that most of the minuscule audience who'd both know about the game and be interested in playing it would probably be listening to the Japanese track anyway. That's no excuse for the poor translation in general, though.
      • The fact that the name "Jelinek" pops up no less than 6 times in the credits points to the fact that the localization director had his teenage children record two of the characters and had his wife and brother work on the scripts. The rest of the cast all have little to no other acting experience, and most of them no voice acting at all (Chaos Wars included, natch). Chris Jelinek, the head of localization, has two other credits to his name - as a marketing and sales representative.
    • The voice acting in House of the Dead 2 (and HotD games in general) is supposed to be So Bad It's Good. Then again, when you get errors like an incorrect punctuation mark turning a threat into an awkward-sounding rhetorical question, you tend to wonder. "Suffer like G did?" has since become emblematic of the franchise through Memetic Mutation.
  • Samurai Legend Musashi, the sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi, is a fairly good game with average gameplay and cool art. But oh sweet Lord in heaven, Musashi's voice. Everyone else has middling VAs (and the villains are outstanding), but words can't describe the pain that is the damn main character's voice. "Dumb jock turned Up to Eleven" doesn't even begin to scrape the surface. Since the game was a sequel, they were most likely trying to make the new Musashi sound like the previous Musashi, but older. The problem is that the Musashi from Brave Fencer is a prepubescent child. So rather than give the newer, older Musashi the voice of a teenager, they gave him the voice of a child who was trying to make his voice sound deeper than it actually was. It didn't help that he couldn't put any sort of emotion into his voice.
  • Shining Force III has a veritable Arctic blast of bad voice acting. Listen and weep.
  • The GBA port of Tales of Phantasia had really poor English voices (not helped by the terrible sound quality of this version). Teenage characters sound like 40 year-olds, female characters sound like smoking addicts, not to mention the limited pool of "voice actors" meant that all characters were voiced by three people or so. What makes this somewhat worse is that this was right after Namdai's release of Tales of Legendia; which, for all its faults, had competent, professional voice acting. Apparently They Just Didn't Care here, since it was just a GBA game.
  • Your Mileage May Vary on how much you think Gameloft succeeds in making iOS games based on other games built for consoles. Most agree, however, that the voice acting that comes with their games is mediocre at best. One egregious example is Eternal Legacy, their Captain Ersatz for Final Fantasy XIII. In a genre that is normally known for So Bad It's Good voice-acting, this JRPG succeeds on making the gamer cringe rather than get engaged in the story. App Spy even said that the option to turn off the voice acting is a pro!
    • Another example of horrible voice-acting in a Gameloft game is Shadow Guardian, which is totally not an Uncharted ripoff. Where Drake's voice is sexy and snarky, Jason Call's voice is that of a bored and confused New Yorker. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of terrible voice-acting this game provides.
  • Tales of Eternia also has pretty bad voice acting. This was somehow made worse on the PSP port (Europe only) in which the voice acting is quiet enough at points to be drowned out by the background music, and at another close to the end, the wrong clips play and you hear the dialogue from the beginning of the game. One would think they'd catch the last on a playthrough of the game, but of course They Just Didn't Care. The English version of Tales of Destiny didn't bother to voice act the characters, but they changed their minds in this game, and boy, it's not good. The voice actors sound amateurish, the lines are completely emotionless and badly delivered, and it's generally atrocious. Fortunately they did much better in the next games (well, at least on those they actually localized).
    • Counterpoint: "Fog. BURNING FORCE!"
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, in the first game voice direction is all around horrible for a good portion of the cast, with characters having odd pauses at random points in sentences and just generally being inappropriate. Kuja is by far the worst victim, though others including Zidane and Ultimecia were also disliked. Zidane's voice acting wasn't particularly bad, Bryce Papenbrook did an okay job, it's just that he sounded entirely different from the Japanese voice and people in general thought the original was more appropriate for the character. The returning voice actors do a good job, except for Steve Burton as Cloud, who is so unemotional and lifeless he could give Squall a run for his money as The Stoic.
    • In responses to comments on a YouTube video though, JD Cullum, voice of Kuja, revealed he wasn't given a good feel for Kuja, and the "voice direction" he got was to imitate the Japanese voice and try to sound "breathy and feminine". If the other VAs have similar stories to tell, no wonder it was hit and miss.
    • The sequel Dissidia 012 thankfully had all the cast undergo Vocal Evolution and in general everyone sounds much better, though it only highlights how bad the first game's scenes are when the player plays through the redone original storyline and finds the voices were not re-dubbed.
  • Al Emmo, an independent adventure game that is essentially Leisure Suit Larry in the Wild West — primarily because the game designer, rather than holding auditions for the protagonist, wanted to do the voice himself.
  • The first Shadow Hearts game, exemplified particularly in the Sea Mother scene. There's also the fact that they didn't bother dubbing over the battle grunts. So essentially, each of the main characters had a different voice when they were in battles, and you could tell the difference. (Seriously, how low does your localization budget have to be that you can't afford to have your actors record battle grunts?) It gets even worse — although most of the battle voices weren't dubbed, a very few were...most noticeably the introduction line to Marguerite's specials. So you'd sometimes have characters changing voices in the middle of battle. The most poignant example of bad voice acting was the game's canonical ending (courtesy of everyone's favorite Eric Stuart). If Yuri is mourning the death of his loved one, why does he sound like he's desperate to go to the bathroom?
    • And all this in a game that was a semi-sequel to Koudelka, which (for all its arguable faults) had fantastic voice acting. To be fair, it improves dramatically by the next game.
  • While the voice acting in the original .hack// series was generally bearable, the voice of Mistral was so awful that many people refused to use her in their party unless it was mandated by the plot.
  • The German dub of the first Metal Gear Solid game was just horrible in every way. No wonder the following games and the remake stayed English.
    • The same applies to the Italian dub as well. The worst offender was Campbell, whose voice suddenly turned from a common adult voice to a deep-sounding one with a very thick local accent.
  • The Bard's Tale, a lampoon of fantasy RPGs with Cary Elwes as the lead voice, should have been awesome. And it might have been, if it didn't sound like he was standing ten feet away from the mic. At least Tony Jay sounded good...
    • The volume problems are fixed in the iOS port... Mostly. There's still errant bits of the old voice work, mostly in the shops, which leads to:
  • Back*

The Bard (very quietly): "Let me see something else."

  • Leave store*

The Bard: "SEE YA, OLD MAN!"

  • The Spanish dub of Kingdom Hearts II was actually pretty good... but there was something weird about Roxas' voice actor. Sometimes the guy nails it, as in his conversation with DiZ. Other times... man, if you're falling into a dark abyss of nightmare, at the very least you could put a bit of emotion into your scream. Seems that this is more a case of wrong voice direction than wrong voice acting, but that a director misdirects one of the main characters this badly makes one wonder.
    • The English version has Mena Suvari's horribly monotone Aerith, a far cry from Mandy Moore's somewhat respectable turn in the previous game.
    • The Japanese voice job for all the Kingdom Hearts franchise feature the atrocious voice for Goofy, inherited of other Disney's Japanese dubs that already suffer it.
  • Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is known for having atrocious English voice acting: so much so that it spawned an urban legend that company that made it, rather than get a second set of English-speaking actors for the English dub, simply made the Japanese actors do English voices. While this wasn't completely true, the performances still ranged from hilarious to flat-out terrible.
  • Most of the English voice acting in Virtua Fighter is at least passable, but everyone hates Lion's voice. Imagine the most whiny, nasal, bratty teenager voice possible going "The SHOOOOOW is gonna bee-GIN RIGHT NOW!" twelve thousand times.
  • Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner has an awkward translation and generally mediocre voice actors, and that's not even counting the main villain. The only really good voice in this game was the AI.
  • If any of you ever got your hands on the imported version of Psychic Force, be very grateful. The English dubbing done by Acclaim is so soul-searingly horrible it's like almost everyone is mismatched — Burn kinda sounds like a constipated White-Haired Pretty Boy, Sonia sounds almost like an old witch, and Emilio...oh God, Emilio!
  • The VA for the main character of underwhelming PC game Neverend actually has quite a nice voice, which makes her lack of acting ability all the more jarring. The rest of the cast, unfortunately, doesn't have nice voices and possess even less talent.
  • The English dub of the original Spellforce. The translators appear to have blown their entire budget for voice acting on the opening FMV, then hired whatever homeless people they could find in the alley behind their studio in exchange for the contents of the break room refrigerator. All the voice acting's wooden, and at least one character speaks all her lines in an awkward slur that contains absolutely none of the pauses that are part of natural speech. The sequel still doesn't have great voice-acting, but at least isn't this bad.
    • The worst offenders? What's-her-name with the orange hair in the tutorial intro, the Orc Titan, and every Troll unit. Yeah, All Trolls Are Different...but seriously, trolls as whiny teens?
  • The acting in Grandia Xtreme sounds like the "actors" sat down with their scripts, were given no direction or context, and just read their lines like one reads impromptu cue cards. Lutina's is the worst — any inflection of hers sounds completely forced. Either the actors were all new to voice acting and only given one read-through to get it right, or they're just really, really bad.
    • There's one exception — the Big Bad, voiced by Mark Hamill, easily chews up any scene he's in. Most people get fed up with the game before his best scenes, meaning Hamill's delightful Ham and Cheese is sadly missed.
  • Somewhere between a game and a movie there's Anastasia for the PlayStation. As you can tell, the voice acting is poor and often miscast with only two voice actors. Rasputin's accent is one of the most hilarious things there, though.
    • Pretty much every such Dingo Pictures dub by Phoenix Games seems to have the same tendency.
  • Bushido Blade 2. While the first game had all dialog in Japanese with English subtitles and was beautiful, this sequel chose absolutely horrid voice actors with lackluster emotion and it was terrible. Bonus points for Highwayman, who's dressed like the Phantom of the Opera and speaks with something between a Scottish burr and a deep country English accent.
  • Most of the English dub cast of the The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact spinoff series sounds like they just got home from a late-night crawl. Of special note is Rock Howard: in his ending in the first game, when he goes "Do I have to bear this burden for the rest of my life?", he sounds less like he's on the verge of tears and more like he's just really, really tired. The others aren't that much better, but at least in Max Impact 2, you can switch to the original Japanese voices.
    • The arcade version of KOF XIII had a normally Dummied Out English voice track which these videos demonstrated, and they were absolutely horrendous. Thankfully the console port of the game is Japanese voices only.
  • The Polish dub of Jagged Alliance 2.5: Unfinished Business replaces original voices with atrocities most probably recorded by an ensemble of small-town winos. Most of the voices don't even resemble the originals!
    • The Polish dub of a Russian Jagged Alliance rip-off titled Brigade E5 is just atrocious and coupled with a Blind Idiot Translation just to give you that extra kick in the nuts. The horrid imitations of various accents (especially one of the selectable main characters, a French woman who says French words with a Polish accent or Punny Named Swiss guy Cheez and his annoying pseudo-German "rrr") top the So Bad Its Horrible list.
  • The Polish translation of Far Cry. Blind Idiot Translation, synchronization thrown out the window, and worst of all, most (if not all) of the voices don't fit the characters at all (for starters, they made Jack Carver sound like a Bishonen!). The dub was so bad, its Polish publisher redubbed it and released the corrected translation as a patch. It was still far from perfect, but at least straddled the line between So Bad It's Good and So Bad Its Horrible this time around.
    • Another thing, mostly about the applying the voice acting itself — they forgot to translate some of the lines and the enemies spoke in English at times.
  • The Polish dub of Rainbow Six: Vegas is just as mind-rapingly bad as the Far Cry example above, mostly because it was made by the same company and shares at least part of the actors. First, thanks to bad translation, all the military jargon sounds fake. Second, Logan's gasping when he's wounded easily qualifies as the Most Annoying Sound. Third, Spanish voices have been left intact and whenever the enemies are supposed to speak English (or Polish in this case), the voices barely match. Fourth, Mission Control is voiced by the resident "tough grrrrl!" voice actress.
  • Polish version of League of Legends (yes, it exists). It's not only stupidly translated, but also badly voiced in most cases. The announcer is voiced by the same person who voices Mission Control in Rainbow Six Vegas (see above), two-three characters sounding exactly the same is a common occurence (examples: Cho'Gath-Kassadin, Garen-Shen, Evelynn-Leblanc-Nidalee, Galio-Udyr), some quotes have weird pauses or accents upon the wrong syllable and nobody has an accent.
  • The French dub of Kessen 2 for the PlayStation 2 was also a (quite obscure) source of hilarity. Mostly because the voice actors had an extremely strong accent from the region of Marseilles. Let's just say it had the same effect as having Roman warriors talking with a Cockney accent.
  • Suikoden Tierkreis is a great game, but the voice acting ranges from acceptable to abysmal. And unfortunately, the main character is firmly on the "abysmal" end of that scale. Specifically, at no point in his lines does the VA appear to inhale. Here's an example.
    • On top of this, many of the lines spoken either simply summarize or completely contradict the lines in the subtitles. Although the voice actors are all painfully, painfully American, many of the characters' names are read in a strange, pseudo-Japanese pronunciation (i.e. "Hotupa" sounds like "Hepstupa" for no discernible reason). It sounds as though the actors were reading from a copy of the script which was still mid-localization, and "jarring" doesn't really begin to describe it.
    • It also suffers from the fact that some characters never had a definite pronunciation to their name. Chrodechild, for one, has hers pronounced at least five different ways. "Chrode-child", "Chrode-chilled", "Chro-de-child"... It just gets worse from there.
  • The first Tenchu game was the least story-loaded game of the franchise (so much that, no matter which character you choose, the story will be almost the same), but still managed to have memorably bad voice acting. Apparent boredom plagued all the actors, Ayame's VA didn't know the concept of volume, and weird pauses were all over (and no, this wouldn't count as Lip Lock, since there are no lip movements in the game). The only truly enjoyable performance was Onikage, just because his VA did the impossible in making a twisted, sinister voice (though Your Mileage May Vary about that one). The other games got progressively better about choosing the voice cast, though.
  • In the case of the German dub of Starship Troopers it appears as if they deliberately picked the worst voice actors available.
  • Mario educational games (and Hotel Mario) have horrific voice acting quality, of roughly the four-guys-in-a-basement level. Hotel Mario is already bad enough, but then you've got Mario Is Missing and the horrors of the worst voice acting in world history, Mario's Early Years: Preschool "Fun".
  • The English voice acting in the Soul Series is generally So Okay It's Average (mostly consisting of boring and a few slightly cool voices that spout out badly-translated lines and scream unnaturally), except for a select few characters, most notably Tira. Hearing her shriek out lines such as "I want to see you destroyed! Hahahahahahaha!" just makes people want to see her destroyed, especially when she spews out such horrific, cringeworthy Narm nonsense as "Can I use him? Nah, he's useless!" and "All done! Rich and juicy souls! Just yummy!". No wonder she became The Scrappy of the series (to some people, anyway).
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen. Apparently they couldn't get Colm Meaney (the actor who played him on the series) to do Chief O'Brien's voice...so instead they got some guy doing a terrible fake Irish accent.
  • Midnight Club II has mediocre voice acting for the majority of the game, but the last boss will repeatedly call you an "asswipe" in a cheesy French accent, in pure Narm fashion.
    • Which is that much worse when you realize he's supposed to be Russian.
  • Professor Layton: Pandora's Box. In Europe it was translated to other languages than English. The German and Spanish voice acting wasn't so bad, but the Dutch one... Your ears will burn.
  • Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance featured some irritatingly-bad voice acting throughout. However, it was especially glaring during the Battle of Endor, where much of the dialogue was a word-for-word re-recording of lines from Return of the Jedi, which sounded nothing like the lines from the film. How bad was it? Let's put it this way — the next time Lando Calrissian showed up in a video game, Billy Dee Williams himself was hired to voice the character.
    • The French version had some excellent voices (Aemon and Emkay stand out), but the rest of the cast varied between mediocre and outright wallbangeriffic...like that Imperial officer who started a sentence, ended it halfway, then hurried to add the forgotten second half.
  • Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries is notable for having characters' voices change randomly from line to line, including at least one instance of gender bending in the mission "Wolf Trial"; the last mission of the Steiner campaign. At the start (when the Clanners challenge you and announce what Mechs they are going to use) the third pilot, Zel Vickers, is male. However during the mission, Vickers taunts you before attacking in what is clearly a woman's voice.
  • The X-COM clone series UFO: After Blank featured a multiethnic cast of characters obviously voiced by a cast of about five voice actors doing terrible accents. It was funny for about five minutes.
  • The Bloody Roar series may not be the best or most memorable fighter series out there and could very well pass as okay at best, but by the time Bloody Roar 4 came around, Hudson appeared to have given up on it. Aside from the bugs, the character imbalances, the character and story derailment, the worst aspects have to be the dialogue and voice acting. As this reviewer pointed out, a majority of these voice actors had little to no experience in voice acting prior to Bloody Roar 4. Of the ones that did, they hadn't done any work since this game, and the only exception to either of the rules was among the original cast of the Narm-infested Resident Evil. With the way the dialogue runs off or cuts out quickly, the tones flying all over the place and how stupid the characters sound in general, it's very easy to believe the aforementioned reviewer's theory that all of the voice actors were paid to do just one take of all the dialogue in recording and leave Hudson to do a cut-and-paste patch job with the results. (Oh, and it doesn't help that the dialogue doesn't sync with the Japanese lip-synching left in all versions of the game.)
  • Dawn of War: Soulstorm is a veritable fountain of bad voice acting. Most of it, such as Brother-Captain Indrick Boreale's infamous "SPESS MEHRENS" speech live on through YouTube and Memetic Mutation.
    • METAL BAWKSES!!!
    • [in an incredibly bored voice] "Damn them. Fight for all you're worth, soldiers. We've got to win this."
  • Men of War is a very good game, but the voice actors are apparently all Swedish trying to sound like a German trying to sound like an Italian who is trying to sound Russian. One of the best voice actors in the game is Russian and whilst all his peers have awful Russian accents, his is British.
  • Galerians. The original game. All of it, ever. Special mention for the scene between Rion, Cain, and Lilia where Cain's VA decided it would be good if he forced a laugh into every line.
  • For the most part, Oblivion had some pretty impressive voice acting. However, the male Imperial voice sometimes sounds cheesy and exaggerated, and the actor for the female Redguards sounds like she wasn't even trying.
    • The French dub has one actor doing the voices of both the Argonian and the Khajit males and one doing the females. And the voice actor is the French VA of the frakking Captain Haddock.
    • And then there's the voice actress of the female Bosmer, Dunmer, and Altmer. It would have been fine if she just did the voice of a few female Elves, but no, she had to do the voice of all of the female Elves in the game! Seriously, half the time, she sounds like she has something stuck in her throat! It's jarring, to say the least!
  • The MMORPG Divine Soul has horrendous voice acting. Nobody even tries to sound natural.
  • While there are a handful of voice actors in the English dub of Arc Rise Fantasia who have potential, most of them just sound cheap. The acting of most is contrived, forced; not helped by the script, that is somewhat unnatural (not even in a Blind Idiot Translation way; more in a "translation for subtitles" way). Lip Lock is also a major issue, as some voice actors seem to care, others don't (Niko's voice actor, for example, who seems too busy focusing on doing his undefinable accent to care about synchrony).
  • The German dub of the original Star Wars: The Force Unleashed game was okay (not that great with pronouncing Coruscant as "Corus AAAAHN" and Vader sounding nothing like in the movies) but Tatooine turned it down to zero with Obi-Wan and Palpatine being 20-ish dudes...and Palpatine having the worst impression of him in all of existence.
  • Limbo of the Lost. There are literally only three people doing voices. What makes this worse is that the script sounds like it was Babelfished from another language and that Spooner Briggs' VA does most of the other cast. His only method of changing his voice is to sound congested or mumble, so there's a large amount of the same person talking to himself. The subtitles are also noteworthily hackeneyed, but that's neither here nor there.
  • The Sega CD version of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game Eye of the Beholder had universally awful voice acting, from a dwarf who sounded like a chain-smoking Yoda to an evil wizard who sounded like Sesame Street's Grover with adenoids. Most of the rest of the voice cast is stilted and dry in the best/worst non-actor style. As in "asking the receptionist to come in and read on her coffee break."
  • Diddy Kong Racing had voices for each character that were very well suited to their appearance and personality. The DS remake, however, did away with all of these and replaced them with emotionless actors who apparently simply couldn't be arsed to get into, or even be relevant to, their roles. Of note are Timber, who in the original had a rather cute child's voice but now possesses a deep/gruff Australian-accented voice for no reason whatsoever; Bumper, who had a fan-favorite voice in the original game but now has a completely unremarkable and forced-sounding tone; and newly-added Tiny Kong, who was "aged" to her teens for this game but still retains her high-pitched kiddie-voice from Donkey Kong 64, leading to a surprisingly disturbing dissonance. Perhaps worst of all is Taj the elephant-genie, who had an appropriate Middle Eastern-sounding voice in the original, but now has a flat British accent and the absolute least emotion of any character in the game (which is definitely saying something). Wizpig is now an unamusing Large Ham as well.
    • A possible exception is found in T.T., who in the original had a nasally but playful voice that suited his role, and in the DS version has an excited-sounding voice that also fits the part, but in a different way.
  • Valis II and III for the TurboGrafx-CD have quite laughable English voice acting, especially from the villains. Valis II also suffered from a dub script so sloppy that the name of the game was pronounced "Varis."
  • King's Quest V has a better excuse than most games here: the CD-ROM version was one of the first games ever to feature full voice acting. Unfortunately, this meant Sierra had to use its own employees, none of which could act worth a damn. Graham and the narrator were at least somewhat acceptable (although the narrator had several obvious page cuts left in). But on the other end of the spectrum, you had a helium-addled elf, an ear-bleedingly bad wolf, a "pOIsonous" owl (no wonder he's The Scrappy) and several people in between that could never read their scripts right, pronounced words wrong, and generally made most of the cutscenes a chore once the novelty wore off. The best part? You can't turn the voices off.
    • Sierra also apparently had no idea how to do voice recording. Much of the audio sounds like it was recorded in a closet with terrible acoustics and a $10 mike. You might cut them some slack considering all the audio is 8 bits 11 kHz, but it sounds even worse than what you'd expect at that technology level.
    • Strangely enough, Sierra never learned its lesson, really. Although they had some games with awesome voice acting (King's Quest VI, Gabriel Knight), some were terrible despite not having the "lack of experience" excuse. Police Quest 4 had awful voice acting, compounded by the fact that the game used filmed actors for the character sprites, and then used different actors for the voices, leading to strange disconnect between what certain characters sound and look like.
  • Stranded 2. "That Won't Work Don't Be Stupid IT'S NOT WHEERKING Don't Be Stupid Did You Even Think That Would Work IT'S NOT WHEERKING Don't Be Stupid That WON'T WHEERK IT'S... TOO... HEAVY I CAN'T CARRY ANYTHING MORE Don't Be Stupid IT'S NOT WHEEERKING"...
  • The white chamber. The player character's VA isn't exactly awful so much as neutral, not conveying the emotion the lines (and indeed the character portrait) suggest. This is especially noticeable when they are dealing with twisted monstrosities or being forced to recall committing murder yet still use the same measured tones when discussing it.
  • The pretty dire action RPG Requital has some truly abysmal voice overs and bizarre dialogue including horrible lines such as "You are welcome, son of a good mother".
  • Jake from Rune Factory 2. His English voice actor is easily the worst performance in the series. He has one of the most nasal voices out of any of the characters, and the overacting on the part of his VA just adds to the awfulness. Some in the fandom suspect that the reason Natsume shelled out extra money for professional voice work in the third game is because of the reception Jake's VA and other poor performances got from the English fandom.
  • The Pajama Sam series, once bought out by Atari, had a very sad excuse for a voice actor for Sam. He sounded like he aged three years backwards, and it gets on your nerves very quickly. Some of the other voice acting was also widely hated, particularly the sponge and the Leavins n' Squeezins guy near the end.
    • The Russian bootleg for the first game by Fargus Multimedia manages to do even worse. Sam's voice actor sounded like a bored 40-year old adult deciding to dub a random game. Yes, a 40-year old voice for a kid who is supposed to be six years old. His mother actually sounds younger than him.
  • The English version of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn had voice acting that flew somewhere between wooden, overeager, and just plain grating for nearly everyone. But one scene in particular stood out in every player's mind as either a very sour note, or delicious narm: "Ike's Memory Scene." A dramatic Flash Back of Ike witnessing his mother's death, and standing still in traumatized silence, the scene comes across as very sorrowful in spite of Mist's shrill screeching... until child!Ike opens his mouth and begins screaming in his super-gruff adult voice.
  • Teddie/Kuma's Japanese voice in Persona 4. His English voice is okay, but his Japanese voice is seriously painful to listen to. Fortunately, it changes slightly when he's in human form and becomes more tolerable, but in his Shadow form it's really high-pitched and annoying.
    • Rise's Japanese voice. Really high-pitched and grating, and once you defeat Shadow Teddie, you have to listen to it in every damn battle.
    • On a related note, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment's[4] English dub comes under this at times. Voices can sound narmy and sometimes there's emphasis on the wrong syllable. Metal Jun's voice in particular comes to mind, as the actor sounds like he was told to play as a wimpy nerd, and Tatsuya's VA could give Jason Dohring a run for his money in terms of Dull Surprise.
    • The voice acting in Persona 3's English dub is mediocre at best, with almost every character sounding flatter than they should. The worst voice, however, is the uncredited actress that interpreted Fuuka Yamagishi, who manages to sounds simultaneously nasal and monotone and, because she's the Mission Control, after getting her in the party you have to listen her in every battle (the character tendencies to be Captain Obvious not helping it at all). In The Answer the actress improves somewhat, but thankfully her role was recast and given to Wendee Lee from Persona 4 Arena onwards.
  • Prinny 2 does have a good amount of voice acting, but the direction for the returning character voices is pretty terrible all around. The new Hero Prinny lacks any sort of emotion, Etna sounds more like a bored primadona than the egomaniac tyrant she's supposed to be, and Flonne, despite retaining her original VA, barely has any inflection or effort in her lines. And then there's what they did to Laharl...
  • While most of the voice acting in World of Warcraft is fine, there are a few bosses that have awful voice acting. Rotface and Festergut have very annoying voices, but they're bearable. The prize goes to Lady Deathwhisper and Sindragosa of Icecrown Citadel. Deathwhisper is incredibly hammy and over the top, and the voice is harsh and obnoxious. If you pull her in the middle of her speech, she'll actually say her speech and her emotes at the same time. Sindragosa is even worse: she SCREAMS at you every time she puts up her debuff. "SUFFER MORTALS AS YOUR PATHETIC MAGIC BETRARARARAAGHAGHGHAGHAARAAYS YOU!".
  • Dragon Age's official Russian dub. Not a single blunder has been edited out.
  • Orphen: Scion of Sorcery. The only reasonably good voice in that was Orphen himself, who was fortunate enough to be voiced by Quinton Flynn (also responsible for Axel from Kingdom Hearts and Reno from the English dub of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children). Everyone else just sounded like they were reading a shopping list. Absolutely no emotion whatsoever. The rest of the game wasn't that great either, but the voice acting was just painful. And unfortunately, it didn't have the option for Japanese voices, so you were stuck with the horrible English ones if you decided to play it.
  • The Italian dub of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2. And that's not self-deprecation. Bland, emotionless voices and bad acting. The final blow is Lyran the Lich: in English he has a deep voice, the Spanish one sounds like chalks on a board but at least is fitting and scary, but the Italian one... dear god.... he has an extremely high-pitched, ridicolous voice who's pure Narm and totally kills the mood.
  • Enjoy this in all its cringe worthy glory: The Top 10 Worst RPG Dubs. It features the notoriously bad English dub of the first Grandia game, and worse.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds overall had very good voice acting, with most of the cast of the show lending their voices to their characters. However, one notable exception is Willow, whose breathy, vacant, sleepy-sounding performance is just painful to listen to.
  • The Town With No Name, already an infamously bad game on its own, deserves special mention for its voice acting; things like the bartender with the bad Irish accent or the horrific singing during the inexplicable "sex for eight days" sequence are bad enough, but the worst is probably the main character, who spends the entire game trying to sound like John Wayne, yet keeps talking in a grating nasal drone that couldn't have sounded more robotically deadpan.[5] It probably doesn't help that the audio more often than not cuts off midway through sentences.
    • What about the "mini-boss" that speaks in a fantastically racist Mexican accent... even though he doesn't even remotely look like he's supposed to be Mexican!!
  • The English cast of Gotcha Force was, according to the now defunct official Japanese website, voiced by actual children and shows why most games have adult women pretend to be children instead. Intonations are all over the place, some words are pronounced wrong wholesale, and several of the characters (Orochi gets special mention) sound like their lines are being read with all of the emotion and presence of a surgery outpatient full of high-grade anaesthetic. Not to mention that the Galactic Emperor's voice sounds like it was recorded in one take, pushed through some cheap filtering effects, and considered good enough for the final game. The repeated "wah ha ha ha ha!"s (read word for word off the script) are among the least intimidating evil laughs to be found in any form of media.
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope, whose voice acting was so horribly directed that the Updated Rerelease actually made sure to include the option to choose the original Japanese voices.
  • Trouble Witches NEO! got a pretty horrible dub. The cast either probably isn't fluent in English (Lyla,[6] Aru,[7] Sakurako[8]) sound incredibly slow (Pril, Venus/Twinkle), or have all the emotion of a toaster, maybe less (Blizzard, Symphony, Spool). There are some decent ones, like Amalgam/Almagam and Lady Aqua (sometimes), and some of the actresses seem to have their hearts in it,[9] but it still ends up being So Bad It's Good at best. These are just a few examples. Enjoy.
  • After receiving complains from the Latin-American consumers that the Spanish voice track for Halo sounded too Spaniard, Microsoft commissioned a "Neutral Spanish" dub in Miami for Halo 2. The thing suffered the trifecta of bad translations (that in occasion contradicted the game text), ill suited casting, and horrendous acting stunted by the horrible "neutral" accent imposed to the dubbers. The resultant job was liked by absolutely no one on either side of the pond; and by the time Halo 3 rolled up, Microsoft decided that having separate dubs (one for and by for continental Spain and a Mexican one for the Latin-American audiences) was the best solution.

Western Animation

  • Whatever your opinion on Angela Anaconda is, the title character's voice makes Nails On a Chalkboard a half appealing alternative.
    • The Latin American dub marginally improves her talking voice: it's still shrill, but at least is tolerable. That doesn't extend to her singing voice in the intro, who makes the audience want to drill their ears to make the pain go away.
  • How about Titanic: The Legend Goes On? The one with the mice with wildly-varying accents (probably supposed to be Yiddish)? And one of the weirdest examples happens when the ship is sinking — a lady says "You had a tiger on board?" (don't ask). Throughout the entire movie, she'd spoken with a proper, upper-class, British accent. For that one line and that line only, she had a freaking man's voice! And then has her normal voice back by her next line. It's clearly a man imitating a woman's voice there, did the original voice actress have to leave for the bathroom while they were recording or something?

"My BAAAAAAAAALLLL! It fell down there! MAAIIII BAAHHHHHHLLLLLL!!!!!

    • The Continental Spanish Dub is equally atrocious, but in a different way. It has maybe 4 voice actors, tops, and no more of 6 voices between them all. It also didn't bother to dub the songs (the notorious rapper dog included), leaving instead the audio of the English dub.
  • Try listening to the main character of Rock-a-Doodle. Hell, try watching any scene that has him in it and see if you want to tear out your eardrums from his insistent Elmuh Fudd Syndwome and general mangling of the English language.
  • The German dub of Robot Chicken. It seems like they only have like five voice actors for the whole show, which would be no problem for America with every actor having different impressions, here our actors have only one voice. Especially bad when it comes to the Star Wars specials, where Palpatine has a falsetto voice and several other unfitting ones for Luke and Lando. A complete Wall Banger considering that the TV station ordering the dub could have hired the studio which dubbed the original Star Wars movies and Clone Wars shows instead of this dilettantes.
  • The French dub of Family Guy. Peter sounds even more retarded than in the English version, says "ho là ho là ho là ho là" every five seconds, and has the most annoying laugh in all of existence. Chris starts out with a fairly okay voice, but then Christophe Lemoine (Chris' voice actor) makes his character sound like a mentally-challenged circus clown. Meg, on the other hand, now has a tolerable voice, but her first voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard. Worst of all is Herbert; instead of his creepy effeminate whistle, he now talks in a deep, gruff tone. Although it still airs in France, this dub has thankfully long since stopped airing in Quebec, where it was completely overshadowed by the not-too-bad local dubbing of The Simpsons on the same network.
  • On the subject of French dubs, there's also Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Most French Cartoon Network dubs are pretty bad, but for some reason they went Beyond the Impossible on this one and gave Bloo an immensely irritating scratchy falsetto for no good reason.
  • Both Hungarian dubs of the 1986 Transformers movie. Issues found in both versions — embarrassingly-small casts; the characters' voices constantly changing; glaring translation errors (Unicron became UniCORN?); ignoring already established, official name translations (in the first dub, the Decepticons are called "Toads", while Hot Rod became "Fishing Rod"). On the other hand, even though it left out about half of the dialog and shortened every sentence as much as possible, the first dub had some very witty and clever translations, and the cast was composed of well-known, really talented voice actors. As for the second dub, it was technically more advanced and a number of actors showed actual enthusiasm in their line delivery. But the negatives far, far outweigh the positives.
    • Also the first Italian dub of the G1 Series. Season 1 and first 6-7 episodes of Season 2 are well done, after that... The whole dubbing cast changes. The characters have random accents or sound like total morons. The worst offender is French Metroplex, but also Retarded Skywarp, Whistling Broadside, Siren-like cadence First Aid, Rhyming Blaster, and Rodimus Prime is Principal Skinner!
  • KaBlam!!: JUNE'S. VOICE. IN. THE. DUTCH. DUB. She sounds like a dying cat. here's a clip. Also, at the beginning of that clip, seems like that the person who says "KABLAM!", now has a weird accent, and thanks to how sometimes in Dutch dubs the different accents cause words to change into a more absurd version, that person now says, "KUUUUUUUUBLOM." Let me guess, it'll become a meme any second now.
    • The Spanish dub also gave her a really irritating voice. Henry's is no better (in this dub he sounds like a badly pitched Mickey Mouse). Listen here. Have the dubbers even listened to their regular voices!? But same as above, it's worse when you're so used to their regular voices.
  • Through no fault of the voice actors, the 2006 American version of Doogal was one of the worst gag dubs in animation. It's bad enough that the original cut being in English as well rendered this redundant; what was once the adventure of a dog and his animal friends saving the world from an evil entity was now chock full of stupid pop-culture references and banal jokes — all very poorly synched. The film has a 2.5 IMDB score, a 23 Metacritic score, and an F from Entertainment Weekly.
  • It could have been avoided—it used to be well handled, has major fans, the voice actors themselves love working on it, some even volunteer to correct the translation goof-ups during recording—but the Hungarian dub for The Simpsons has fallen into this category, especially in the later seasons. It already started out as a relatively low-budget production with limited technical backup (meaning if someone accidentally erased part of the voice track, they couldn't retake the scene, left the goof in, and handed it over to the TV station). Over time, as the show gained popularity and went through a number of various dubbing studios, the quality of the dub somehow sank even further. Lip-sync is a rarity nowadays, the voices and name translations change constantly (at times, quite jarringly, within the same episode), and the overall translation itself ranges from half-decent to downright nonsensical. It's as if all the worthwhile translators were Seth MacFarlane fans, because his shows receive darn good dubs, and The Simpsons had to make do with only the most under-payed hacks. Never mind that merely a fraction of the gags survive (in part due to the on-screen translator/narrator actually talking over the dialog), even basic, straightforward sentences get horribly mangled (like "couch gag" becoming "a coach named Gag", or "my bad" becoming "me bad"). Worse, the translators seem to be completely ignorant towards pop-culture, with no idea of how to make the gags work for a non-American audience, and so translate a huge amount of jokes word-for-word, thereby completely rendering them pointless. The alternating voice cast doesn't always manage to salvage what's left either: if characters speak with their non-regular voice, it will almost always be some irritating, too high or low-pitched "cartoon" voice that doesn't even mimic how they are supposed to sound.
    • There seems to be no improvement in sight—the dub usually employs the trope of The Song Remains the Same, but in a particularly notable mess-up, they cut even the original English vocals, which lead to a bizarrely silent musical sequence, complete with the characters quietly flapping their mouths. No re-editing took place; this is the finished product.
  • Speaking of The Simpsons, there is a role that gets screwed no matter the dub: Marge! In the better dubs, she sounds either like the local dub actress tried her best to imitate Julie Kavner's voice with some degree of success, or somewhat decent but just not matching her characterization. In the worst ones, it ranges from raspy, to raspy with laryngitis, to, like in the Chzech dub, being flat out being dubbed by a man.
  • Phineas has a really crappy singing voice in the Latin American Dub. Just hear how he sings Gitchie Gitchie Goo, and that was just the second version. The first version showed how much the dubbers cared.

Repeat Offenders

  • Agapio Racing Team (a Finnish dubbing company) is legendary in its awfulness. One would think they had just hired a bunch of stoned teenagers off of the street, shoved scripts in front of their faces and forced them to dub the show live at 7 in the morning, without even the courtesy of giving them some morning coffee. Their voice actors, often known under different company names such as Golden Voice, were the bane of children's programming for years, until their dub for Digimon garnered enough complaints to warrant firing the group, and they haven't produced a single thing since. See their work on Digimon here, and a notorious musical number from My Little Pony here.
    • The Digimon dub has a wonderful assortment of emotions — fury, sadness, and joy.
  • In Brazil, there was a time in which certain companies, to cut costs, would produce a Portuguese dub in Miami for their anime. These dubs were done by Brazilians who lived there — in other words, people with no experience whatsoever in the acting field, no control over accents, etc. The result, predictably enough, were dubs with an amateur-sounding cast, laughably-bad performances, different accents everywhere, terrible directing and so on. Fortunately, the practice died over time...for a while; recently, Viz Media decided to dub the (admittedly mediocre) Blue Dragon anime in Miami. The end result started to become a meme among the fandom mere days after the broadcast of the first episode. It's that bad. Check it out here and here (naturally, more recommended if you know BR-Portuguese).
  • Odex, a Singapore-based dub company. Beneath their belts are butcherings of such shows as Zipang, Fantastic Children aaaaand...
    • The English dub of Karin... Karin's voice is tolerable for a while, but when she starts crying (which is common), it gets super high pitched and grating. And because we don't have a section for bad scripting, the English dub has one particularly-grating moment. "I'm gonna avoid that new transfer student!... but if I can't my peaceful life is going to be turned upside down!" So. Cliche.
    • "Time for talk is over! I challenge you to DYOOOOOOL!"
  • In Portugal, the TV stations don't bother with editing and keep the original background music, which is nice. However, the voiceovers are made by adults who have no idea how a child sounds. The adults (occasionally) sound good, but anything under the age of 18 will sound, if you're lucky, retarded. If you're unlucky, it's torture. In ascending order of pain — Digimon Tamers, Naruto, One Piece. Don't worry, the last one gets worse.
    • As a Portuguese, I'll admit that our dubs are plain crap. Hell, we're mediocre at anything that involves voice work. Our accent, or lack of, makes our voices very dull and unemotional compared to our Brazilian cousins, who speak in a much livelier way. It doesn't help that the voice acting industry over here is composed entirely of talentless hacks and actual actors phoning it in for a quick buck. Sometimes I wish they'd start broadcasting Brazilian dubs instead, because seriously, we were not destined to be good at this and it shows.
  • Studio Loudworks, an English-to-Serbian dub company. The voices can be utterly grating at some parts, and even when there isn't, there's still the matter of their glaring blind idiot translations—They consistently (and very stupidly) translate word-for-word from English, resulting in a difficult-if-impossible to understand script.
  • Most (mind you, not all!) of the Hungarian dubs released by the Romanian "Zone" dubbing studio. With only a handful of actors and actresses, most of whom suffer from horrible nasal and guttural voices, and a less than firm grasp on the language's grammar, it's no wonder that a number of their works had to be redubbed (most notably Star Trek: Voyager) due to the viewers' outcry.
    • The Hungarian movie dubs on the MGM station, made by the same studio but with proper Hungarian voice actors, qualify as well. Most of voice actors working on them are fine, that's not a problem, but the same cast dubs every movie, using the same voice, and sounding like they do not give a damn about acting. It gets on a person's nerves to hear the same couple of voices over and over again in every freaking movie. Some of the more classic films they play actually have older, perfectly passable dubs, yet the TV station still re-dubs even those, save for such isolated cases like Beetlejuice, whose dub has been described above (it seems it had a quality low enough to meet their standards). Some claim this is because the actors have fun doing these dubs, and the studio is very cost efficient, so it can churn out as many dubbings as it wants within a given amount of time, but this is a horrible, horrible case of taking quantity over quality.
  • While Spanish dubs tends to be good, there's some real stinkers and some real inept voice acting, depending the country or studio involved:
    • Practically, anything dubbed in the city of Monterrey, Mexico (like Recess) tended to be so awfuly dubbed, that the Recess‍'‍ direct-to-video movie was dubbed in Mexico City instead as a result (with better results). Needless to say, they only dubbed a few series before disappearing from the voice acting industry later on.
    • In the same way, most stuff dubbed in Cuernavaca, Mexico was pretty awful to hear on screen (with some exceptions, like Gundam Wing, Martian Successor Nadesico, and many animated stuff).
    • Until recently, almost anything dubbed from Colombia was from being So Bad It's Good (Rurouni Kenshin, Super Doll Licca-chan, Mikan Enikki) to really franchise-destroying levels (the above mentioned awful dub of Kaleido Star destroyed any chance to bring the rest of the franchise in Spanish).
    • Similar like the Brazilian case, almost anything dubbed in Spanish from Miami, Florida tends to be So Bad It's Good (The Fairly OddParents) to really ear-grating (South Park), but unlike with the Brazilian Portuguese voice actors in Miami (or the Hispanic ones from Los Angeles), the Hispanic voice actors from Miami are almost mostly Cuban-Americans, or some few South Americans (they rarely hire Mexican-Americans or Mexican expats like in Los Angeles) and they almost always keep their Cuban accents intact.[10]
    • The dubbing for the History Channel on its Latin American feed has the little problem that all the shows were commissioned to the same Miami-Venezuelan studio, who only have a pool of about 10 voice actors, most of them not even bothering to change voices between series, or even within the same show. The voicework itself isn't really bad acted, but that's little consolation when all the shows sound the same, and the programming being documentaries shouldn't excuse it. For sheer coincidence, some of their acting talent also work in the dub of SpongeBob SquarePants, bringing us the gift of Mr. Krab telling us about aliens.
  1. ↑ Greenfield ran the company that made the TV series' dub.
  2. ↑ Known as the "Big Green" dub for what it named Piccolo
  3. ↑ Often referred to as the "Speedy Dub" after the company that distributed it
  4. ↑ PlayStation version
  5. ↑ Slowbeef described it as "John Wayne with a stroke".
  6. ↑ Easily the worst of the bunch with her Tommy Wiseau-esque performance
  7. ↑ who is given a female voice, yet still referred to as male
  8. ↑ However, she has the best English out of the three (which isn't saying much) and her lines aren't quite as awkwardly delivered as the former two. Her performance could probably be written off as In-Universe Gratuitous English by a generous enough player.
  9. ↑ Conan and Lilly
  10. ↑ Just to give an idea how bad is this, try to imagine both South Park and The Fairly OddParents being voiced in English by Jamaican voice actors, while keeping their accents intact.
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