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Final Fantasy 16: Finding the voices of Clive and Joshua Rosefield

Fredrick

If you’ve heard Joshua Rosefield, brother of Final Fantasy XVI protagonist Clive Rosefield, in the trailers and gameplay, chances are you’ll find that voice very familiar. That’s because it’s Logan Hannan, the voice of Hugo de Rune in Asobo Studio’s A Plague Tale series.

Logan Hannan – voice of Joshua Rosefield

Naturally, the voice Hannan uses between Joshua and Hugo is different, but there’s a youthful familiarity to it, and it turns out, according to FFXVI localization director Michael-Christopher Koji, it’s actually his performance as the latter that makes him Became the former character Fox.

Koji said Joshua’s voice audition was the first to go. The team cast an actor who was very close to puberty, but at the time, it seemed to be going well, he said. In some cases of game development, actors can record all their lines for a period of time, but in other cases, this is not the case. Since FFXVI uses motion capture, scenes must be executed before voice can be recorded. This meant that the first Joshua actor couldn’t record all of his lines in one go. Unfortunately, puberty hit during the recording, and “he didn’t sound like an 8-year-old anymore.” Koji said he sounded like a 15-year-old, and “it just didn’t work.”

“At this point, I’d had enough of A Plague Tale, and I thought, ‘Well, instead of doing another set of auditions, I know exactly who we want. I’ve played the game, and he’s great. let’s go together [Hannan] A Plague Tale,” Koji said. “That finally solved the problem. “

That’s the scariest aspect of recording with kids, Koji said, noting that it’s not uncommon. “I don’t think anyone was more pissed off about puberty than Joshua’s original cast,” he added.

As for why Hannan was chosen, Koji said it was because his performance in the Plague Tale series encapsulated everything FFXVI developer Creative Business Unit III needed in Joshua.

“When we got the script, it was like ‘Okay, we’re going to have a very, very intense scene with a very, very young character,'” Koji said of Joshua’s murder in FFXVI. “We knew there was a kid out there and having fun, and we had to put him through real hell. Because the whole point was to make it as real as possible, we didn’t want to go down the road of hiring adult actors and having them voice the kids, because unless you find People who are really, really good at it, otherwise they might end up sounding fake.

“On the other hand, we’d have an 8-year-old actor perform a super-violent scene. It’s an M-rated game, so we needed to find something that would produce this visceral performance and make it sound real. people.”

If you’ve played A Plague Tale: Innocence or its sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, you know that Hannan is perfectly capable of this, considering everything Hugo has been through in those games.

“I was thinking, ‘Who did this?’ [while playing A Plague Tale] I saw this was a kid at that age, and I thought, ‘This is who we need to bring into the project,’ and at the same time I thought it was impossible for him to say ‘yes,'” Koji said.

CBUIII contacted Hannan and he was interested. After the audition, the team decided he was the perfect choice for Joshua.

“I mean, he’s screaming in pain, and even older actors have a hard time doing that without making it sound a little fake and cheesy, and I think we’re getting these very, very real show,” Koji said. “Although Logan is young, he’s a really good actor, he’s been a lot of fun to work with and hopefully I’ll be able to use him again in the future.

“Although he’s getting older, so his voice will change, so I need to cast him in different types of roles, but he’s a really good actor,” Koji added.

Joshua’s brother Clive is voiced by Ben Starr, a newcomer to video game acting. Koji said Starr actually auditioned for a different character, one who works with Clive in the game’s opening mission.

Ben Starr – voiced by Clive Rosefield

“That was an audition for one of the parts that Ben Starr came in and he auditioned for that part, and we heard it in the studio, and the director said, ‘Okay, this is good, but you have a very Great character voices. Can you read the script?” They gave him Clive’s script, even though he was for a different [role]”

Koji listened and immediately recognized Clive’s character.

“After hearing about 20 other professional voice actors who have done a lot of different games, a lot of different movies and plays, you hear all these different voices thinking, ‘Could this be Clive?’ And you keep Wait and see, ‘Maybe it’s Clive, I don’t know,'” Koji said. “The moment we heard Ben Starr, everyone knew it was the voice, it was Clive’s voice, and all of a sudden, all the dialogue that I had translated or written before that, I could hear the voice, and we immediately knew it was the voice.

“So he auditioned for a part that was maybe 10 lines long, and he ended up being the hero. I thought that was really exciting. It was one of those ‘I found out’ types of moments where you hear it will know immediately.”

Koji said that after finding Starr, they let the Japanese team hear him as Clive, and that team agreed that he was the perfect voice for the protagonist of FFXVI. According to Koji, FFXVI producer Naoki Yoshida still plays the game in English because of Starr’s performance, even though CBUIII also cast a Japanese voice actor for Clive.

In less than a month, we’ll all be hearing more about Joshua and Clive when FFXVI arrives on PlayStation 5 on June 22.

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