Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Appears To Feature English & Japanese Lip-Syncs

This is incredible.
I can't imagine the time and effort that must have gone into this considering how much dialogue there is in these games.

Oh, bravo Monolith. Briliant!

I mean if you call stiffly opening your mouth a few times lip synching...sure.

Impressive, although not hardly a crucial feature for me personally. I'd rather have battle/field banter subtitles at last, but that doesn't look like a thing so far.😆

Wonder if they let the dub cast have more than one take or context this time.

I'm not really a big Xenoblade guy, but that's awesome! I really hope that sets a precedent for other game localizations moving forward.

This looks largely automated to me. Both versions. In which case there would be rather little work in terms of actual animation going on.

It's a new day everyone!

With games like this i always use japanese voice (also with zelda) and English subs.
Japanese have the best voice acting for anime style games. Makes me feel like watching an anime movie lol.

@Pod what I thought exactly. It reminded me Darksiders II where I could see lip sinc in italian too (they hardly do this, but being automated was easy enough to them to add it). Maybe there will be more work in the most complex cutscenes since in Xenoblade there always have been two types of cutscenes, and you can easily tell the difference by the animations.

That's very nice! ^_^

I wonder if someday they will also make it so the names (which tend to be very different in the English version of the games) in the subtitles also match which voice language you have selected?

I feel like games in general have improved incredibly on lip-syncing in the past few years, both Japanese and Western.

I'm honestly not sure this matters to me. I've been watching movies with terrible lip syncing since the Seventies, it never crossed my mind to judge a video game by the quality of its lip syncing.

This looks like an automated function to me. Still, it's an improvement.

This is ace! It's not ruinous or anything, but the lip-synching in XC1 can dent the moment a little, especially if it's an emotional one.

I don't see it but that's pretty cool if it's the case. Xenoblade 2 had some bad syncing which took you out of the moment sometimes

I’m reminded of Yakuza like a dragon where they did the same thing.

@The-Chosen-one the Japanese voice actors in this clip have ugly voices. Also the game is shallow without the English nopon actors and you literally miss out on half the game without battle dialog and post battle banter..

Would you believe me if I said I never noticed until now?

Nice. The lack of lip-syncing in XC2 was incredibly noticeable at times. It's a nice feature to have.

And also not locked behind a next-gen paywall like with Ghost of Tsushima, lol.

About time! Even if it's not perfect it's a definite improvement. I really appreciate the quality of the English VA for these games and it's nice to finally see an effort on the animation side as well.

@defhed disagree but that's the best thing about having both vocal tracks!

@Tremblucay

It's not that bad to be honest. From what I understand, matching the lips to audio is automated, so they basically went back and compiled all the cut scenes twice. The reason you don't do this most of the time is because the English voice cast records way too late in the development state. Some games that use the same voice actor for English and Japanize (hire a voice actor who speaks both languages) already have been doing this for a while.

Still, even if that's all they did, it's time consuming and it's great they did it. The other thing to consider (which we can't tell from the video) is how much polish they gave it. Did they modify cut scenes when the amount of dialog didn't match up? Did the graphics team give it a once over and correct any obvious errors?

Well be very interesting to see what happens moving forward.

The game would be just as good without this effort, but its still nice they did it

@NinjaSyao This was my first thought, MATCH THE NAMES IN THE SUBTITLES TO THE AUDIO I SELECTED. My Japanese isn’t what it used to be, so I do turn on the English subs, but that only confuses things more when it comes to XBC. An option for faithful subtitles (regardless of changes made to the English script) would be way more helpful than lip sync for me.

I hope I can play with Japanese audio and have the subs keep the Japanese names for characters.

Monolith, you dirty little Japanese madmen.

Yes, its an accomplishment .. but not too sure why this is a shock. Not much is pre-rendered these days anymore. So this is just simply a matter of having the engine capable of doing this on the fly .. like having the "cut scenes" render according to what gear you have equipped.

In a way, it’d be strange if this weren’t on some level automated.

For better or for worse, language processing, facial recognition, automation in animation and related technologies have all progressed at alarming rates since the first game was released, due to advances in machine learning/AI. The rise of DeepFakes shows how easy it is to snap one person’s face onto another person’s body.

If there weren’t an existing tool that could analyse dialogue in a given language, break it down into its respective phonemes and then map those to certain mouth shapes for use in animation, then… I’d be quite surprised.

The results when applied to actual human faces are unsettlingly accurate. I imagine employing similar technology for simple anime mouth flaps shouldn’t be too difficult a task.

But what do I know? I don’t work in animation, or even really dabble.

Still, the fact the relevant tech has made massive leaps is very apparent, and I’d find it find it strange if the developers didn’t take some advantage of it - as a labour saving measure if nothing else.

@PBandSmelly not quite the same thing, but I feel it was worth mentioning. Yakuza: Like A Dragon goes a step further, having different subtitles depending on if you're using the Japanese VAs or the English VAs. It'd be cool if more localization companies did something similar, instead of having the subtitles dialogue exclusively match the English script.

As long as they give me En txt and JPN voice. I can live with that feature.

I just hope characters keep their japanese name if you choose japanese dubbing.

The mythra/pyra hikari/homura thing was always annoying me.

@The-Chosen-one "Japanese have the best voice acting for anime style games" - I think it's because there are certain expressions and voice types that work well for that medium and aren't grating in Japanese. The delivery is also very different compared to English lines like the way dramatic lines are delivered.

I'm totally with you on games like this - Japanese VO with English subs.

@Pod It probably is automated, yes. As an example, The Witcher 3 used an algorithm to match audio to lip movements.

Pointless work to please kids and culturephobes that are using ***** dubs. No one sane would ever think about playing foreign game butchered with voices and direction that has nothing to do with original creators. Dub lovers make me cringe hard regardless of the media country origin.

@Aruvein Xenoblade 2 TL was a disaster. Not just the altered names, but they literally changed everything. Lore, world basic, religious references, cultural references, Japanese folklore references and Japanese popculture references. It was the worst localization I've ever seen.

@Exmotable this should be a standard for years already. If I chose original voices, it's only natural that I want text to be as much authentic as it's only possible. I always cringe when I need to read dubtitles, especially if there's no option to set Japanese language to text, which is still pretty common unfortunately.