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audioBusting

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English games with Mandarin voice acting

I am starting to notice that games in the English language with some parts in another language is getting more and more common, and Chinese is one of the more common ones. I guess it's not so surprising when it has the most native speakers in the world. I'm only familiar with Mandarin, but I just want to list the ones I can remember and try to comment on them anyway. It's always fun for me to hear how they do. So to be clear, I'm only listing games that are mostly in English but have some voice-acted lines in standard Mandarin Chinese (no dialects).

List items

  • The people in Hengsha speak Mandarin in a surprisingly standard accent. I've never been there myself, but I would have guessed they'd speak in a more apparent accent or dialect (maybe Shanghainese?). It might be a sci-fi scenario where the language has been thoroughly standardised, though it's kinda funny when you compare it to the English accent in Detroit. Who knows.

    Update: looking back at it, there's also a few times where Jensen is referred to by a Cantonese term? What is going on there.

  • There's a failure log entirely in Mandarin and it's one of the funnier ones. Well written and well voiced! It starts with a woman talking about her situation and telling her husband and son how much she loves them, and ends with her throwing insults non-stop at some guy for making her go home late on the night she was kidnapped by the aliens.

  • There is a throwaway joke in the game where an English-speaking character suddenly started speaking in Mandarin to a home cooking AI. Their Mandarin is terrible! I could not even understand what they were saying until I repeated it and read the text, and it still kind of doesn't make sense. There are so many levels to how the exchange makes no sense that it would take too long to explain.

  • The Tibetan monks speak in Mandarin, strangely enough. Apparently this is somewhat addressed in Dreamfall Chapters, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

  • Oohhh boyyy the Chinese soldiers' voice acting in Operation Anchorage is SUPER WEIRD. It sounds like they heard someone speak in Mandarin a month before and tried to copy the accent while reading phonetically written lines.

  • Not exactly a fit for this list, but worth mentioning for Beast in the East. The accents are all over the place in Yakuza 0. Oda sounds 100% like a Japanese man trying to read off a piece of paper, but Elder Chen sounds pretty legit.

  • Very 标准(standard) Mandarin from the door receptionist on the first level! The translation of a propaganda I found is a bit weird though. "没有办不到的事,只有不努力的人" could be literally translated as "There is no impossible task, only people who don't work hard enough." The game's Infobank instead translates this to "Failing to plan is planning to get fired." I get that they need to translate the flow and subtext, but it seems a little too liberal.

  • Can't speak for any other languages in the game, but what Mandarin there is does sound right. The credits show that many people were consulted to get all the different languages right, and it shows!

    One weird note though (possible light spoiler I guess?): I can't say I understand the Taiwanese being spoken, but judging from the subtitles, it seems like the major clue identifying one of the Formosan passengers is only present in the English translation of the dialogue. Not sure how that one's meant to work in-universe.