The Ultima 8 Introduction, in French
To celebrate the release of Ultima 8 on GOG.com today, Sergorn Dragon thought it fitting to take a look at the French-language translation of the introductory sequence for Ultima 8:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA85QtezeII&w=480&h=390]
I forgot how long a fall that was.
I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be good voice acting or bad voice acting, to be honest.
It’s… very mediocre voice. I’m not calling it downright awful, because it feels like professional voicework compared to the REST of the french acting in this game.
The Guardian was voiced by Jean-Marc Chemla, who also voiced him in Ultima VII as well as Prideaux in Strike Commander. He was no actor though, he supervised the translation of both UVII and UVIII (he translated some of UVII ad I recall, but not UVIII which was done by a single person). He did some other stuff for Origin as I recall (I see he’s credited as writing some books in SI and SS) but let’s just say he wasn’t exactly a great actor.
Ultima IX had a professionnal actor for the Guardian though, much better.
Though I don’t like the french version of Ultima VIII (mostly due to the voice acting), I must admit the text translations were not so bad. They translated english into an old french medieval-looking language (that only French people could understand without getting too much headaches) like they did in Ultima VII and Serpent Isle.
If I have to play Ultima VIII, i’d rather play it in plain English. But it was nice back in 1994 to get a French translation and it allowed non-english speaking people to play the game. Back then, most games were not translated and getting a french translated game was considered itself as a small “event”.
I’d argue actually that the writing in the french version of Ultima VIII is better than the original, because yes: the translation is *that* good. Betty Peltier-Weaver did a wonderful job with this version, because it was well transalted but the addition of olde french added at a lot to the tone and feel of the game. (The french version of Ultima VIII was indeed my main inspiration when I did the french translation of Lazarus a few years ago.)
I was really dissapointed when I first played U8 in English to find out that they completly removed the Old English of it, it didn’t felt right (altough with hindsight I figure this was because the plan was to fully voice the game down the road).
Now the voice acting was lackluster in French, but there was so little of it, it ain’t exactly such a big deal (eck all you’d need is to play it without the speech pack really).