Welcome to part three of this epic trilogy. Last time we looked at a bunch of Atlus games and I talked probably for too long about Sengoku Basara. It was bunches of fun. Anyway, let's get right back into it. Shall we?

Fallout New Vegas - 2010

Beatrix/Calamity

While New Vegas wasn't half as well written as Obsidian fans on the internet tried to convince everyone it was, it was still an entertaining enough distraction. Karen Strassman got to play not one but two named ghoul characters in New Vegas. Beatrix and Calamity were both about as entertaining as you could hope for a poorly rigged and robotically posed burn victim rendered on a six, seven year old engine to be.

They both sound appropriately well-weathered. They kinda sound like Marge's sisters from The Simpsons, who are themselves quite ghoulish sounding. So that part works itself out pretty well, though the two characters basically have the exact same voice. I would complain, but when you look at how many characters they had Liam O'Brien read in the same voice, it doesn't look like variety in vocal performances was high up on Obsidian's to-do list.

There's really not too much else to say about this one. If you weren't looking for it, you might not notice this one, as it's not exactly in her usual repertoire, so that's fun, but other than that the characters don't really do anything super interesting. I mean, these are Fallout NPCs after all. Neither of them get more than a bit of a single side quest with them in it apiece. Other than that they're just local color.

Calamity does get to repair your equipment and sell you stuff though, and evidently Beatrix is in everyone's favorite side quest because ghoul prostitutes are hilarious or something I guess? Like I said, I don't think the writing in this game is the best thing ever. It's certainly no worse than Fallout 3's writing or anything, but this is ostensibly supposed to be the lineage of Planescape: Torment right? Like, these are supposed to be some of the taste makers in game writing right? I don't know. I just don't see it. But the game is good, dumb fun and Karen Strassman is in it so that's fun too. Moving on.

Notable Quotes:

"The only thing I know for certain is that I don't know nothing."

"I've never really done much science stuff until now. I'm pretty good at it, or so Doctor Henry tells me."

"Time you enjoyed wasting isn't wasted time."

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder. But I've always been a fan of hog tying my lovers so they can't escape."

Sonic series - 2010 up

Rouge the Bat

So, at some point in 2010, the Sonic series got a new voice director or casting director or something, and they threw out pretty much their entire stable of voice talent they'd been using for the past four or five years for a completely new cast. At any rate, Strassman came along with all the new actors in the wake of this mass exodus, to take on the role of Rouge.

There's not really a whole lot more to say about that. The Sonic franchise is only just slightly more relevant in this day and age than Bomberman. So it's not like these are good games you're missing or anything. I mean, there's Sonic Colors, but I don't think she was in that one, and there's Sonic Generations I guess. But I think Sega has given up on trying with Sonic in much the same way that most gamers have given up with caring about Sonic.

But if you liked her performance as Poison, then Rouge the bat is kind of like a more kid friendly version of that. But we're talking like, third tier Sonic characters here with Rouge the bat. I mean, she's no Charmy the Bee, but you're not likely to get much more than a B plot with her in it either. So you aren't likely to see much of her regardless of the game in question. Maybe she'll make a return in Sonic Lost World. We'll just have to wait and see on that one though.

Mortal Kombat 9 - 2011

Kitana/Mileena

Strassman pulled double duty in Mortal Kombat 9, since Mileena is supposed to be some sort of creepy clone monster thing version of Kitana. They do sound pretty different though. Kitana has this sort of generic heroine quality to her voice. She's royalty, so she speaks in an elevated tone of voice, and her personality is kind of severe, but other than that, she's a pretty flat character. I mean, she's a good guy in a Mortal Kombat game. She's supposed to be boring. I mean, she's an awesome character to play as, but she pretty much only exists in the story mode to be waifu material for Liu Kang.

Now, Mileena, on the other hand, is quite the entertaining little gal. Since she's a bad guy, she gets to be way more interesting than Kitana. She's sort of like this weird, creepy, lipless harpy thing that sort of plays off of her sexuality to ensnare men. So when she isn't doing sexy moans, she's making crazy squawking shrieking noises, which make her sound like a rabid animal or something, which is pretty cool.

But she's an interesting twist on your typical female characters. She's like this sort of sex monster type thing, that is equal parts alluring and revolting. So she takes on this weird, disembodied form of sexual energy that is certainly fairly off-putting but nonetheless interesting, at least from a male perspective anyway. She's like, totally way better than Baraka too. That looser scrub got his butt whupped by Johnny Cage in the first round. So being only half Tarkatan means she's only half dumb loser or something I guess.

Like, you can tell she was basically designed to be his female counterpart, on top of being the second palette swapped version of Kitana. But Baraka's just a dumb loser in a Halloween mask, while Mileena actually has some interesting stuff going on with her character. She's got kind of a Caliban angle going on with her character, but instead of just being abjectly ridiculed for being gross and ugly, she still has that sexy body, and she can sort of do whatever as long as she's under disguise. She's also a complete psychopath and spends her free time plotting to take over both Outworld and Edenia.

Compare all of that against Kitana, who basically just has a bad relationship with her step dad and then falls in love with Liu Kang. They don't even go into any depth with her dead mother being turned into an evil zombie. Like, that whole part is just kind of glossed over in the story mode. But Strassman does do a pretty good job with her nonetheless. She gives her this pretty cool 'I used to be royalty' thing with the way she talks, even though she's barely there plot wise and nobody actually seems to care about Edenia anyway.

But she really brings it with both characters. I mean, MK9 is kind of all about really heavy impacts. Like, that's the overall takeaway from this game I think, is 'Holy shit did you see how fucking hard he just hit that guy!?' And I think that's extra true than with any of the previous Mortal Kombat games. And It's good to have someone who can sound super intense when doing those crazy impact sounds and whatnot during the fights.

Notable Quotes:

"Mother! You're alive?!"

Wait. No. That's from the other thing. Never mind.

Red Faction Armageddon - 2011

Kara

I don't really know what to say about this one here. For some reason nothing in the story really ever stuck with me. I guess I could say the same for the game play too. But I don't know why the story didn't do anything for me. The cast is all tight, and has familiar voices in interesting places, the whole thing has a very Resident Evil 5 vibe to it, but my eyes just sort of glaze over when I try to think back to anything particularly interesting happening in the story, except for that one thing, but I am trying to politely avoid spoilers as much as is reasonable here.

The performances are all good, though the writing lacks any kind of creative spark to make those performances memorable or stand out in any way. There's a little bit of Whedonesque snark, that's decently enjoyable I guess, but nothing worth shooting your grandmother to get ahold of. The script certainly seems to have proved the SyFy channel logo on the splash screens right, I'm sorry to say, with it's generic blandness. Though the game isn't all that bad, it's just kind of middling is all.

But Armageddon is one of the few gigs where Strassman did mo-cap, so it's a rare case where you get to see her doing camera acting on top of voice acting in the cutscenes, which is something of a rarity, and that's pretty cool I think. Strassman's voice doesn't really sound like any of her other roles here either. Maybe that has something to do with the acting in front of cameras part of the deal. But you might not recognize it from her other roles. It doesn't really have many of the hallmarks of her other characters' voices.

The less exaggerated vocal performance makes it sort of sound like some of her more early characters, but she's doing kind of a lower pitch with her voice here too, so it's just kinda got it's own thing going. Unfortunately, the game decides to head off without her about halfway in, so you're back to lone wolfing it after that. So while she's a fairly major character in the story, she doesn't get all that much screen time in the game. Armageddon isn't a great game, but Strassman's performance is at least pretty enjoyable anyway.

Neverdead - 2012

Cypher

While Cypher only has all of, let's say five minutes of screen time at best in Neverdead, I'm still putting it on this list, mostly because it's such a rad game. The whole cast is in rare form on this project, and Karen Strassman, as Aigis herself might say, is "the coolest of the cool" as Cypher, despite it being such a small bit part.

I'm really only writing about this one to have another excuse to bring up Neverdead, which is at least a dozen times cooler than everyone else says it is. It's a shame everyone was all too busy prattling on about other things to pay even passing support to this game. I suppose Konami is at least partially to blame for sending this game out to die with almost zero marketing. It's certainly nothing new for Konami, picking up a cheap and probably not very good Western studio to make a game with probably a really tiny budget and then just throwing it out to market. But it stings all the worse because this was a genuinely cool game despite the game play being middling.

It's also really disappointing to see one of the more prolific Metal Gear series staff members, the creator of Ghost Babel and Ac!d no less, go out to tell a story of his own to zero fanfare and active derision from several publications. I'm sure if they'd thrown a token executive producer credit for Kojima on this game, people would have suddenly and instinctively been interested in it and probably would have given him credit for all the good parts too.

I should probably stop shit talking Kojima here, but the story really does scratch that itch for stupid weirdness that the Metal Gear series has, but without all of the pitiful shit humor marring the ham-handed attempts at serious narrative. It's like all the parts of Metal Gear that I love without all the stupid lame and embarrassing parts.

It's got an unflinching sense of weirdness about it, and it's one of the few Japanese games coming out these days that doesn't have just horrible pandering fan-service with its' female characters. It's more interested in showing you fight weird demons while Megadeath plays in the background in some absolutely gorgeous cutscenes than it is in showing you what color panties it's heroine is wearing. And hey, kudos to Shinta Nojiri for thinking outside the box on that one.

Street Fighter X Tekken - 2012

Poison

While Street Fighter X Tekken was a mess of hot bullshit, they certainly didn't lack for fun and vibrant characters to play with. What they chose to do with that was to make a story mode that spends more time on loading screens than it does actually telling the story. But what I'm trying to say is Poison is a fun character historically, and she's a fun character in Street Fighter X Tekken too. I wish we'd gotten to see more of her, but she is fun.

She and Hugo are kind of like an old Loony Tunes cartoon. Spike and Chester in particular come to mind off the top of my head. And Strassman does a really good job of working the 'big-mouthed runt' and 'over the top sex-pot' aspects of the character into something cohesive and entertaining. Which, again, makes me wish we'd gotten to see more of her, because it really seems like they were onto something with this.

But I guess we'll just have to wait for Ultimate Super Street Fighter Cross Tekken 2nd Impact Turbo Arcade Edition Version 2014, because who even knows if Namco would use those characters, assuming they even do get around to making Tekken X Street Fighter. Oh but if they did though! The chances of that are slim, so we're left with what they gave us, which isn't too awful much and that's too bad.

Notable Quotes:

"I'm not just hotter than you. I also just kicked your ass!"

Tales of Graces F - 2012

Fourier

Speaking of Poison, Fourier in Tales of Graces actually sounds quite a bit like Poison. There's a sort of cartoony bounciness to her voice that resembles her turn as Poison, though her character is a bit more serious in tone, though maybe not so much in style. Actually, all of the characters have that sort of cartoony bounce to their voices, and I get the impression that was to put sort of a lighter tone on the game overall.

And it's rare that you get to hear Strassman do such a rubbery sounding voice, so that's pretty cool. And that plays back into Strassman's knack for overacting. There are shades of Sialeeds' voice in the performance too, with flashes of that haughtiness there. It's not as pronounced, and it's much less of a put-on with Fourier. It gives the impression that she really is proud maybe to a fault.

But she's also kind of creepy sounding. And I know this is maybe kind of a stretch, but she has this sort of, SHODAN as Dr. Polito thing going with her voice that makes her sound kind of menacing and malicious. She does have kind of a severe personality, so I suppose those dips into that menacing voice were meant to convey as much. But then her voice has a tendency to go really high in pitch too, which I think is just what Strassman's voice naturally does when playing more animated voices.

Another interesting point worth noting is how similar Strassman's character, Fourier, and her sister Pascal's voices sound. I don't know if they started with one voice and then imitated the other, or if this was due to some outside meddling on the director's part, but it's a pretty neat little detail to have included.

And that whole being sisters with the main character thing is sort of the crux of her character. She's got a bit of an inferiority complex due to her younger sister being so naturally gifted. So there's something of a rivalry there. Even though they are generally on good terms, their relationship seems strained. And that maybe explains how haughty she sounds. This wouldn't be the first time a character with an inferiority complex liked to flash their feathers like a peacock, and that definitely seems to be case here.

Persona 4 arena -2012

Aigis

Poor Aigis didn't exactly get the best return appearance in Arena. Sure, she at least kept her amazing original actress, unlike certain other characters in the game which we won't name here. But all of the characters from Persona 3 had some pretty significant changes brought to their characters in Persona 4 Arena. Aigis, in particular, has lost most of the robotic intonation to her voice, which was one of the main points of focus when I wrote about her earlier.

Losing that makes sense for the most part given the context; the idea was that she had gradually become more familiar with imitating human speech, something which is evident even during Persona 3. But it really does end up being sort of an elephant in the room when she speaks, at least starting out anyway. It probably would have been impossible to just come back to these old characters in a different context and not have some issues, but it definitely stands out, and especially so with Aigis.

Going back to that hanging thread from before about Aigis actually just being a total dick though, Persona 4 Arena really changes the way Aigis works in a humor sense too. She doesn't have the robot voice anymore, and she obviously has enough awareness of the world that she can't bust someone's ass without getting called on it, but she still does it anyway. She is just talking mess left and right, so apparently Aigis has just always been a total smart ass, and before she was just doing it on accident or something, which I personally think is just great.

They do still try and do the whole fish out of water thing with her, even though her robot voice is gone, but they don't spend enough time focusing on her character to really get much of the old Persona 3 Aigis going on, which is kind of a shame. That said, she's still a ton of fun to listen to despite any complaints I had about her robot voice, with the one exception of hearing her in actual game play.

Notable Quotes:

"My armor!"

"My armor!"

"My armor!"

(But seriously though, that part's really not her fault.)

Zero Escape - 2012

Phi

Phi is an interesting character. I guess everyone in that game is a little interesting. Actually, none of the actors sound the way you're accustomed to hearing them sound. That goes for Laura Bailey et al. The characters all have really odd and kitschy idiosyncrasies to their performances, which actually goes really well with the writing and character designs.

I don't know if it was the director or what, but they really managed to get some very different sounding performances out of everyone involved, which is kind of rare to see really. Evidently the direction can be credited to Valerie Arem, who really knocked it out of the park on this project. I mean, it's always great to get a little variety with these things, and the game manages to sound really different with so many familiar names attached.

Strassman's character, Phi, seems reticent in her speech. She has this shrugging reservation to everything she says, not so much like she's hiding something, but more like she has some sort of chip on her shoulder, more as a general character affectation than anything specific, though I don't know where the story of the game goes personally.

Her speech seems a lot more animated than you usually see in games too. That goes for the other characters too It's hard to put concisely, but it's like the characters jump from one emotion to the next with more frequency than you see in other games. But it's not that the characters feel inconsistent or anything bad like that. It actually makes the performances sound more realistic even, having the characters emote as much for off-hand comments as they do for more serious scenes.

It definitely doesn't sound like any other game I've ever played, and that helps make the whole game seem all the more surreal. And it's pretty surreal already, what with talking bunny monsters and the just wacky costume designs. It's definitely a different game, but the acting is some of the best I've heard in a while for sure.

Notable Quotes:

"I'm not Batman..."

Fire Emblem Awakening - 2013

Anna/Olivia?

I don't really know a whole lot about this game because I don't have a 3DS. But I hear it was the new hotness when it came out earlier this year, and it definitely looks like a lot of fun. Strassman plays the money loving merchant Anna and also Olivia who does something that isn't being a merchant or something I think. So that's pretty cool I guess. And while I believe Olivia is kind of a plot-centric character in the story, Anna is really more of a side character, being a merchant and all.

Now, granted, the voice acting is pretty sparse in Fire Emblem Awakening. The voice acting only ever really comes up in the cutscenes and the occasional story vignette.The rest of the voiceover consists of weird grunts and monosyllabic words triggered to dialogue voices, which is actually kind of off-putting. If you're not reading along, you basically just hear 'Huh?' "Yes.' 'Oh?' '...Right' 'Well..' 'Ahh!' 'Heh...' 'Right...' 'mmm' 'No?' 'Wait!' 'Okay.' and that sort of stands out pretty bad, since they took the time to voice all of that in the first place. It's also odd how they seem to always use voice clips that sound confrontational and angry in situations where it doesn't make sense to.

But of course I would be remiss not to mention that you can marry your characters too. Evidently it sort of works like the social links in the Persona series. You basically raise your support rank with particular characters by spending time with them, and if you are able to achieve an S-rank with a support character of the opposite sex to your general, then you get to tie the knot with them. It really doesn't amount to a whole lot. It's basically just a picture of the girl with her saying something like 'OMG ur such a saxxy man!' and that's it, but it's a neat enough little added feature, and it seems to have proven fairly popular nonetheless.

Ugh! My waifus!!1

Notable Quotes:

"This sure beats gold! ...Wait, no it doesn't."

“Keep this up and someday I may love you more than money! Haha... no, seriously.”

"Violence is on sale today!"

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm - 2013

Izsha

Karen Strassman plays Izsha, who is Kerrigan's advisor in the Heart of the Swarm campaign, and it's actually one of her cooler roles. While the story in Heart of the Swarm wasn't all I'd hoped it would be, the character is really cool. She's a creepy looking Zerg thing, and her voice has that sort of insect hive mind quality to it. And that's probably what's coolest about this voice, as it's a real cool gimmick when it's done right.

There are definitely shades of Aigis in this performance. Being as it's a creepy bug monster thing, it speaks in a really flat tone to emphasize the fact that speech shouldn't come naturally to it, and it's got a nice, creepy, pitch-shifted delay effect on it that makes it sound extra not-human, which is nothing you haven't seen before. But it's done well here. And Strassman has already proven pretty adept at intentionally emotionless voices. So they definitely hit all the right notes for creepy hive mind bug monster thing.

Outside of that though, they don't do a whole lot with the character. As you can see from the provided video, you get conversation points between missions and whatnot, and she shows up in like, a couple cutscenes I think, but other than that, she doesn't get a whole lot of screen time. But, you know, interestingly enough, Blizzard seemed to have been playing with the idea of using Strassman to play Kerrigan, back when Wings of Liberty was in development. Evidently those fools just couldn't make up their minds on what they were doing over there though. The list of rumors surrounding the voice cast alone is ridiculous.

And evidently the change in voice wasn't even because the original actress, Glynnis Talken Campbell, was unavailable. It sounds like she auditioned just like everyone else, and they were going to go with her, but then they decided to go with Strassman, and presumably did all of the recording with her, but then canceled that at the last second for Tricia Helfer too. All in all, it was, as Jim Ross would put it, 'a complete debacle.' But everything worked out in the end I suppose. And Izsha is a pretty cool character, though I don't know if I can honestly recommend the game for the campaign, as it seems kind of light on story, and what story there is just seems a bit hit or miss to me. But that might just be my unfamiliarity with the series talking.

Notable Quotes:

"I feel my queen's hatred, burning like a star. But there is something underneath it... I do not understand."

"You were mighty. You made us cunning and strong, and we knew we would survive forever under you."

"We are numberless, we are fearless, and we are evolving."

So there you have it. That's 1992 on halfway through 2013 all summed up into three parts. I hope I didn't bore you too much with this not so little abridged guide to an actor's imdb page. I hope it was fun and maybe a little informative. And I hope there was at least one or two games on here you haven't played that maybe I've interested you in checking out, or maybe even reminded you of some old favorites worth booting up again.

-Kris Osborn