The game is maximum anime and I always find that works best coupled with over the top Japanese voice acting. The English didn't seem great to me anyway even though the only thing that felt 'bad' about it was Rex.

Just started the game up and the main character has an Yorkshire accent, it turned out fine. What could possibly go wrong.

Also worth noting that a great deal of the names and terminology has been localized and some people have trouble reconciling that when listening to the original.

Not something that particularly springs to my attention but it is was it is.

The English voice acting is not perfect. There are plenty of odd line reads, weird pauses in the middle of sentences in order to match lip flaps and Rex's actor is horrible at screaming (although he is quite good at crying). However there are still a lot of good performances in the English dub, I really like Nia and Morag's voices among others, and the dub does grow on you after a while. Also there are a lot of conversations the characters have during gameplay that are not subtitled so if you do switch to the Japanese audio you will miss out on those. For example: one of the Blades I got would always talk about being courageous during battles but if you were fighting a giant spider or some other kind of bug the Blade would freak out (which I thought was fun).

I just noticed that there is a an "events theatre" in the main menu, that's all I really need to satisfy my curiosity how some cutscenes sound in Japanese. I'll stick to english.

I like the japanese voice actor for Rex(Hiro Shimono i think it was) and that's what made me play the whole game in japanese, no offense to the english guy but I couldn't find any passion in his voice...

Been playing in English, and although at times the reads aren't great, overall I'm positive on it. Love some of the accents in there that you don't often get to hear in games.

@bleshoo: This is the same way I feel about it and I'm kinda shocked how many people consider the UK actor focus a downside. As in, outside of the usual band of English VA haters. "Why couldn't XBC2 have gotten a REAL English localization job?" was how one stream viewer put it. Suppose that could have been hyperbole, but it was amidst other legit whining, so hard to tell.

I even like Rex! His voice is rather soft and calming to me. It's just, bless his heart, he can't scream to save his life.

Pyra, in contrast, seems more than solid. Particularly shocking when you look up her VA Skye Bennett, and see that it's her first voice role? That's um... rare, in my experience. Good job her. Real shame about her character design.

Then there's Nia, who I think I have a crush on. Welsh is such a cool accent.

I got the game early so the Japanese voices werent available. I figured XC & XCX had pretty decent VO so I mareswell try it, and found it to be terrible. The Nopon characters were the worst.

(to be fair it's hard to play those kinds characters without being annoying but I thought the people who voiced Tatsu and Riki did a pretty good job with what they had)

Went with the Japanese VO and dont regret it, sure it's a little weird with the name/line changes but it's not that destracting.

@poobumbutt: Nia's definitely a standout voice! Honestly I don't know how people can be so down on the dub.

Rex is the main character and overall weakest part of the cast and so you see a lot of him and also frontload the game with a lot of what he's especially bad at which is Intense Anime Screaming.

So it can leave a bad taste by the time you get to the parts that are actually totally okay.

@bleshoo: @efesell: Yeah, and that's fair. I can't speak for Bleshoo, but I was specifically talking about people complaining out UK voice acting like it's some aliens talking. It doesn't surprise me that what I consider "fine" (again, other than the screaming) is just weak to others. I'm used to being in the minority with anime English dubs.

But making it personal and/or nationalistic is stupid, that's all I meant.

I read ahead of who was in the Japanese voice cast for some of the Rare Blades. That sealed the deal for me to play in Japanese as there are a few voice actors and actresses that I'm fond of doing work in Xenoblade 2. Unlimited Anime time!

The English voice overs seem very rough at first, but what I've heard from a buddy playing the game is that they even out as the game goes along. Also, the use of different accents really adds a lot of weird and wonderful flavor to the English voice overs.

I agree with this. The dubs grew on me after a while, I switched to Japanese for a bit, but ended up going back to the dubs.

Rex sounds like a soccer goon while Nia sounds like an 80 year old grandma in the dub. It gave me flashbacks of when I tried to watch Attack The Block and John Boyega's accent was so heavy I had to turn it off after 20 minutes. As a weeabo, recognizing the voice for Char Aznable, Ochaco Uraraka, MoriMori, and Kosaka as one your blades is so satisfying.

Well, I picked English for the original Xenoblade because British voice casts are extremely hard to come by, and basically every Japanese game has a Japanese voice track now. The novelty has simply worn off.

So rather than hearing the same old voices we've come to expect (which would've been true for an American cast as well), I was far more excited to hear this cast of British nobodies.

For those same reasons, as well as continuity's sake, I also picked English for this sequel and was very happy with the work that they did.

Nia's really the standout character for me. She reminds of Fran from FF12 in some ways. Fran also had a very "safe" Japanese voice, but then they gave her that crazy, supposedly Icelandic accent in English that made you go "Whoa, what's going on here and why is it so sexy?" It ultimately made for a much more memorable character.