Complaining: Horrible.Voice Acting

Multiple Languages

• Vision of Escaflowne:
  • While the original English dub wasn't awful, it did have one or two dodgy performances that had long-time fans going rabid; most notably, the voice of Dilandau, whose Japanese and German actresses made him sound masterfully Axe-Crazy, but whose English VA, Andrew Francis, gave him a chirpy little 9-year-old kid voice, making him sound more like a spoiled brat than a pyromaniac nutcase. The fact that it was Francis' first role ever, and that he was going through puberty at the time probably had a lot to do with this, and it's said that his voice acting got a little better as time went on. That, and he finally sounds less chirpy and more manly in the movie.
  • Dilandau's French and Latin American voices aren't any better - his French actress makes him sound like an old lady, and she clearly can't act or do convincing screams or giggles to save her life, whereas LatAm!Dilandau could very easily be confused for Shinji Ikari or Raj from The Big Bang Theory.
  • Merle's English and German dub voices make her character sound way older than her character is supposed to be.
  • Also, Zongi's German voice is far too high and doesn't make him sound creepy enough. hbi2k's Abridged Series gave him a much creepier and more suitable voice.
• Dragon Ball has wrestled with all manner of bad dubs:
  • The French-based AB Groupe dubs for the Dragon Ball Z movies^note (known as the "Big Green" dub for what it named Piccolo) with its beyond-shoddy translation based on the French dub and its small pool of voice actors who do several roles at once without sounding fit for any of their roles, or even deciding who does what character. The script often tries to fit in too many words in a sentence for a single scene, resulting in nearly every character having a case of Motor Mouth and the lack of apparent direction makes even the classic power up screams full of Narm.
  • The Blue Water dub for Dragon Ball GT, in which Vegeta sounds like he gargled with battery acid before recording and Android 18 has no emotion whatsoever. Kid Goku, Mr. Satan, Shenlong, and Baby are about the only four with decent voices, and everyone else either phones it in or hams it up.
  • Their dub of Dragon Ball is a bit better, but not by much. The villains are hammy, but they do a pretty good job with their voices. The heroes however, have the same problem with GT's dub.
  • The Malaysian-English dubs, better known as the "Speedy" dubs after the company that released them, are even worse than the AB Groupe dubs. What few voice actors they managed to get give incredibly wooden and heavily-accented dialogue with voices that never match the characters they are cast with and the translation reeks of Engrish. The names given for the characters are never consistent for the Dragon Ball Z movies, which is especially the case for their dub of Bojack Unbound, where nearly every character has their name changed thanks to using the Cantonese dub as a source.^note Goku becomes Gohan, Gohan becomes Goku, Bojack becomes King Bogo, Kurilin becomes Infinite Hands, among others.
  • The French dub for Dragon Ball Z, which featured annoying, high-pitched voices and a translation that went out of its way to not refer to anyone by name, resulting in a confusing mess. Plus, the voice actors changed rather often, adding to the confusion. There is also a huge problem with grunts and fighting sounds. They literally did not change them from the original Japanese versions. This meant that the voices in fights were very inconsistent. However, it sounds just superb when compared to the pure awfulness that was Dragon Ball GT's French dub.
    • Many other European dubs get a bad rep for the same reasons. Oftentimes a series will be sublicensed from French or German distributors (which in turn may use a preexisting dub/sub as a base for their translation rather than going directly to the source), making the show a dub OF a dub. In the specific case of DBZ, aside from not naming several characters, the dub also introduced many new name changes that were often bizarre ("Genius Turtle" for Muten Roshi or "Satan's Little Heart" for Piccolo) or plain generic ("Star Warriors" for the Saiyans or "Special Force" for the Ginyu Force). Furthermore, having been made for a young audience, the dub also came with an incredibly upbeat whimsical intro song which is often regarded by fans as one of the worst opening songs in the series, and was subjected to very inconsistent censorship and reediting.
    • There is at least one exception—the Portuguese dub, mostly due to: a) Having a (small) cast of professionally trained^note (in theatre) and somewhat already famous actors and comedians; b) Having the cast be mostly consistent^note (the only major characters who got an actor change were Piccolo and Vegeta, who always shared actors who even came back for GT, and Gohan when he grew up, whose previous actor was also the voice of both Goku and Trunks in all stages); c) making it a straight-up Gag Dub.^note Here's where the comedy comes into play. This all made it into a case of the Portuguese Love Dragon Ball.
  • Kaio-sama's first Japanese voice in Dragon Ball Super. He would often sounds disinterested and emotionless, despite being a character known for his sense of humor. It is especially noticeable when he gets angry at Goku for letting Cell blow up his planet. This was because of Joji Yanami's age (being in his 80s), so he couldn't strain his vocal cords too much. When Toei later decided to recast him, many were grateful, presumably including Yanami himself.
  • Funimation's original 1999 dub of the Frieza Saga is notorious for its poor acting, bad writing and amateurishness. Its replacement score by Bruce Falcouner while pretty good, plays non-stop and sounds like it belongs more in a video-game or professional wrestling match. It was FUNimation's first DBZ dub without Saban's hefty financial assistance, as such the dub's cast literally consisted of random non-actors imitating the prior Ocean Group cast. Goku has absolutely no emotion in his voice and screams. Krillin is overly gruff-sounding. Vegeta sounds like a constipated version of Brian Drummond's Vegeta, later mutating to a deep-voiced character with an odd accent. Vegeta's screams also were completely lacking. Frieza sounds even more like a woman, and the writers gave him blatantly homoerotic lines like "All right, big guy! Whatever turns you on!" Bulma is rendered as an annoying Valley Girl stereotype. However, FUNimation decided to stick with their cast, which led to their vast improvement, with Sean Schemmel (Goku), Christopher Sabat (Vegeta), and Sonny Strait (Krillin) all becoming well-known industry veterans. They even went back to this arc to re-do some of the worst parts of this dub. Given that those who watched this 1999 dub as children are adults now, there are bound to be a few who view this show through a Nostalgia Filter and decry much better Dragon Ball Z dubs made later, such as Dragon Ball Kai and the movies Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F'.
  • Speaking of The Ocean Group, their alternate dub of the Cell-Buu arc is often ridiculed for its bad acting. Fans of Ocean usually attribute this to a very rushed production schedule, and the overall cheapness of producers AB Groupe (yes, the same people behind the Big Green dub).
• One Piece certainty isn't safe from this either, but these are considered some of the worst:
  • Among the many complaints levelled against the 4Kids dub of this show, the worst aspect - other than the Bowdlerization and insulting scripts - has to be its voice acting and casting, the most notable one being David Moo as Sanji. Forgiving the fact that they gave him a Brooklyn accent (4Kids was based in NYC after all), they made him sound like those lollipops had given him a severe case of smoker's lung, ridding his voice of the suave quality the original and Funimation's redub have. And it wasn't just Sanji; many secondary characters were given weird accents, seemingly at random - Shanks was Irish, Krieg was sorta-German (which is at least understandable since "Krieg" is a German name), Kuro was posh-English, and Robin was given a Texas accent… apparently because she wears a cowboy hat in her first appearance. 4Kids's loss of the series in early 2007 after 104 episodes^note (cut down from 143) is almost universally considered a Mercy Kill by the fans. Since Funimation has held the show for far, far longer than 4Kids did (including redubbing those first two seasons), just about everyone is trying to forget the original dub ever existed.
    • The poor voice acting in the 4Kids dub is particularly infuriating when one realizes that many of the main cast had done good or even excellent work in other shows.^note Zolo was played by Marc Diraison, whose Guts was so loved by the fans that they demanded he (and the other two lead actors) be retained when the movies were licensed a decade after the original dub. Chopper was played by Lisa Ortiz, known for making the part of Lina her own (for more on that role, see below). Robin was played by Veronica Taylor, who had well-regarded high-profile roles to her name long before this. Even David Moo, by far the weakest cast member, had gotten qualified praise for his portrayal of Xelloss years earlier. Blame the directors and producers of the dub for those crimes against humanity. The actors were only doing what they were told.
  • The Japanese version of One Piece: Unlimited Cruise had a cringe-worthy performance where the giant Hulk-like Nightmare Luffy speaks in a ridiculously high-pitched helium voice. Luckily they realized how incredibly stupid that was, since when Nightmare Luffy debuted in the actual anime Mayumi Tanaka used a deeper, much more fitting tone.
  • Odex's Singaporean English dub script is actually more accurate than the Funimation dub (which is itself a faithful translation), but had even worse voice acting than the 4Kids dub. Luffy's actor sounded like some stoned surfer dude, the recording quality sounded worse than a fandub, the cast had only a few actors on board (no pun intended) that voiced multiple characters and kept randomly changing as the series went on. Poor Nami went through three voice actors in the space of only 104 episodes. Thank God the mess only lasted those 104 episodes before broadcast was cancelled.
  • One Piece's first French dub clearly lacked motivation. Luffy being voiced by a man was already guaranteed to raise some eyebrows but the big problem was the obvious limited number of actors available: all the villains sounded the same and Zoro and Sanji clearly shared the same actor (the only thing done to differentiate them was giving Sanji a painful scratchy voice) so it was cancelled after 50-ish episodes, missed by none. It's telling when the subsequent dub, done by Belgians (often viewed as the poor man's voice actors) was considered a vast improvement.
• The Italian dub of Fist of the North Star falls flat because all the voices sound similar. A fan joke is about how the roles are supposedly shared by the studios: "You do Hokuto, you do Nanto, you do fat guys, you do thin guys and women". However, at least they kept the anime's story, something which the French dub completely threw out the window.
  • The Swedish dub isn't any better; indeed, some people have claimed that even Microsoft Sam has a less monotone voice than some of these voice actors, which really says a lot about how bad the voice acting is. Not that this is the only thing wrong with the Swedish version...
  • The voice actors in the French dub hated anime in general, and refused to work unless they were given permission to voice their characters however they wanted, resulting in absolutely ridiculous voices and lines (imagine an Abridged Series done by a member of the Hatedom). While some people consider it So Bad, It's Good, others consider it flat out horrible.
• YuYu Hakusho:
  • The Japanese voice of Byakko. Seriously, have you heard his pathetic "roars?"
  • Before Funimation picked up the license to the series, Central Park Media dubbed its movie, Poltergeist Report. The dub for it was horrendous, with talented voice actors like Eric Stuart and Veronica Taylor being unable to save it. The performances ranged from Dull Surprise to Large Ham with no inbetween. The most notorious example was Yusuke, whose VA was also infamous for Garzey's Wing previously mentioned. Yusuke's performance could go from completely emotionless to over-the-top. The dialogue was also an issue, as Kuwabara would have a habit of repeating exposition dished out to him. It also suffers from No Pronunciation Guide, but that was expected from a 90s English dub. What isn't forgivable, however, is how they pronounced Kuwabara's name as KuwaHara. How do you get H from the letter B? It's almost like one of the voice actors screwed up their line, but they kept it in anyway. There's Dub Name Change, there's No Pronunciation Guide, and then there's this. ^{Here's How It Happened…} It's actually a simple mistranslation and/or misunderstanding about how Japanese works. Some languages - like Welsh, Hebrew, and Japanese - have a feature called consonant mutation where certain consonants change pronunciation if they're in the middle of a word, usually to a "soft" form. The Japanese variant is called rendaku and affects "K", "T", "S", and "H/F" - which change to "G", "D", "Z", and "B" or "P", respectively. The problem for non-native speakers is that whether rendaku happens or not can be fairly random, with some kanji clusters using it, some not. It's even more random with "name" kanji. The kanji pronounced "hara" in particular doesn't always take rendaku. Thus it's not much of a stretch to assume that the script translator really didn't have a pronunciation guide OR an audio track to check against, made his best guess, and screwed it up. A less-damaging instance of this happened in the credits for the second season of the Ah! My Goddess anime, where ADV Films accidentally named the character designer, Hidenori Matsubara, as Hidenori Matsuhara.
• Most early French dubs of anime tend to be pretty bad, even though they've been dubbing anime there since the 1970s and 1980s. This is one of the reasons why there is no Subbing Versus Dubbing debate to speak of among French-speaking anime fans. However, as Japanese anime became less and less censored and stigmatized over the years in France, anime dubs have greatly improved, notable examples being Gurren Lagann or Samurai Champloo.

Japanese

• Kenjiro Tsuda's performance as Suzuki in Lovely★Complex gave him a voice that makes him seem as lively as wallpaper paste. It's so bad, it destroys Willing Suspension of Disbelief; it's hard to conceive a situation where a girl as snarky and self-aware as Koizumi would hang around him for even a minute once he opens his mouth.
• Soichiro Hoshi's crying in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. To put it charitably, it makes even Baby Kira Yamato cry.
• Adult!Nel keeping her toddler voice in the original Japanese track of Bleach. She was supposed to have a lisp and all, but come on! The English dub seems to have fixed this at the expense of making Toddler!Nel sound older. And it just makes it worse that she cries out "ITSYGO!" [sic] every two minutes, more when he's getting his ass kicked. At least the dub has her say his name correctly. It's supposed to sound cute, but not after forty freakin' episodes of it.
• In an example of Gratuitous English, the black guy who beats Watanabe to death in The Legend of Black Heaven. His voice is a few octaves too high for somebody that beefy, and completely flat, even though his character's pissed to high heaven. One can only imagine that they just randomly picked an American tourist off the streets of Tokyo, shoved a script in his voice, and forced him to record the Black Guy's lines at 5 in the morning without the courtesy of some good old coffee. Seriously, it just has to be heard to be believed.
• The original Japanese dub of Beck features numerous problems. For one, Ryusuke and Maho are supposed to be fluent in English, and their seiyuu... aren't. That at least can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is that main character Koyuki is supposed to be an amazing singer, and the Japanese go so far as to get a separate guy for Koyuki's singing parts... and he can't sing - he's nasal, he has no breath control, and his English is even worse than the other two. Maho's voice actress isn't a great singer either. Compare to the English dub, for which Funimation went out of its way to get actors who were trained singers and musicians and earned its spot on the Sugar Wiki.^note The major exception to this is Colleen Clinkenbeard, who noted in the commentary track that she went into her audition and insisted she NOT be asked to sing - sure enough, her character is a non-singer; the director evidently appreciated her moxie. In her words, "I'm the only voice actor here at Funimation who doesn't fucking sing, and they make me do it anyway!"
  • Episode 23 deserves special mention due to how its climactic scene was handled outside Japan. In the original, Koyuki stands up on stage alone and starts singing The Beatles' "I've Got A Feeling". Obviously, there was no way in hell Apple Corps' legal eagles would let THAT slide, so Funimation (upon hearing the price tag) requested a different song be substituted. Japan obliged, but the result is awful; Koyuki sounds utterly bored and is even more flat and nasal than normal. Contrast again to the English dub where Greg Ayres makes the replacement song sound like a proper climax.
• If you thought Byakko's roars in Yu Yu Hakusho were lame, Cyberdramon's "roars" in the Japanese version of Digimon Tamers are just as bad.
• Listen to Lucemon Satan/Shadowlord Mode's roars in Digimon Xros Wars! They're so narmtastic it's unbelievable!
• Given the proximity between music and anime industries in Japan, with many seiyuu also having a singing career under their belt, it's not surprising that many singers would eventually try their hand at voice acting. In some cases the transition worked, giving us some good voice actors, while other times it just didn't:
  • The 1985 movie Bobby ni Kubittake (aka Bobby's In Deep) is very divisive in the anime fandom, with people dismissing it as a pretentious mess and others praising its beautiful and at times incredibly creative animation. One thing on which they'll all agree however is that Hironobu Nomura, the singer on whose popularity this movie was supposed to cash in on, couldn't act at all.
  • The already terrible OVA adaptation of Art of Fighting boasts the guest-starring of Ayumi Hamasaki, one of the most famous and respected pop singers in Japan. Her acting here is pretty bad and it's no surprise that this is the only voice acting role in her long career.
  • The OVA for Marimo no Hana guest stars two members of the pop idol group AKB48. The huge difference in quality between them and the professional voice actors is, to put it charitably, very noticeable. At one point the main character, voiced by one of them, is supposed to be speaking with a Kansai accent but it's barely noticeable, when not barely comprehensible.
• Momoko in the Wonder Momo anime puts on a bad performance that would give even the Bible Black dub's (see below) voice actors pause. It's horrendous beyond belief. Just because she sings badly in the webcomic^note the source material for the anime shorts doesn't mean her voice acting needs to be terrible to match...
• Himegoto already wasn't a good anime by any means, but the voice acting is unbearable, with everyone having a screechy and high-pitched voice, and zero effort into making the male characters actually sound anything like boys (considering that each one is a Wholesome Crossdresser, this was most likely done for homophobic reasons). Unsurprisingly most of the cast were complete newbies, and it showed.
• Being an anime aimed at little kids, it makes sense that Jewelpet doesn't have the best voice acting. But Labra's screechy, whiny voice (to the point where it seems that her seiyuu is screaming some of her lines) is downright excruciating to listen to, and is a complete waste of Miyuki Sawashiro's talent. And then she starts crying...

English

• The Bible Black English dub doesn't seem to have any exclamation points, up to and including Rika's suicide. Add the fact that everyone sounds about thirty years older than they should and you've got a pretty horrendous experience. One would have to come to the understanding that hentai probably isn't going to be dubbed very well, but Bible Black is a special case—it's horrible dubbing even by porn standards. There was actually some protest behind the scenes that resulted in the actors intentionally butchering it.
  THERE'S BEEN A SOO-EE-SIDE! SOMEBODY JUMPED FROM THE BEELDING!
  • Bizarrely, Dan Green was among the English dub's voice cast. While his acting was decent, his lines made him spout some of the most bizarre lines in both anime and Hentai history, enough to make Joel from Vinesauce cackle with laughter.
    Joel: "You know, nothing's more erotic than seventy year old grannies."
• Manga Entertainment tried to get as much of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series' dub cast as possible for their dubbing of the films, and they were able to get back many of them. Sadly, it was one of the ones they couldn't get that did them in the most—Matt Greenfield turned down the offer to reprise his role of Makoto Hyuga, and was replaced by Keith Burgess, whose low husky voice was not only completely unfit for Hyuga, but emotionless and slurred as well, killing most of the character's scenes.
• The Singaporean English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! is very useful because, unlike the 4Kids dub, it is a reasonably faithful uncut translation of the Japanese. However, it features some infamous choices for the voice acting:
  • The most noticeable example is Seto Kaiba, who sounds like Nappa from Dragon Ball Z.
  • When you hear that the Singapore dub gave Ryou Bakura a Southern accent to indicate his politeness, you'd think that he'd sound like a refined gentleman a la Rhett Butler. Unfortunately, poor Ryou ended up with the "redneck hick" variation instead. It's really hard to think of anyone as intelligent and polite when they sound like a cross between Herbert from Family Guy and the Squidbillies. When the same voice actor does Yami Bakura, he sounds like a really bad impersonation of Peter Lorre. At least it sounds different from Ryou but it's way too different.
  • Joey's almost out of high school, yet his voice sounds like a boy just coming into puberty.
  • Marik is a notorious offender, being voiced in the Singaporean English dub by a girl who sounds like an emotionless little boy on helium. What's worse is she uses the exact same voice for Yami Marik as well, which sounds really jarring and out of place to say the least. Marik's voice actor for 4Kids' dub gives him a terribly unfitting voice that makes him sound like the Green Goblin. Loud, painfully nasal, and generally sounding like a strangled duck, it makes the Battle City arc hard to watch. Though Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series manages to make that obnoxious voice hilarious, so there's that going for it.
  • Both Yugi and the Pharaoh in the Singapore dub sounded and spoke like Bill and Ted. It was so off-putting that even the Abridged Series made fun of it.
    Joey: "Jeez, and people say my accent is inappropriate!"
• Macross: Do You Remember Love? Or maybe it should be "Do you want to remember the legendarily-bad English dub Macross in: Clash of the Bionoids?" For the uninitiated, here's a sample.
• Male Maze in Maze Megaburst Space is supposed to be an athletic, aggressive teenager. Instead, in the English dub, he sounds like a chunky truck driver in his forties, complete with a gravelly voice. In the Behind the Scenes video included in the box set, Greg Wolfe, Male Maze's actor, tries to justify this by stating that the director didn't want it to sound like the Japanese version and wanted the actors to give their own unique take. A rare case where giving the actors too much freedom turned out to be a bad thing by fans.
• The English voice acting for Garzey's Wing (a show which, by itself, isn't very good) is a nice mix of bad acting and lack of emotion, with a side helping of Narm. The dub is basically a result of what happens when you directly translate the Japanese script without the slightest attempt at making the dialogue flow naturally in English, and have the actors read from it… and only allow a single take per line. It's surprising to see how lines like "I must somehow make sense of our convoluted situation!" haven't been subject to Memetic Mutation (so bad was the dubbing that Crispin Freeman has showcased it during at least one of his voice acting panels as an example of awful voiceover).
• Animax Asia's English dub of Maria Sama Ga Miteru makes pretty much every character sound like high school drama club rejects, with the best efforts topping out at merely passable.
• The dubbing of Fight! Iczer-One is terrible, appearing to have been read by at most three women cold from scripts.
• When Cloverway took over the dubbing of Sailor Moon, a number of voice actors were switched out in the process. The one worst off of the bunch was Usagi/Serena herself, whose VA attempted to mimic her predecessor's voice tics and screams, but somehow made the character sound older than she should be, and she did get better over time. Ironically, the VA for Chibi-Usa/Rini was actually better than her original, so it seemed like an odd trade-off.
  • Den of Geek conducted an interview with the old cast, and Linda Ballantyne herself admitted that she didn't like how she was being forced to just imitate Terri Hawkes and the way Cloverway wanted her to portray Serena.
• The hentai Heritage From Father received an English dub... supplied by the original Japanese VAs. While the English does seem to be up to scratch, the actors all have accents thick enough to render their lines nigh-incomprehensible, and they can't seem to find the punctuation marks.
• The previous non-Disney dub of Porco Rosso is a complete disaster, with performances misfiring from the start, and poorly executed dialogue. It sounds like it should be a low-rate Saturday morning cartoon, which is ill-fitting for this movie. Its only entertainment value is that it's good for a laugh. This, incidentally, is one of the dubs Carl Macek gets misblamed for, even though neither he nor his studio had anything to do with it; they merely distributed it.
• Pokémon:
  • The Pokémon Speak can get pretty dubious at times and is often negatively stereotyped. 4Kids' Michael Haigney admitted to half-assing some of the Pokémon voices, and that's just for the early seasons; the later seasons have such oddities such as giant scary centipede Scolipede having a high-pitched voice and the alien-like Beheeyem sounding like Cookie Monster. Pokémon USA seems to only have four or five different voices for Pokémon. It's not hard to find multiple Pokémon that have similar, or even the very same voices as another, even within multiple episodes.
  • Judging by the You Tube comments, it is commonly agreed that the Frontier Brains(with the exceptions of David Wills's Nolan and Bill Roger's Tucker) typically have the weakest performances out of all the set of major trainers in the show. The most notorious offenders by far are Craig Blair's Brandon and Carmen Borgia's Palmer. Apparently, TP Ci thinks that having Craig Blair shouting "No!" every single scene Brandon appears is funny but in truth it gets repetitive and grating VERY FAST. Palmer has the opposite problem, while Brandon sounds way to over dramatic at times, Palmer sounds like a guy who is very-uninterested in battling almost crossing in Dull Surprise despite the fact that Palmer is supposed to be a hot-headed and over-the-top character.
  • The quality of Pokémon USA's dub in general varies inconsistently from season to season, but can fall into this when at its worst, with the XY season being cited as one of the lowest points. Sarah Natochenny's Ash sounds like a female chain-smoker and overuses painful Totally Radical slang and many other characters have inappropriate voices and/or grating speech patterns.
  • An example of another character with an inappropriate voice and/or grating speech patterns includes Bill Rogers' Brock, who sounds like an old man as opposed to a teenager, and abuses awkward alliteration when flirting with women. In an interview with the Anime America Podcast (at the 22-23 minute mark), even the interviewer said that Bill Rogers' Brock sounds fifty years old.
  • According to this interview, Tom Wayland, the director of the dub, doesn't do much in the way of "directing" - he simply has the actors do what they like when in the recording booth.
  • It's no secret that Pokemon's dubbing got worse over the seasons. One movie-only legendary stands out for just having one of the most inept, dull acting ever: Hoopa's Confined Forme. The lady playing his voice just cannot act for the life of her. When Hoopa is being happy and mischievous, she does fine, but she absolutely fails at the big, emotional moments, especially Hoopa's realization at the end being particularly poorly acted, like she's trying way too hard to sound loud but only comes off as dull and shrill. It really says something when Rie Kugimiya, Hoopa's original voice actress, does a better job, and most people criticize her for having an annoying voice!
    • From the same movie, Hoopa's Unbound Forme isn't much better. Hard to take something seriously it sounds less like a threat, and more like a very bored Cookie Monster.
• Opinions about the characters' voices in Mew Mew Power, 4Kids' dub of Tokyo Mew Mew, are all over the place, ranging from not-that-good to pretty fitting. Most people, however, agree that Scottie Ray's Mark/Masaya Aoyama just sounds... wrong. It's far too deep for a preteen/teenager character, and he never tries to act in any way beyond an "old man storyteller" kind of intonation.
• Though most of the voice acting in the English version of Robotech is considered top notch (for its time at least), the voice acting for Minmei turned her into a complete Scrappy. It's telling that when ADV Films got the rights to give a full faithful dub to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, they didn't even bother trying to find a Texan actress who could make Minmay likeable again - they just got Mari Iijima herself into the studio to reprise her iconic role in English.
  • However, even Mari wasn't immune from criticism. Though her English is fine on a technical level, she speaks with a thick accent (despite having lived in the US since the late 80's), which stands out amongst the very American cast - ADV, to their credit, anticipated this and had the actors playing Minmay's parents attempt to imitate Mari's accent. Also, Mari has admitted she considers herself more of a singer than a voice actor - Macross remains one of her only acting roles even in Japanese - which coupled with the language issue means she comes off a bit weak compared to the rest of the (mostly-veteran) cast. On the other hand, Mari has implied she prefers her English performance to her Japanese one, so take of that what you will.
• The first half of the first season of Slayers has generally atrocious English voice acting, with the exceptions of leads Lisa Ortiz and Eric Stuart, who played Lina and Gourry respectively. Those two sound fine, but they can't make up for Daniel Cronin's emotionlessly whispering Zelgadis, or Joani Baker's ear-splitting nasal Amelia. Everything turned out for the best when, after a long gap in dubbing, every part except Lina and Gourry was recast with noticeably better actors (Veronica Taylor for Amelia, and Crispin Freeman for Zelgadis). Starting with episode 14, even the bad parts of the dub were at least listenable, while the good parts belong in the Sugar Wiki. There's a reason fans requested Funimation bring back the old cast when Slayers Revolution was licensed.
• While not an altogether horrible dub, Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight contains some painfully bad performances. Crispin Freeman and most of the principal characters are done well (although Parn's VA is less effective than the OVA, where he was in fine form). But many incidental characters, from Ashram's minions to the dragons to minor incidental villains like Rabido and Duke Raster, all sound like 11th hour casting. Furthermore, Cecil, Hobb, and Groder sound very off. The Record Of Lodoss War OVA is a much better dub, the occasional awkward line or dodgy incidental role notwithstanding.
• Central Park Media's 1996 English dub of Grave of the Fireflies, while not up to the level of Sentai's 2014 redub, isn't really that terrible as a whole. But what is terrible is young Setsuko's voice. She seems to have been voiced by an adult desperately trying to sound like a little girl. The actress seems to be credited with a pseudonym, though, so we'll probably never know her actual age. Nevertheless, she sound constipated or something.
• For the most part, the English dubbed version of Digimon Xros Wars, Digimon Fusion, is pretty good. Unfortunately, it has one horrendous and glaring mistake: when Mikey talks about why he adopted his "can't turn my back on people" policy and flashes back, his younger self keeps his gruff teenager voice, but... when he cries, he sounds exactly like any other little kid! You can't have a deep voiced kid have a high pitched cry!
• The cancelled dub of Urusei Yatsura by AnimEigo was atrocious. It was so bad that they only dubbed two episodes before stopping it (and, more damningly, left the dub track off the first DVD when the show switched release formats, never acknowledging its existence). Michael Sinterniklaas, who voiced main character Ataru, had a long way to go before he founded NYAV Post (his very-respected ADR studio). The worst had to be the French accent they gave Lum (her actress, Martha Ellen Senseney, voiced Sylvie in Bubblegum Crisis and while not the best, it sounded fine compared to her Lum). As far as accents go, Eric Paisley (Brian J. Mason of BGC) giving Cherry a vague Asian accent at least partially made sense, considering he's a monk. It's telling that the British Gag Dub, which also lasted only two episodes, is universally considered a huge improvement.
  • The dub of the second movie, Beautiful Dreamer, isn't any better. It has the unfortunate distinction of being only the second dub Central Park Media ever produced^note (the first was Project A-Ko, which also sounds terrible), and suffers from odd casting choices, flat and emotionless acting, mispronunciation beyond even what was standard for a mid-90's anime dub, and poor sound quality.
  • There is an extra feature on the DVD for the first movie, Only You, that shows some failed auditions for Ataru and Lum. They're... much worse than even the abortive Sinterniklaas dub, and nearly all the girls who tried out for Lum gave her that awful faux-French accent. The final product - though still not up to the standards fans had come to expect from AnimEigo by that point^± (this is largely due to the fact that Coastal Carolina, AnimEigo's usual go-to dubbing studio, had shut down the year before, forcing AE to use a far less experienced studio that had mainly dubbed hentai up to that point) - was at least listenable, as were Movies 3-6 from the same studio, largely because the voice director finally opted to not make any kind of accent distinction with Lum.^? (also she decided to just play Lum herself, and may very well be the best thing in that dub)
• The British dub for the 1990s anime Tanoshii Moomin Ikka is sub-par at best with somewhat stiff acting, but there are some voices in there that make your ears bleed: Sniff, Snork, and Little My. The former sounds like a low pitched Jar Jar Binks, Snork sounds like a brain-dead Patrick Star, and the latter sounds like a snotty high school queen bee who decided to take drugs.
• Pilot Candidate - already listed in the Anime section of the Darth-Wiki - has an awful English dub. The voice acting is stiff and wooden, the dialogue doesn't even try to match the lip syncing, some characters pronounce normal English words completely wrong (the worst being Zero's "WO-MAAAAAAAN!!"), 90% of the females in the dub are voiced by the same person, all of whom sound stiff and ungodly annoying (especially the pink-haired nurse character), and worst of all, it completely wastes the talents of actors like Joshua Seth and Michelle Ruff, who have done great work elsewhere^note Seth as Tai from Digimon Adventure, and Ruff in many other shows, most notably later on in her career as Rukia from Bleach.
• Mao-chan's English dub attempts to literally emulate the speech patterns from the Japanese track (such as making the characters say “I say that, yes I do!” after every sentence), but it comes across as awful-sounding, lame and awkward. In addition, the voice acting is horrendous and ear-grating, as the voices are obnoxiously high-pitched, straining to sound as cute as possible. It's better explained on Anime News Network's review of the series.
• The Love Hina anime has a reputation for being a huge pain in the ass to adapt. Its English dub is particularly infamous. The production is filled with veteran voice actors… who are all horrendously miscast, resulting in dialogue that often sounds forced, unemotional, and dry. Many of the actresses sound way too old for their characters. Kitsune is given a Deep South accent (which is understandable given the original's Kansai Regional Accent), but it's a Scarlett O'Hara drawl, wholly uncharacteristic of her party-loving tomboy nature, rather than a more fitting "redneck" twang (Barbara Goodson, otherwise a fine voice actor, can't play a Southerner to save her life).
  • Love Hina Again's English dub manages to be even worse, with piss-poor writing to go with the acting, Naru sounding high-pitched and whiny, as well as Kitsune having an even worse and more forced Southern accent than in the TV series. It's easier explained on ANN.
  • Word of God has stated the reason this dub turned out so badly was due to heavy Executive Meddling. Apparently, Production I.G had major Control Freak issues at the time, and the Japanese producers decided to hang around the recording studio and constantly overrule everything director Wendee Lee tried to do. This included her casting suggestions and even the voice direction itself. It doesn't excuse the final product, but it does explain how Lee could go from the respectable Outlaw Star dub to this.
• While the English dub of Fruits Basket was, on the whole, pretty good by 2003's standards, Momiji's voice stands out like a sore thumb. Kimberly Grant put no effort into making him sound like a child or even male for that matter (despite being Older Than He Looks) - sure, Momiji is a little androgynous, but not to the point of being completely mistaken for female. Also, he sounds emotionless at times... like his crying whenever Kyo hits him.^note Granted, that could be excused considering every character except Tohru knows he's faking it. One can also complain about him not having a German accent despite being half-German, but the Japanese voice actress didn't do one either, so that's not exactly a fair criticism.
• While Funimation's post-2012 dubs have come under fire for many reasons from some in the anime community, many agree that the dub of the Danganronpa anime is the nadir of their quality. The dub got off to a bad start with Funi's decision to not use the already-extant dub cast from the game^note Though it was reportedly recorded at the same time as when Attack on Titan was being dubbed, which was in 2014, and around that time the game came out and Funimation knew nothing of the game's cast and the only reason they reprised Bryce Papenbrook was because he was at their studio at the time. As to their own casting, Greg Ayres as Monokuma has an aggravatingly scratchy voice that gets grating fast, Yasuhiro has an obnoxious California Surfer accent, Hifumi sounds like Mr. Krabs doing an impression of Comic Book Guy, Junko talking like a Valley Girl, most the cast struggle to show many emotions, there is tons of Totally Radical slang, outdated memes, and there are several Out of Character moments. The kicker is is that it's blatantly obvious as well the scriptwriter has little to no familiarity with the source material itself, since they have Komaru call Naegi her younger brother. Bryce Papenbrook as Naegi (the only cast member retained from the game) Austin Tindle as Kiyotaka, and Felecia Angelle as Aoi Asahina (particularly during the trial after Sakura's death) are the only ones who seems to be really trying, the others ham it up or have little to no direction.
• While the dub for Danganronpa 3 is generally better quality, it still suffers from a number of awful performances, easily the most notorious of which is Jamie Marchi, who is usually a good voice actress, as Junko Enoshima. Putting aside the infamous memes inserted into her lines, carrying over from the previous anime's dub, Marchi's stilted Valley Girl dialect is beyond irritating and a massive Mood Killer during otherwise serious scenes. Hard to take the Big Bad seriously when she sounds like something straight out of a bad Abridged Series.
• The dubs from Sentai Filmworks, such as Kono Naka Ni Hitori Imouto Ga Iru^note localized as Nakaimo - My Little Sister Is Among Them!, tend to be extremely hit-or-miss due to their bizarre combination of veteran voice talent left over from the ADV days coupled with rock-bottom budgets. Their own nadir is without a doubt the dub of Guin Saga, where they literally just stopped trying halfway through the first season. One character is a bard, but his singing makes Lucy sound like a virtuoso. This was the point where Sentai finally got tired of Steven Foster (a polarizing guy who could produce excellent dubs… if he had a budget and a good scriptwriter, neither of which Sentai keep in supply) and soon thereafter fired him.
• Sins of the Sisters, aside from being nigh-incomprehensible, is bogged down by a redundant, over-expository script, and terrible voice acting to go along with it. The actor playing Hans puts on the most irritating performance out of everyone, as he yells all of his lines and any attempt to make him show any emotion other than self-righteous anger feels and sounds forced. None of the other characters save Aiko (Hans' time-shifted and gender-bent alter ego; long story) make an effort to sound anything close to natural.
• Now, the English dub of Shaman King wasn't terrible; some of its offenses can be forgiven (like having grown men voice characters originally voiced by women). Others aren't, though... Namely, the accents. For some reason, Japanese Delinquent Ryu/Rio sounds French, and Chinese shaman Ren/Len and his sister Jun/June are British. What's worse? The German shaman Faust VIII and actually British shaman Lyserg sound American, which would be forgivable if it weren't for the accents they gave the aforementioned Ryu, Ren, and Jun. And while the characters being voiced by men isn't bad, the voices those guys provide is; Chocolove/Joco, for example, was voiced by Motoko Kumai in Japanese, and had a higher-pitched, cutesy voice typical of the characters Kumai voices, and it fits fine. In English, it's a guy who sounds way too deep and occasionally scratchy (which may be why this is the guy's only known credit). In general, it's just a mess of Vocal Dissonance.
• The Omni Productions dubs of the Transformers series Headmasters, Victory, and Super-God Masterforce were done in Hong Kong by a cast with little knowledge of the source material. It's very obvious that the dub team has little to no clue what is going on, the voice casting is abysmal, the recording quality and lip-sync is terrible, everyone sounds unsuitable and the scripts are full of "Blind Idiot" Translation. It doesn't help that characters are given bizarre new names; Spike is called "Sparkle", Metroplex is "Phillip", etc. More info at TFWiki here.
• The English dub of The Little Mermaid (1975) is horrendously gimped, emotionless, and often off-sync, making even 4Kids dubs seem top-notch. Fritz the dolphin especially stands out like a sore thumb, sounding like a kindergartener despite being the same age as Marina.
• The dub for the original Mobile Suit Gundam is a decent one - definitely watchable, and was good enough to warrant being included with the re-release by Right Stuf when they rescued the license. The dub for the 3 compilation movies, on the other hand...well, it uses a completely different cast from the dub for the TV series, and a lot of the words are mispronounced. Oddly enough, according to the staff who produced the dub, most of the problems can be blamed on Yoshiyuki Tomino himself, who supervised the dub and made many unusual requests. It's not hard to understand why DVD releases for the trilogy don't include it.

Hungarian

• The Hungarian dub for Jetix's version of Naruto started out as this, thanks to the incredibly-annoying voice the title character received, and the fact that the supporting cast switched their voice actors around a lot... but then came the second dub by Animax, taking the original Japanese anime as its basis, with an arguably better translation and a hell of a lot more consistence in its voices. There was... still some complaining, but less.
• It's been generally agreed on that the Hungarian dubbing of Sailor Moon had great voice casting, but the translation work was, in turn, horrid (it was translated from the French version, by someone who has admitted to being bad at even that language), and considering the episodes have been dubbed out of order, it's no wonder the actors reportedly had no clue what was going on in the story.
• The dubbing of Captain Tsubasa mainly had problems with lip-sync and consistency — often, the voices of characters changed within a single episode, and occasionally multiple characters were dubbed by the same person, using the same voice... even when they were talking to each other! This made the series a very confusing watch.
• Almost all of the Direct to Video anime releases from the 80s and early 90s suffered from bad translation work, a handful of voices dubbing every character, and not even the faintest effort went into trying to match said voices with the mouth-movements.
• The 2nd Transformers: Energon dub, having been re-translated from the infamously sloppy American dubbing but incorporating even more errors. It has the robot names change depending on the episode and all the voice actors (who also tend to vary jarringly^note for example, Starscream would randomly sound 30-40 years older in certain episodes) are the cheapest ones you normally hear doing voiceovers for shows on the Discovery Channel. The same team also made the 2nd dub of Transformers: Cybertron, but probably owing to the better source material, it was at least halfway passable.

Malay

• The quality of a Malay anime dub depends on the era and the type of anime itself. The 90s and the early 2000s are considered "the Golden Age of Malay dubs", with Crayon Shin-chan, Doraemon, Digimon and You're Under Arrest! among many others, before slowly diminishing (but still good) in the mid 2000s and finally going downhill in the very late 2000s. From 2010 onwards, only a select few anime are dubbed into Malay and most of the local channels prefer to air either English dubs or Western cartoons instead. Note that while Malay dubs are not as frequent as twenty years ago, they actually put some (not much but still) effort into their dubs. The horrible ones either give incomprehensible accents to the characters (Mobile Suit Gundam 00, One Piece and School Rumble)^note Some of the accents might unintentionally sound racist, as those three shows have many non-Japanese characters in prominence or very low voices and translated poorly that the story is hard to follow (Digimon Tamers and Fruits Basket). Some voices for different characters sound exactly alike, implying that only 2-3 people worked in the dubbing studio. Special mention goes to Digimon Adventure 02, where while the plot is translated well, Davis, Jun and Yolei sounded like 40-year old women (some may realize that Davis is the same person who voiced Nobita's mom from the Doraemon Malay dub) while T.K.'s voice is too high pitched even for his age that he sounds girlier than Kari.
• It should be noted that the Malay dubbers don't care about the dubbing quality as long as the show is translated to their language for the convenience of the viewers (as the majority of them are kids, the Animation Age Ghetto is strong in Malaysia unless they're 3D). It may also be that they're simply obligated to do it in order to satisfy Malaysia's bizarrely strict language laws.^note Malaysia is one of the rare countries to explicitly codify discrimination into Law - in this case giving blanket preference to ethnic Malays over non-Malay citizens. This includes enforcing the Malay language while trying to officially remove any trace of English (the colonial language still widely used by ethnic minorities). Ironically, in the more recent years Malay dubs have decreased in quantity as the language enforcement laws get stricter. However, in Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny, in one of Meer Campbell's singing performances, she sings in Japanese. But the audience cheering has been completely removed, creating a bizarre situation where an entire audience is going wild, with their mouths wide open, but not making any noise.

Spanish

• The Latin Spanish dub of Kaleido Star, made in Colombia, only did one thing wrong. Unfortunately, that thing was casting the most high-pitched actors available and amping their voices to unlistenable levels. This dub not only made the series flop and killed any interest on the rest of the franchise in the region (in fact, it only aired once on Cartoon Network and two years later once on Boomerang), but also gave Colombian dub studios the (not totally unfair) fame of producing the worst dubs south the Rio Grande.
• While otherwise the Mexican dub of Cardcaptor Sakura goes into the realm of Superlative Dubbing, there are some dark spots on it:
  • The voice of Kero, at least in his plushie form, too weird and nasal for the character. Yamil Atala was probably asked to aim to whichever Mexican equivalent of the Kansai accent was, but instead he sounds like he's on drugs. Part of the problem was that the dubbing studio decided to use him to voice both Kero the Plushie and Kerberos the Guardian, when the original voice job (and most dubs) had separate voice actors for each one despite being technically the same character, and Atala simply couldn't pull the vocal range to do mascot-like voices.
  • There have been complains about the performance by Tomoyo's VA, Mónica Villaseñor, mostly going by how her acting sounds like a rather forced and overblown version of her "cute young girl" tone.
• The Mexican dub of Gundam Wing was more or less decent, save for one truly terrible performance: Luis Tenorio's incredibly nasal and whiny-sounding Quatre. It's puzzling since Tenorio played a passable Treize in the same series.

Finnish

• Modern dubs of anime tend to be decent, but it wasn't that long ago when they were horrid. From the 90s there's Digimon Adventure by Agapio Racing Team. How bad is it, you ask? Just take a look.
• Who remembers the awesome anime Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin? Here's a collection of the "golden bits" of the Finnish dub. This was made originally in the 80s when there wasn't much standard or quality control to any voice-over work.
• If you want more, just search for Finnish dub on Youtube and if it isn't a fan-dub (like all of the Team Fortress 2 stuff) and it's from the 90s or before, the dub isn't going to be very good, unless it's an official Disney film dubbed into Finnish.

French

• The French dub of City Hunter suffered from the same problems as Dragon Ball Z, being that it was first aired on a kids show, causing it to be heavily censored. A major flaw is the questionable localization, in which many names were changed, as Ryo Saeba is known here as Nicky Larson (which also became the anime's title there), Kaori and Hideyuki Makimura are named Laura and Tony Marconi, or Umibozu earns the ridiculous patronym of Mammouth. Speaking of the voice actors, while Ryo Saeba's French voice actor sounded good for the character, all the antagonists were dubbed by the voice director, Maurice Sarfati, with laughably mediocre results, much like the dub of Fist of the North Star.

• A very infamous French dub is the 2014 movie Dumbbells. The dub was made in South Africa with completely unknown actors, with the translation done by an amateur. And it shows. The dub was so bad that Netflix pulled the dub, apologized to a translation society, and replaced it with a professional dub made in Paris.

• The Hungarian dub of Beetlejuice. Where to start? It is a Hong Kong Dub, and as such, the lip-sync is generally off, at times with the characters just flapping their mouths without saying anything (the worst offender being the third "Beetlejuice" cry at the end, which is simply omitted). Random grunts and shouts can be heard whenever the voice actors felt like paying attention, but no effort was made to conceal how terribly they stood out from the audio track. What more, the title character received Power Echoes, which, along with his fast-talking and low-voiced dubbing actor, made him difficult to understand. He doesn't even sound the slightest like the original — imagine Dr. Finklestein mumbling in an echoing cave: that is the Hungarian Betelgeuse. To top it off, the dialog also offers examples of mistranslation (giving a toast became giving a bread toast), and the music and sound effects are so silent, you can barely hear them over the voice track. How... how could they screw this up so bad?
• As another TVTropes page put it, "Transformers in Hungarian is screwed beyond comprehension", and the dubbing of the Transformers Film Series played a big part in prompting this observation. Though mostly the first movie's. On a positive note, it used the original Transformer names introduced in the G1 comics, but apart from that, it was just cheap and lazy. The voice actors of Sam and Lennox sound way too young, their voices are almost comically high. The translation work is a mess - Michael Bay films are infamous for their generally shallow dialog, but here, it's even more watered-down. A handful of lines are missing (what little intelligible dialog Frenzy originally had was either cut or left in English), while what is there tends to be off by half a second or so. And Ironhide's VA simply sounds bored out of his mind. So much, that he says his famous line about exterminating Sam's parents only after the other Autobots have reacted to it. Thankfully a lot of these shortcomings were dealt with in the sequels, but sadly those continued in the trend of randomly omitting lines, and left various names in English in several scenes.
• Many cheap dubs of Asian martial arts movies have horrible American voice dubs, which often take you out of the Asian atmosphere because the American accents are so thick that you have the impression some Texan cowboys are playing the roles.

• Oh god, the Ultraman 80 English dub. The voices were done by Malaysian actors who sound like they were randomly pulled off the street. The previous Malay Ultra dub of Ultraman Taro comes close with the wannabe British narrator, but Eighty's dub takes the cake. Thankfully, only 10 known episodes were dubbed in English, the rest in Mandarin Chinese.
• The guy who did the promos for The Hype on The WB's "All-New HYPE NIIIIIIIGHT!" It was the same guy who did everything for Disney in the 1990s, and was the voice of that EXTREME bubble tape in that one ad.
• Hungary's Top Gear dub, if it can even be called a "dub". Initially, they had a very small cast with only two or three actors voicing everyone besides the main trio... and even the voices the presenters got didn't quite suit them. All that changed at around Season 5 or 6, when the entire voice cast was recast. But that was the only change. The voice timing and lip sync...way off. Much of the entertainment value of the original...lost.
• In B-Fighter Kabuto, the character Mac Windy was an American character played by American actor Reuben Langdon. Perhaps the producers did not trust his ability to speak Japanese, but for some reason, they overdubbed his lines even when he was speaking English. No parties will be getting crazy with the overdub actor, that's for sure.
• The Brazilian dub of Doctor Who isn't all bad. For example, the Tenth and Eleventh Doctor sound pretty good, and the Twelfth one and Donna sound downright impressive. However, the Ninth Doctor sounds extremely wooden, too high-pitched for a big, wide-shouldered Time Lord like him, and they kept the joke about him sounding like he's from Northern England, even though his accent is pretty much the same as most other characters'.
• Sesame Street
  • Dubbing quality of the American segments varies from country to country. Some (Holland, Germany, Mexico, even Russia) have excellent voice actors; some don't have fantastic voice actors, but given that they are made in territories without a wide array of voice actors, they're fine. Some don't have that excuse, which brings us to the original version of Spain's Barrio Sesamo. Not all of the characters sound terrible (and the series itself is beloved in Spain), but Grover's voice is way too high-pitched, making songs like "Fuzzy and Blue" nigh-unlistenable, Kermit sounds very gruff and deep, and Ernie constantly talks in a childish whisper that makes it hard to hear anything he's saying. Funnily enough, while they eventually improved Grover's voice in later dubs, the subsequent '90s version of the show continued using the gruff/whispery interpretations of Kermit and Ernie (though this might've just been to keep the voices consistent).
  • Somewhat invoked on the Dutch Sesamstraat: Paul Haenen (the Dutch voice of characters like Bert and Grover) is a fantastic actor, but he has a lousy singing voice, which often gets lampshaded on the locally-made records (Ernie makes fun of Bert for singing badly while he has a good voice). At the same time, it doesn't make songs like this any more listenable.
• The Spanish Latino dub of The Big Bang Theory caused a lot of outrage and brought a lot of attention for how bad it was. Most of the jokes depending on geek culture were changed or dumbed down, not to mention that most of the science-related jokes were changed if not ignored all together. Whether this was because the voice actors did not understood the references or they thought Viewers Are Morons and assumed that the Latin American public wasn't gonna get them, is still a matter of debate on TV forums. Of course, the not very good sync and the fact that a lot of voices did not match very well the characters didn’t help either. The dubbing is so infamous that it inspired a social media campaign for having Warner Channel Latinoamérica airing the show only in English (with subtitles) when the network started airing that and other shows dubbed. The campaign was so noticeable that Warner Channel Latinoamérica made commercials informing of the SAP availability.
• LazyTown
  • The Croatian dub, which suffers from bad performance, unfitting voice actors and even glaring technical issues (such as non-matching lipsync and lines of dialogue being repeated) that give off the impression that the dub staff never bothered to even attempt to make it believable, or if they just picked up a bunch of bored 40-year old adults off the streets of Zagreb, shoved scripts in front of their faces and forced them to dub the show on a 5 kuna budget. For example, some of them are half-asleep. The songs are the worst, with no effort put in some of them, some lines are omitted, and sometimes the characters' voices are dubbed thrice.
    • Aside from the aforementioned problems, the dub also has a very interesting instance of carelessness where they replace an intended song with an entirely different one. Case in point, "Always a Way" being replaced by "Twenty Times Time" in "Defeeted" which leads to a case where Stephanie sings about properly brushing your teeth while helping Sportacus overcome Robbie's fake boots he was tricked into wearing.
    • And then there's the time where she sang a lesson on how to become active... while actually being active.^note Yes, she sang "Have You Ever" instead of "Go For It".
  • The first Romanian dub was notorious for giving Stingy a voice that sounded like a mix between Grover from Sesame Street and Rolf from Ed, Edd n Eddy. Just listen to how he sung "The Mine Song", which became a Memetic Mutation. It was so badly received that four months later, it was given a second dub which, thankfully, sounds a lot less worse.
• The German dub of Stargate Universe, apart from having atrocious voice acting that did not fit the characters at all, also contained several translation errors, some of whom completely change important plot elements. For example, in the German dub, it is literally said that Destiny is flying "with lightspeed connected through hyperspace", while actually the exact and complete opposite is true.

General

• It's very rare that video games will have the entire voice cast present during dubbing. In dubs where the ADR director isn't doing his job, this will often result in hilarious/awful sequences where a voice actor knows his line, but not how the character saying it is supposed to be feeling or what the line is a response to. As an example, reading "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero" as a congratulations, so one character ends up reacting glumly to being told off while the other thanks him heartily for breaking it.

Multiple Languages

• Samurai Warriors (and Koei's Warriors games in general) has never been known for amazing voice acting, but there was a particularly horrible example in the case of Ranmaru Mori. The Japanese voice actor for Ranmaru was blatantly female and made no attempt to hide the fact. This still beat the English voice actor's frog-in-throat annoyance^note by the talented but horrendously miscast Tony Oliver; the dubs for SW 2 and SW 3 went the Cross-Dressing Voices route, and SW 4 eschewed English voice acting altogether.
• Metal Gear Solid
  • The German dub of the first game was just horrible in every way. No wonder the following games and the remake stayed English.
  • The same applies to the Italian dub as well. The worst offender was Campbell, whose voice suddenly turned from a common adult voice to a deep-sounding one with a very thick local accent.
  • The French one is the go-to example for bad video game dubs. Despite a few rather good voices (Otacon, Naomi and Mei Ling being the "best"), it's full of failures and quirks: Meryl and Wolf have the same actress (differentiated only by Wolf sounding a tad rougher and Meryl squealing like a rubber toy when she gets hit), Ocelot hams like it's going out of fashion and so are Raven, Liquid and Mantis (the three are grating, but not as ridiculous as Ocelot), the intended gruff Campbell sounds terribly fake and Snake switches from "muscleheaded moron" to "Christian Bale's Batman's mentally challenged twin". Why they kept the American voices for later installments is no mystery. Years later, during an interview, Emmanuel Bonami (Snake's VA) expressed both a wish for French VG dubs in general to go one step above "laughable" and interest in a possible French dub of Metal Gear Solid 4. Not only that, he did a fan redub of the MGS4 intro with a much better voice ; not really fitting for old Snake, but would've worked rather well with Young Snake.
• The Spanish dub of Kingdom Hearts II was actually pretty good...except for a particular case: Roxas. Seriously, man, if you're falling into a dark abyss of nightmare, at the very least you could put a bit of emotion into your scream. Which is weird, considering there were other scenes where Roxas' voice actor nails it. For example, his conversation with DiZ. So it could be more a case of wrong voice direction than wrong voice acting. For that matter, there's Goofy in the Japanese version. Actually, Japanese-dubbed Goofy in his other appearances would probably qualify here to some people.
• Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance featured some irritatingly-bad voice acting throughout. However, it was especially glaring during the Battle of Endor, where much of the dialogue was a word-for-word re-recording of lines from Return of the Jedi, which sounded nothing like the lines from the film. How bad was it? Let's put it this way: the next time Lando Calrissian showed up in a video game, Billy Dee Williams himself was hired to voice the character. The French version had some excellent voices (Aemon and Emkay stand out), but the rest of the cast varied between mediocre and outright stupid...like that Imperial officer who started a sentence, ended it halfway, then hurried to add the forgotten second half.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  • For the most part, it had some pretty impressive voice acting. However, the male Imperial voice sometimes sounds cheesy and exaggerated, and the actor for the female Redguards sounds like she wasn't even trying.
  • The French dub has one actor doing the voices of both the Argonian and the Khajit males and one doing the females. And the voice actor is the French VA of the frakking Captain Haddock.
  • And then there's the voice actress of the female Bosmer, Dunmer, and Altmer. It would have been fine if she just did the voice of a few female Elves, but no, she had to do the voice of all of the female Elves in the game! Seriously, half the time, she sounds like she has something stuck in her throat! It's jarring, to say the least!
  • This obviously failed take that was kept, unedited, in the English dub.
• Persona series
  • Persona 2: Eternal Punishment's^note Play Station version English dub comes under this at times. Voices can sound narmy and sometimes there's emphasis on the wrong syllable. Metal Jun's voice in particular comes to mind, as the actor sounds like he was told to play as a wimpy nerd, and Tatsuya's VA could give Jason Dohring a run for his money in terms of Dull Surprise. Maya's voice, on the other hand, is simply so obnoxious that you will be very, very glad she's a Heroic Mime and only has occasional soundbites for combat and other situations.
  • The English dub of Persona 3 faced this problem with Fuuka Yamagishi's (uncredited) dub voice. She was noted as never emoting quite right, her voice always a monotone of some kind. And since she was the Mission Control, it combined with Captain Obvious and Most Annoying Sound to make the performance infamous. While she did improve somewhat in The Answer, Wendee Lee replaced her from Arena onward.
  • Persona 4
    • Teddie/Kuma's Japanese voice. His English voice is okay, but his Japanese voice is seriously painful to listen to. Fortunately, it changes slightly when he's in human form and becomes more tolerable, but in his Shadow form it's really high-pitched and annoying.
    • Rise's Japanese voice is really high-pitched and grating, and once you defeat Shadow Teddie, you have to listen to it in every damn battle.
• Pajama Sam series
  • Once it was bought out by Atari, it had a very sad excuse for a voice actor for Sam (mainly his voice actor in the fourth game). His voice actor for the first three games is polaring but passable. But here? He sounds like he aged three years backwards, and it gets on your nerves very quickly. Some of the other voice acting was also widely hated, particularly the sponge and the Leavins n' Squeezins guy near the end.
  • The Russian bootleg for the first game by Fargus Multimedia manages to do even worse. Sam's voice actor sounded like a bored 40-year old adult deciding to dub a random game. Yes, a 40-year old voice for a kid who is supposed to be six years old. His mother actually sounds younger than him.
• Final Fantasy series.
  • Masakazu Morita's voicing of Tidus from Final Fantasy X stood out horribly among the general cast. His lines were overreacted and often too loud, making Tidus' moments more infuriating than necessary. Justified in that Tidus was Morita's debut role in voice acting and his subsequent voicing of Tidus like in the Dissidia Final Fantasy games was much better.
    • James Arnold Taylor's performance as Tidus suffered from trying to emulate Morita's performance, but some argue it being worse due to his performance making Tidus sound more shrill and whiny, which turned him into a massive Base-Breaking Character. Thankfully, like Morita, he does get better with later incarnations like Dissidia and Final Fantasy X-2.
  • Final Fantasy XV: While the final game was considered an example of Superlative Dubbing, the demo released a year prior, Episode Duscae, had some infamously bad voice acting, particularly from Noctis, who had an inappropriately deep voice for a character who is supposed to be 20-years-old. There have been many instances where the player would mistake Noctis for Gladiolus. As a result, Ray Chase, Noctis's voice actor, nearly lost the role in the full game, but was given a second chance that payed off in the end, since he gave a more fitting performance in it.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy: In the original game, voice direction is all around horrible for a good portion of the cast, with characters having odd pauses at random points in sentences and just generally being inappropriate. Kuja is by far the worst victim, though others including Zidane and Ultimecia were also disliked. Zidane's voice acting wasn't particularly bad; Bryce Papenbrook did an okay job, it's just that he sounded entirely different from the Japanese voice and people in general thought the original was more appropriate for the character. The returning voice actors do a good job, except for Steve Burton as Cloud, who is so unemotional and lifeless he could give Squall a run for his money as The Stoic. In responses to comments on a YouTube video though, JD Cullum (Kuja) revealed he wasn't given a good feel for Kuja, and the "voice direction" he got was to imitate the Japanese voice and try to sound "breathy and feminine". If the other VAs have similar stories to tell, no wonder it was hit and miss. The sequel Dissidia 012 thankfully had all the cast undergo Vocal Evolution and in general everyone sounds much better, though it only highlights how bad the first game's scenes are when the player plays through the redone original storyline and finds the voices were not re-dubbed.

English

• One staple of the Resident Evil series is that all dialogue is spoken in English (with Japanese subtitles for the Japanese audience). The problem was that Capcom's team didn't have the budget or manpower to write a proper script in English. So the entire script for the game was written in Japanese first, and then translated into English to the best of the team's ability. Anyone who speaks both English and Japanese (or even translates a sentence in Google Translate) will realize the flow of a sentence structure is different between Japanese and English, thus making the dialogue come off as sounding a bit awkward. As for the voice actors themselves, Capcom went out and simply hired Americans who were living in Japan at the time to do the voice-work. Furthermore, they just had the actors say the lines without giving them any direction of what they're supposed to be expressing at the time, who their character was talking to, or the context of the line. It does get better in later games, but the original North American Resident Evil game is as notorious for its stilted voice acting as it is for being the archetype of the survival horror genre.
• One of the many, many problems with Ultima IX is the atrocious voice acting. The Avatar either sounds annoyingly dumb or like he couldn't care less about what's happening. Most of the other NPCs are done by actors who put absolutely no effort at all into their lines. What makes it even more infuriating is that the game originally had an amazing voice cast featuring the likes of Keith Szarabajka, Mary Kay Bergman, Kay E. Kuter and Michael Dorn, only for all their work to be ditched and redone by a cast mostly made up of Origin employees and amateur actors (the one well-known actor among the group, Bill Johnson, came back to voice the Guardian mostly as a favor to Richard Garriott) after the plot was changed due to massive Executive Meddling.
• Duel Masters for the PS2. The main characters' voices were passable, but when talking to an NPC the voice sample would either not play at all while the character flapped their lips about... or worse.
• Every game mentioned in Audio Atrocities, with convenient samples of particularly egregious examples. Some of the games are So Bad, It's Horrible on their own to boot. These include:
  • The #1 example? Last Alert. The game itself is an enjoyable shooter, but the scenes where people actually spoke are cringe-inducing. Perhaps the best line is one in which a character calls another character "stingy", as the voice actor pronounces the word as if it rhymed with "stringy".
  • There's some speculation that the reason the casting department for Chaos Wars did such a half-assed job on the dub is that they were required to have one by Sony and knew that most of the minuscule audience who'd both know about the game and be interested in playing it would probably be listening to the Japanese track anyway. That's no excuse for the poor translation in general, though.
    
    The fact that the name "Jelinek" pops up no less than six times in the credits points to the fact that the localization director had his teenage children record two of the characters and had his wife and brother work on the scripts. The rest of the cast all have little to no other acting experience, and most of them no voice acting at all (Chaos Wars included, natch). Chris Jelinek, the head of localization, has two other credits to his name - as a marketing and sales representative.
• Musashi Samurai Legend is a fairly good game with average gameplay and cool art. Most of the characters have middling VAs (and the villains are outstanding), but words can't describe the pain that is the damn main character's voice. "Dumb jock turned Up To Eleven" doesn't even begin to scrape the surface. Since the game was a sequel, Square Enix were most likely trying to make the new Musashi sound like the previous Musashi, but older. The problem is that the Musashi from Brave Fencer is a prepubescent child. So rather than give the newer, older Musashi the voice of a teenager, they gave him the voice of a child who was trying to make his voice sound deeper than it actually was. It didn't help that he couldn't put any sort of emotion into his voice.
  • Here's a fun fact: Musashi's voice actress is the same one for Axl from Mega Man X7, so that might explain it a little.
• Shining Force series
  • Shining Force III has a veritable Arctic blast of bad voice acting. Listen and weep.
  • Shining Force Neo on the PS2 is even worse. Word of God has it that all of the voice work was recorded in a children's theater class!
• The GBA port of Tales of Phantasia had really poor English voices (not helped by the terrible sound quality of this version). Teenage characters sound like 40 year-olds, female characters sound like smoking addicts, not to mention the limited pool of "voice actors" meant that all characters were voiced by three people or so. What makes this somewhat worse is that this was right after Bandai Namco Entertainment's release of Tales of Legendia; which, for all its faults, had competent, professional voice acting (except Chloe and Shirley).
• Tales of Eternia also has pretty bad voice acting. This was somehow made worse on the European PSP port in which the voice acting is quiet enough at points to be drowned out by the background music, and at another close to the end, the wrong clips play and you hear the dialogue from the beginning of the game. One would think they'd catch the last on a playthrough of the game. The English version of Tales of Destiny didn't bother to voice act the characters, but they changed their minds in this game, and boy, it's not good. The voice actors sound amateurish, the lines are completely emotionless and badly delivered, and it's generally atrocious. Fortunately they did much better in later games (well, at least those they actually localized). The one exception to this rule is Max, whose gruff voice and Large Ham performance actually manages to fit the character.
• Gameloft
  • Regardless of your opinions on their iOS games based on other games built for consoles, most agree that the voice acting that comes with their games is mediocre at best. One egregious example is Eternal Legacy, their Captain Ersatz for Final Fantasy XIII. In a genre that is normally known for So Bad, It's Good voice-acting, this JRPG succeeds at making the gamer cringe rather than get engaged in the story. App Spy even said that the option to turn off the voice acting is a pro!
  • Another example of horrible voice-acting in a Gameloft game is Shadow Guardian, which is totally not an Uncharted ripoff. Where Drake's voice is sexy and snarky, Jason Call's voice is that of a bored and confused New Yorker. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of terrible voice-acting this game provides.
• Al Emmo, an independent adventure game that is essentially Leisure Suit Larry in the Wild West - primarily because the game designer, rather than holding auditions for the protagonist, wanted to do the voice himself. The Updated Re-release seems to have acknowledged this, using a new and more experienced voice actor for the protagonist.
• The first Shadow Hearts game, exemplified particularly in the Sea Mother scene. There's also the fact that they didn't bother dubbing over the battle grunts. So essentially, each of the main characters had a different voice when they were in battles, and it was easy to tell the difference. (Seriously, how low does your localization budget have to be that you can't afford to have your actors record battle grunts?) It gets even worse: although most of the battle voices weren't dubbed, a very few were...most noticeably the introduction line to Marguerite's specials. So you'd sometimes have characters changing voices in the middle of battle. The most poignant example of bad voice acting was the game's canonical ending (courtesy of everyone's favorite Eric Stuart). If Yuri is mourning the death of his loved one, why does he sound like he's desperate to go to the bathroom? And all this in a game that was a semi-sequel to Koudelka, which (for all its arguable faults) had fantastic voice acting.
• While the voice acting in the original .hack// series was generally bearable (though Kite generally ends up sounding constantly uninvolved with the plot, the voice of Mistral was so awful that many people refused to use her in their party unless it was mandated by the plot. Mistral's voice was high-pitched and on the squeaky end with some really odd syllable emphasis.
• The Bard's Tale, a lampoon of Fantasy RPGs with Cary Elwes as the lead voice, should have been awesome. And it might have been, if it didn't sound like he was standing ten feet away from the mic. At least Tony Jay sounded good...
  • The volume problems are fixed in the iOS port... Mostly. There's still errant bits of the old voice work, mostly in the shops, which leads to:
  [Back]
  The Bard (very quietly): "Let me see something else."
  [Leave store]
  The Bard: "SEE YA, OLD MAN!"
• Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is known for having atrocious English voice acting: so much so that it spawned an urban legend that company that made it, rather than get a second set of English-speaking actors for the English dub, simply made the Japanese actors do English voices. While this wasn't completely true, the performances still ranged from hilarious to flat-out painful. Thankfully, Namco and Monolith learned their lesson and got much better voices for Origins, including Crawford Wilson and Fred Tatasciore.
• Most of the English voice acting in Virtua Fighter is at least passable, but everyone hates Lion's voice. Imagine the most whiny, nasal, bratty teenager voice possible shouting "The SHOOOOOW is gonna bee-GIN RIGHT NOW!" twelve thousand times.
• Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner has an awkward translation and generally mediocre voice actors, and that's not even counting the main villain. The only really good voice in this game was the AI.
• If any of you ever got your hands on the imported version of Psychic Force, be very grateful. The English dubbing done by Acclaim is so soul-searingly horrible it's like almost everyone is mismatched — Burn kinda sounds like he's constipated, Sonia sounds almost like an old witch, and Emilio...oh God, Emilio!
• The VA for the main character of underwhelming PC game Neverend actually has quite a nice voice, which makes her lack of acting ability all the more jarring. The rest of the cast, unfortunately, doesn't have nice voices and possess even less talent.
• The English dub of the original Spellforce. The translators appear to have blown their entire budget for voice acting on the opening FMV, then hired whatever homeless people they could find in the alley behind their studio in exchange for the contents of the break room refrigerator. All the voice acting's wooden, and at least one character speaks all her lines in an awkward slur that contains absolutely none of the pauses that are part of natural speech. The sequel still doesn't have great voice-acting, but at least isn't this bad.
  • The worst offenders? What's-her-name with the orange hair in the tutorial intro, the Orc Titan, and every Troll unit. Yeah, All Trolls Are Different... but seriously, trolls as whiny teens?
• The acting in Grandia Xtreme sounds like the "actors" sat down with their scripts, were given no direction or context, and just read their lines like one reads impromptu cue cards. Lutina's is the worst; any inflection of hers sounds completely forced. Either the actors were all new to voice acting and only given one read-through to get it right, or they're just really, really bad. There's one exception: the Big Bad, voiced by Mark Hamill, easily chews up any scene he's in. Most people get fed up with the game before his best scenes, meaning Hamill's delightful Ham and Cheese is sadly missed.
• Somewhere between a game and a movie there's Anastasia for the Play Station. As you can tell, the voice acting is poor and often miscast with only two voice actors. Rasputin's accent is one of the most hilarious things there, though.
• While the first Bushido Blade had all dialog in Japanese with English subtitles and was beautiful, Bushido Blade 2 produced an English dub that had absolutely horrid voice actors with lackluster emotion and it was terrible. Bonus points for Highwayman, who's dressed like the Phantom of the Opera and speaks with something between a Scottish burr and a deep country English accent.
• Most of the English dub cast of The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact sounds like they just got home from a late-night crawl. Of special note is Rock Howard: in his ending in the first game, when he goes "Do I have to bear this burden for the rest of my life?", he sounds less like he's on the verge of tears and more like he's just really, really tired. The other characters aren't that much better, but at least in Maximum Impact 2, you can switch to the original Japanese voices.
  • The arcade version of KOF XIII had a normally Dummied Out English voice track which these videos demonstrated, and they were absolutely horrendous. Thankfully, the console ports of the game decided not to use these tracks, and kept only the Japanese voice tracks for every character.
• Suikoden Tierkreis is a great game, but the voice acting ranges from acceptable to abysmal. And unfortunately, the main character is firmly on the "abysmal" end of that scale. Specifically, at no point in his lines does the VA appear to inhale. Here's an example. Also, many of the lines spoken either simply summarize or completely contradict the lines in the subtitles. Although the voice actors are all Canadian, many of the characters' names are read in a strange, pseudo-Japanese pronunciation (i.e. "Hotupa" sounds like "Hepstupa" for no discernible reason). It sounds as though the actors were reading from a copy of the script which was still mid-localization, and "jarring" doesn't really begin to describe it. It also suffers from the fact that some characters never had a definite pronunciation to their name. Chrodechild, for one, has hers pronounced at least five different ways. "Chrode-child", "Chrode-chilled", "Chro-de-child"...and it just gets worse from there.
• The first Tenchu game was the least story-loaded game of the franchise (so much that, no matter which character you choose, the story will be almost the same), but still managed to have memorably bad voice acting. Apparent boredom plagued all the actors, Ayame's VA didn't know the concept of volume, and weird pauses were all over (and no, this wouldn't count as Lip Lock, since there are no lip movements in the game). The only truly enjoyable performance was Onikage, just because his VA did the impossible in making a twisted, sinister voice. The other games got progressively better about choosing the voice cast, though.
• Mario educational games (and Hotel Mario) have horrific voice acting quality, of roughly the four-guys-in-a-basement level. Hotel Mario is already bad enough, but then you've got Mario Is Missing and the horrors of the worst voice acting in world history, Mario's Early Years: Preschool "Fun". At least Mario Teaches Typing 2 had Charles Martinet telling corny jokes and lampshading his lot as a floating CG head to make things more bearable.
  • "Who discovered that skull you're holding? How old is that skull you're holding?" Weegee is just a Memetic Spook, but the Peach of ''Mario Is Missing''... gah!
• The English voice acting in the Soul Series is generally So Okay, It's Average (mostly consisting of boring and a few slightly cool voices that spout out badly-translated lines and scream unnaturally), except for a select few characters, most notably Tira. Hearing her shriek out lines such as "I want to see you destroyed! Hahahahahahaha!" just makes people want to see her destroyed, especially when she spews out such horrific, cringeworthy Narm nonsense as "Can I use him? Nah, he's useless!" and "All done! Rich and juicy souls! Just yummy!". No wonder she became The Scrappy of the series (to some people, anyway).
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen. Apparently the developers couldn't get Colm Meaney to reprise his role as Chief O'Brien... so instead they got some guy doing a terrible fake Irish accent.
• Midnight Club II has mediocre voice acting for the majority of the game, but the last boss will repeatedly call you an "asswipe" in a cheesy French accent, in pure Narm fashion. It's that much worse when you realize he's supposed to be Russian.
• MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries is notable for having characters' voices change randomly from line to line, including at least one instance of gender bending in the mission "Wolf Trial"; the last mission of the Steiner campaign. At the start (when the Clanners challenge you and announce what Mechs they are going to use) the third pilot, Zel Vickers, is male. However during the mission, Vickers taunts you before attacking in what is clearly a woman's voice.
• The XCOM clone series UFO After Blank featured a multi-ethnic cast of characters obviously voiced by a cast of about five voice actors doing terrible accents. It was funny for about five minutes.
• The Bloody Roar series may not be the best or most memorable fighter series out there and could very well pass as okay at best, but by the time Bloody Roar 4 came around, Hudson appeared to have given up on it. Aside from the bugs, the character imbalances, the character and story derailment, the worst aspects have to be the dialogue and voice acting. As this reviewer pointed out, a majority of these voice actors had little to no experience in voice acting prior to Bloody Roar 4. Of the ones that did, they haven't done any work since this game, and the only exception to either of the rules was among the original cast of the narm-infested Resident Evil. With the way the dialogue runs off or cuts out quickly, the tones flying all over the place and how stupid the characters sound in general, it's very easy to believe the aforementioned reviewer's theory that all of the voice actors were paid to do just one take of all the dialogue in recording and leave Hudson to do a cut-and-paste patch job with the results. And it doesn't help that the dialogue doesn't sync with the Japanese lip-synching left in all versions of the game.
  • What's worse with the above example is that Primal Fury/Extreme (the Nintendo Game Cube and Xbox Updated Rereleases of 3, respectively) actually hired big-name VAs to voice the cast. Read through that list, and you're bound to ask yourself "Why the HELL did they not keep these guys?" Oh well; at least the cheesy voice acting can provide you with some kicks.
• Dawn of War: Soulstorm is a veritable fountain of bad voice acting. Much of it, such as Brother-Captain Indrick Boreale's infamous "SPESS MEHRENS" speech and Lord Carron's METAL BAWKSES!!!, live on through YouTube and Memetic Mutation. Other characters... not so much:
  • [in an incredibly bored voice] "Damn them. Fight for all you're worth, soldiers. We've got to win this."
  • A lot of the voice acting is genuinely entertaining due to its over-the-topness, but the incredibly robotic Warlock in Upper Wastes is outright painful to hear.
• Galerians had atrocious voice acting all around. Special mention goes to the scene between Rion, Cain, and Lilia where Cain's VA decided it would be good if he forced a laugh into every line.
• While there are a handful of voice actors in the English dub of Arc Rise Fantasia who have potential, most of them just sound cheap^note Unsurprisingly, a good deal of the voice cast only worked on Arc and nothing else before or after. The acting of most is contrived and forced, not helped by the poorly-localized script (not even in a "Blind Idiot" Translation way; more in a "translation for subtitles" way). Lip Lock is also a major issue, as some voice actors seem to care, others don't (Niko's voice actor, for example, who seems too busy focusing on doing his undefinable accent to care about synchrony).
• Limbo of the Lost has literally only three people doing voices. What makes this worse is that the script sounds like it was Babelfished from another language and that Spooner Briggs' VA does most of the other cast. His only method of changing his voice is to sound congested or mumble, so there's a large amount of the same person talking to himself. The subtitles are also noteworthily hackeneyed, but that's neither here nor there.
• The Sega CD version of Eye of the Beholder had universally awful voice acting, from a dwarf who sounded like a chain-smoking Yoda to an evil wizard who sounded like Sesame Street's Grover with adenoids. Most of the rest of the voice cast is stilted and dry in the best/worst non-actor style. As in "asking the receptionist to come in and read on her coffee break."
• Diddy Kong Racing had voices for each character that were very well suited to their appearance and personality. The Nintendo DS remake, however, did away with all of these and replaced them with emotionless actors who apparently simply couldn't be arsed to get into, or even be relevant to, their roles. Of note are Timber, who in the original had a rather cute child's voice but now possesses a deep/gruff Australian-accented voice for no reason whatsoever; Bumper, who had a fan-favorite voice in the original game but now has a completely unremarkable and forced-sounding tone; and newly-added Tiny Kong, who was "aged" to her teens for this game but still retains her high-pitched kiddie-voice from Donkey Kong 64, leading to a surprisingly disturbing dissonance. Perhaps worst of all is Taj the elephant-genie, who had an appropriate Middle Eastern-sounding voice in the original, but now has a flat British accent, a very quiet voice, and the absolute least emotion of any character in the game (which is definitely saying something). Wizpig is now an unamusing Large Ham as well.
• Valis II and III for the TurboGrafx-CD have quite laughable English voice acting, especially from the villains. Valis II also suffered from a dub script so sloppy that the name of the game was pronounced "Varis."
• King's Quest V has a better excuse than most games here: the CD-ROM version was one of the first games ever to feature full voice acting. Unfortunately, this meant Sierra had to use its own employees, none of whom could act worth a damn. Graham and the narrator were at least somewhat acceptable (although the narrator had several obvious page cuts left in). But on the other end of the spectrum, you had a helium-addled elf, an ear-bleedingly bad wolf, a "pOIsonous" owl (no wonder he's The Scrappy) and several people in between that could never read their scripts right, pronounced words wrong, and generally made most of the cutscenes a chore once the novelty wore off. The best part? You can't turn the voices off.
  • Sierra also apparently had no idea how to do voice recording. Much of the audio sounds like it was recorded in a closet with terrible acoustics and a $10 mike. You might cut them some slack considering all the audio is 8 bits 11kHz, but it sounds even worse than what you'd expect at that technology level. In spite of all this, fans have latched onto King Graham's voice actor Josh Mandel, who had possibly the best performance in the whole game. AGD even got him to play Graham in their Fan Remakes of King's Quest II and III.
  • Strangely enough, Sierra never learned its lesson, really. Although they had some games with awesome voice acting (King's Quest VI, Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory IV), some were terrible despite not having the "lack of experience" excuse. Police Quest 4 had awful voice acting, compounded by the fact that the game used filmed actors for the character sprites, and then used different actors for the voices, leading to strange disconnect between what certain characters sound and look like.
• Stranded 2. "That Won't Work Don't Be Stupid IT'S NOT WHEERKING Don't Be Stupid Did You Even Think That Would Work IT'S NOT WHEERKING Don't Be Stupid That WON'T WHEERK IT'S... TOO... HEAVY I CAN'T CARRY ANYTHING MORE Don't Be Stupid IT'S NOT WHEEERKING"...
• The pretty dire action RPG Requital has some truly abysmal voice overs and bizarre dialogue including horrible lines such as "You are welcome, son of a good mother".
• Jake from Rune Factory 2. His English voice actor is easily the worst performance in the series. He has one of the most nasal voices out of any of the characters, and the overacting on the part of his VA just adds to the awfulness. Some in the fandom suspect that the reason Natsume shelled out extra money for professional voice work in the third game (the fourth was translated by XSEED Games, which previously published Rune Factory Frontier, instead) is because of the reception Jake's VA and other poor performances got from the English fandom.
• The English version of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn had voice acting that flew somewhere between wooden, overeager, and just plain grating for nearly everyone. But one scene in particular stood out in every player's mind as either a very sour note, or delicious narm: "Ike's Memory Scene." A dramatic flashback of Ike witnessing his mother's death, and standing still in traumatized silence, the scene comes across as very sorrowful in spite of Mist's shrill screeching... until child!Ike opens his mouth and begins screaming in his super-gruff adult voice.
• Prinny 2 does have a good amount of voice acting, but the direction for the returning character voices is pretty terrible all around. The new Hero Prinny lacks any sort of emotion, Etna sounds more like a bored primadonna than the egomaniac tyrant she's supposed to be, and Flonne, despite retaining her original VA, barely has any inflection or effort in her lines. And then there's what they did to Laharl...
  • On the topic of Disgaea, Adell's VA in Disgaea Dimension 2. NISA may not have been able to secure the original VA and this may just be DLC, but his voice acting here is inexcusable. While some people found Adell's original English voice to be at odds with his Hot-Blooded personality, this one is much worse, having an annoying high voice with absolutely no inflection or effort put into any of his lines. Heck, even the quality of the recording on the voice sounds terrible.
• While most of the voice acting in World of Warcraft is fine, there are a few bosses that have awful voice acting. Rotface and Festergut have very annoying voices, but they're bearable. The prize goes to Lady Deathwhisper and Sindragosa of Icecrown Citadel. Deathwhisper is incredibly hammy and over the top, and the voice is harsh and obnoxious. If you pull her in the middle of her speech, she'll actually say her speech and her emotes at the same time. Sindragosa is even worse: she SCREAMS at you every time she puts up her debuff. "SUFFER MORTALS AS YOUR PATHETIC MAGIC BETRARARARAAGHAGHGHAGHAARAAYS YOU!".
• The only reasonably good voice in Orphen: Scion of Sorcery was the title character himself, who was fortunate enough to be voiced by Quinton Flynn (also responsible for Axel from Kingdom Hearts and Reno from the English dub of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children). Everyone else just sounded like they were reading a shopping list, with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. The rest of the game wasn't that great either, but the voice acting was just painful. And unfortunately, it didn't have the option for Japanese voices, so you were stuck with the horrible English ones if you decided to play it.
• Enjoy this in all its cringeworthy glory: The Top 10 Worst RPG Dubs. It features the notoriously bad English dub of the first Grandia game, and worse.
• Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds overall had very good voice acting, with most of the cast of the show lending their voices to their characters; even Sarah Michelle Gellar's replacement is spot-on, as she was in the first game. However, one notable exception is Willow, whose breathy, vacant, sleepy-sounding performance is just painful to listen to.
• The Town with No Name, already an infamously bad game on its own, deserves special mention for its voice acting; things like the bartender with the bad Irish accent or the horrific singing during the inexplicable "sex for eight days" sequence are bad enough, but the worst is the main character, who spends the entire game trying to sound like John Wayne, yet keeps talking in a grating nasal drone that couldn't have sounded more robotically deadpan^note Slowbeef described it as "John Wayne with a stroke.". It probably doesn't help that the audio more often than not cuts off midway through sentences.
  • What about the "mini-boss" that speaks in a racist Mexican accent... even though he doesn't even remotely look like he's supposed to be Mexican!!
  • For the last two "mini-bosses" before the final boss, one of them sounds like they took a horrifically wrong turn into Camp Gay, while the other sounds more robotically deadpan than even the main character himself. You can check it out here.
• The cast of Gotcha Force sounds like they were voiced by people who hadn't ever seen the English language on paper, let alone in a script. Intonations are all over the place, some words are pronounced wrong wholesale, and several of the characters (Orochi gets special mention) sound like their lines are being read with all of the emotion and presence of a surgery outpatient full of high-grade anaesthetic.
  • Not to mention that the Galactic Emperor's voice sounds like it was recorded in one take, pushed through some cheap filtering effects, and considered good enough for the final game. The repeated "wah ha ha ha ha!"s (read word-for-word off the script) are among the least intimidating evil laughs to be found in any form of media.
• The Star Ocean series, in general, has voice acting that ranges from "passable but generic" to "cringe-inducingly bad."
  • Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has all but one female party member talk in squeaky, annoyingly-high-pitched voices that get old fast. And the one female party member who doesn't sound that way has two lackeys that follow her, both of whom sound like they couldn't care less about anything. The men in the party don't sound much better, either; most of their lines come across as Narm.
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope features decent performances from Matthew Mercer and Kyle Hebert as Edge and Arumat, respectively. But Sarah and Meracle's voices inflect almost at random, and sound either totally flat or totally wrong for the scene. The voice acting was so horribly directed, the Updated Re-release on the PS3 actually made sure to include the option to choose the original Japanese voices.
• Trouble Witches NEO! got a pretty terrible English dub. The cast are likely not fluent in English (e.g. Lyla^note who's easily one the worst of the bunch with her Tommy Wiseau-esque performance, Al the Black Cat^note who is given a female voice, and yet fails miserably sounding as a male, Sakurako^note although she has the "best" English out of the three (which isn't saying much) and her lines aren't quite as awkwardly delivered as the former two, her performance could probably be written off as In-Universe Gratuitous English by a generous enough player), sound incredibly slow (e.g. Pril, Venus / Twinkle), have a really annoying voice (e.g. Malcom when he goes evil mode), or have all the emotions of a toaster, maybe less (e.g. Blizzard, Symphony, Spool). There are some decent ones, like Amalgam / Almagam and Aqua Seep Seal (sometimes), and some of the actors seem to have their hearts in it^note like Conan and Lilly, but it still ends up being So Bad, It's Good at best. These are just a few examples. Enjoy.
  • One can hear Uruchi's voice actor reading a line once and then recording an alternate take in the same audio file.
• The Nintendo DS reboot of Snowboard Kids was pretty bad across the board. It was the worst type of reboot, as it was unfaithful to the original games, and objectively terrible when judged by its own merits. One of the problems was the voice acting. The characters were supposed to be in their late teens, yet they sounded 12. Also, one of the returning characters from the original games was retconned into having a heavy, highly stereotypical accent.
• While the Armored Core series has been known to have some pretty bad English dubbing, V takes the cake as the worst. The delivery of dialogue both out of combat and in is precisely the same (i.e. bored indifference), responses are pronounced way out of context (see the Nice Job Breaking It, Hero example above), and the narrator sounds like he's five minutes away from his lunch break and is just phoning it in. Gamespot listed the voice acting as negative in and of itself, something they almost never do.
• The MMORPG Divine Soul has horrendous voice acting. Nobody even tries to sound natural.
• Fallout: New Vegas has rather good voice acting for the most part, but one character, Mean Sonofabitch, the Super Mutant guard in Westside, had a rather glaring error in his voicing. His character suffers from a speech impediment, due to NCR troops cutting part of his tongue out. As such, he spoke incorrectly, naturally, with many of those mispronunciations written out in his subtitles. However, the voice actor wasn't told how to pronounce "Wesibe", his bastardization of Westside. Instead of saying "WES-sibe", he said "we-SEE-bay", really killing a touching moment of a poor, innocent victim who was victimized for a laugh by soldiers in what the game usually regards as the "good guys", to the degree that New Vegas has "good guys".
• Most of the voicing in Blood II sounds like the developers just grabbed the nearest intern and told him or her to read out the lines, with no context whatsoever. The VAs of the main characters are the only ones who put in any effort.
• Tats Tops Videos did a (now private only) Top 50 Worst Voice Acting in Games^note in case you're wondering about why they mistakenly listed Star Ocean: The Second Story but showed Star Ocean: Till the End of Time instead, they weren't familiar with the series and didn't know much about it video, featuring some of the games listed here and some games that will make you wish you never heard of them (literally and figuratively speaking).
• The English dub of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia has its ups and downs—the main characters and the Big Bad give good performances, but the two DLC-only characters, RED and 5pb, are pretty bad. It's telling that all of the cutscenes in which either character appears prominently is completely silent (but only in the English dub; they're fully voiced in the original Japanese audio), as their Voice Grunting during battle represents two sides of the bad voice-acting coin: RED's delivery (while perfectly in line with her Genki Girl character) is squeaky and over-emotional, while 5pb's is flat and lacking any inflection.
• No matter your opinion on Super Smash Bros. Crusade, it's easy to agree that Porky's voice acting was done abysmally - he sounds as if he has a perpetual cold, not to mention that he speaks in long sentences whenever he activates one of his highly spammable attacks:
  "Go, my pretty! Go, my pretty! Go, my pretty! Go, my pretty! Why yes, I can see you! Go my pretty! Spankity spankity spankity!"
• The Operation Flashpoint and ARMA series aren't that well known for their quality voice acting. Excluding the well-known stop-start quality of radio transmissions, which is practically a hallmark of both game series, the moments of story-telling voice acting are pretty bad. For ARMA, the voice acting is downright amateurish. The Expansion Pack Private Military Company attempted to make a detailed storyline that was utterly undercut by the poor voice acting, with lines being read by people who sound like they might have had thirty minutes of VA experience. Operation Flashpoint also has its issues. At one point before a mid-game mission in Operation Flashpoint Red River, the guy giving you your mission briefing is supposed to sound like he's a badass Marine commander. But the voice actor tries too hard, sounding instead like he's about one spilled cup of coffee away from a nervous breakdown.
• While the rest of the voice acting for Conception 2: Children Of The Seven Stars ranges from okay to great, one voice is so terrible that it's exclusively met with at least distaste: Torri's. Her voice sounds like she has her nose clogged when she talks, and sounds so terrible that she went from the most popular character to the least popular one the moment her character video was released. It's easier to just show you than explain.
• House of the Dead's widespread reputation comes not from its zombie killing action, but rather it infamously laughable voice acting of the first two games. However, special mention goes to Caleb Goldman, whose "Loyfe Cycle Empurr" speech and his "Coylum" last words is so monotonous that fans did not take his zombie threats seriously at all ^note until House of the Dead 4, where his voice acting is dramatically improved to the point of being genuinely intimidating. Thankfully, 3 and 4 have much improved voice acting.
• OverBlood is a budget title, so it makes sense it wouldn't have good acting. The main character overacts everything and everyone else sound bored or worse. The sequel, though, features better voice actors, but worse mixing, with most lines being too quiet, too muddled with their accents, or worse. It doesn't help that there is quite a bit of talking in this game, and that half the time, lines just cut out in the middle of a sentence.
• EGOSOFT's X-Universe series of games are infamous for their terrible voiceacting, typically due to using non-native speakers for the dubs. Odd pauses that cause sentences to seem over before they are, weird pronunciation, corny dialogue, and Mad Libs Dialogue has caused many players to mute voiceovers entirely. X: Rebirth uses native speakers with better pronunciation and drops the Mad Libs Dialogue, but ramps up the narmy dialogue; pilots spontaneously flip between being rude jackasses to polite, and your crew inevitably sounds like a bunch of incompetent idiots.
• Dead or Alive 2 Hardcore for the Play Station 2 was the first entry in the Dead Or Alive series to have English voice acting...very bad English voice acting. Bass is the only character in the entire game who gives a good performance, while everyone else sounds bored or otherwise completely uninterested. Tina has an very unconvincing Southern accent, Kasumi sounds like a twelve year-old girl, but the worst offender of them all is Helena, a French woman who speaks without any trace of a French accent. And on top of that, none of the characters' battle cries or grunts were dubbed (except for Tengu, the final boss). Listen for yourself here, and here.
• Some of the Mega Man games were infamous for their voice acting, particularly Mega Man 8 (which provides the page quote), Mega Man X4, and Mega Man X7.
  • Mega Man 8 suffered from horribly wooden acting. Mega Man's voice actress doesn't even try to sound like a boy (to the point where even Roll sounds more masculine than him), and she mispronounces Bass' name (you'd think with his dog being named Treble, she'd get a clue that Bass wasn't named after a fish). The worst by far, however, is the voice actor for Dr. Light. Not only does his portrayal suffer from a severe case of Elmuh Fudd Syndwome, but at one point, he stumbles on one of his lines without a second take:
  Dr. Light: "YOU MUST WECOVAH AWW THE ENEGY IMEDILY, W-MEGAMAN!"
  • Mega Man X4 has most of the same issues. While Mega Man's voice in 8 was unfitting, it was at least understandable since he's supposed to be built like a child. However, the voice actress gives the exact same performance for X, who was designed to look like an adult. Colonel and Iris, who are supposed to be siblings, have inconsistent accents (with Colonel having a British accent and Iris slipping from sounding British to sounding like a Southern Belle). The General sounds completely emotionless. Then we have Zero's infamous "WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOR!?" cry that completely ruined Iris's death scene. Sigma is the only character whose voice actor sounded like he was trying, but only for the Large Ham aspect.
  • Mega Man X7 can be debatably considered worse than Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X4. While the voice acting in those were bad, they were at least limited to FM Vs and battle grunts. Every level in X7, on the other hand, had voice acted cutscenes. X, while at least voiced by a male this time around, suffers from Dull Surprise. Axl sounds way too young, despite being designed like a teenager. He would also sound whiny most of the time, even when he’s not complaining. Signas whispers almost all of his dialogue. Sigma sounds like a mix between Cookie Monster and Dr. Claw, which is much worse than it sounds. Red was voiced by the same actor who voiced Barry Burton, and his performance hasn’t gotten better. Tornado Tonion sounds like an obnoxious Camp Gay stereotype with an accent that even Tommy Wiseau wouldn’t figure out. Finally, the most infamous performance came from Flame Hyanard, who screams all of his dialogue and would repeat “BURN! BURN TO THE GROUND!” The only voice actors who sound okay are Zero and Alia, but even they have their moments of flatness and/or annoyance. It’s especially worth noting that Zero and Axl’s voice actors would later appear in Tekken 5 as Raven and Anna respectively, and would give much better performances in that game, so this could mostly be blamed on bad direction. It wouldn’t be until Mega Man X8 that we would get some decent English voice acting in the X series.
• There are a lot of debates over the Kingdom Hearts community as to who has one of the worst voice acting. However, it is universally accepted that Mena Suvari as Aerith from the second game has one of the worst performances in the game, what her awkward pauses, her emotionless delivery, and her overall lack of any enthusiasm in her voice. She got replaced immediately by Andrea Bowen, who managed to deliver a much better performance in Crisis Core.
• In Crash Nitro Kart, most of the characters sound pretty decent, but Crash himself is voiced by Steve Blum of all people, who uses an unusually high pitched voice that sounds nothing like him. If that isn't Playing Against Type taken to its logical conclusion, I don't know what is!
• A game called Dark Years, which was covered by Jim Sterling, may be, as the video seems to indicate, the preferred choice on a list like that one for The New Tens. The game is a murder-mystery drama set in 1950's London, but you would not be able to tell from the voice acting as it is a random mishmash of very incomprehensible accents with no coherence to the setting and communicating nothing but the most basic of information to play the game properly. The worst part is that it is a finished product as opposed to being in early access, which, considering the general hideous-looking aesthetics of the game, would have been a better choice. On a side note, plenty of viewers seem to be convinced that this is the video game equivalent of The Room .
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Some of the unique voices are okay, but all of the various townspeople and guards all clearly draw from the same tiny pool of voice actors, creating an auditory version of You All Look Familiar. As if that's not bad enough, sone of that voice acting is also awful. There are numerous cases of EmPHAsis On The Wrong SylLAble and Dull Surprise as a result. The low-rent nature of the voice acting is readily apparent before the player even gets into the game proper, actually, if choosing to play as an orc the Imperial soldier Hadvar asks if they're from one of the nearby strongholds, but accidentally poses it as a statement instead of a question. Of course, one of the worst examples...

  Horrified Townsperson: (sleepily and monotone) Oh no. It's the dragon. It's attacking...

• While the dubbing of Bravely Default is overall excellent, it has one major weakness in a certain character, Egil. Getting an actual child to voice the character would seem like a commendable decision, but you'll quickly realise why most vocal productions opt for Cross-Dressing Voices instead. Even when talking about his future aspirations or the death of his parents, this kid sounds wooden and emotionless.
• Sonic Adventure generally had So Bad, It's Good English voice acting, but there's one character who definitely qualifies for this page: TAILS. He was voiced by a pre-pubescent boy (Corey Bringas), and it shows. Not only is his acting bad, but even the sound quality of his lines is terrible. Sonic Adventure 2, in which Tails was voiced by Corey's younger brother, Connor Bringas, was just as bad in terms of voice acting, but at least the sound quality improved. Just imagine what it would sound like if you took a random eight-year-old off the street and told him to do the lines for this character and that's pretty much what Tails sounds like. Thankfully later games would have him voiced by adult females.
  • From the same game, while Sonic and Knuckles generally did a (reasonably) good job with their voice acting, there's their monotone "Oh no." whenever they get hit during the fight between them. Knuckles in particular sounds so emotionless when he says that that it's almost like his voice actor was deliberately doing a monotone. Sonic's "Watch out! You're gonna crash! Ahh!" (where the "Ahh!" sounds less like a cry of concern for his best friend and more like he just figured something out) is probably worthy of mention too, though it's worth pointing out that it was just as bad in the Japanese version.
• Sonic Heroes should be mentioned too. Most of the voice acting is acceptable, but Tails (again), still voiced by a pre-pubescent boy, is given a nasally and inappropriately whiny tone. Probably worst of all is Charmy, voiced in an incredibly grating falsetto by a woman who isn't at all trying to sound like a young boy. As cheesy as the 4Kids voice cast could be at times, at least it gave Charmy a tolerable voice.
• Done for Stylistic Suck in Water Hazard, which has amateur acting with inexplicable accents and affected delivery to imitate the horrible voice acting common in the PS 1 era. The best part is the sea monster that makes very human, cartoony biting noises.
• George from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is an 11-year-old child with a mature adult man's voice and a horrible, wooden delivery. The rest of the characters have really good voice performances (barring the odd silly accent), which just makes it stick out more. It was possibly difficult enough to find a Guanese Creole-speaking American voice actor at all...

Dutch

• The Dutch version of Earth 2140, the obscure predecessor of Earth 2150 had the unit's voices dubbed in Dutch. This is already odd, as games not aimed at children below the age of 6 generally keep the English voices. But what made this odd was the spectacularly bad job they did with all the cloned super-soldiers being voiced in the most wooden, monotone, stilted voice that by a man who sounded like he was in his 50's and worked in a nursing home with easily excitable heart attack patients. After the humor wore off, you'd switch to the UCS campaign, since all their soldiers were machines and only made bleeping noises.
• Professor Layton: Pandora's Box was translated into multiple languages for its European release. The German and Spanish voice acting wasn't so bad, but the Dutch one... Your ears will burn.

Polish

• The Polish dub of Jagged Alliance 2.5: Unfinished Business replaces original voices with atrocities most probably recorded by an ensemble of small-town winos. Most of the voices don't even resemble the originals!
  • The Polish dub of a Russian Jagged Alliance rip-off titled Brigade E5 is just atrocious and coupled with a "Blind Idiot" Translation just to give you that extra kick in the nuts. The horrid imitations of various accents (especially one of the selectable main characters, a French woman who says French words with a Polish accent or Punny Named Swiss guy Cheez and his annoying pseudo-German "rrr") top the So Bad, It's Horrible list.
• The Polish translation of Far Cry. "Blind Idiot" Translation, synchronization thrown out the window, and worst of all, most (if not all) of the voices don't fit the characters at all (for starters, they made Jack Carver sound like a Bishōnen!). The dub was so bad, its Polish publisher redubbed it and released the corrected translation as a patch. It was still far from perfect, but at least straddled the line between So Bad, It's Good and So Bad, It's Horrible this time around.
  • Another thing, mostly about the applying the voice acting itself: they forgot to translate some of the lines and the enemies spoke in English at times.
• The Polish dub of Rainbow Six: Vegas is just as mind-rapingly bad as the Far Cry example above, mostly because it was made by the same company and shares at least part of the actors. First, thanks to bad translation, all the military jargon sounds fake. Second, Logan's gasping when he's wounded easily qualifies as the Most Annoying Sound. Third, Spanish voices have been left intact and whenever the enemies are supposed to speak English (or Polish in this case), the voices barely match. Fourth, Mission Control is voiced by the resident "tough grrrrl!" voice actress.
• Schizm: Mysterious Journey is a particularly bizarre example. Produced and developed in Poland, all of the characters are depicted by (amateur) live actors, who delivered their lines in English, and then had them re-dubbed by professional English actors in The Netherlands. What makes the voice acting bad is that the English dubbing actors had to accommodate all of the pauses and in-fluencies done by the Polish actors to facilitate synchronism, resulting in some very odd utterances. Examples can be seen here. Still, at least the game makes up for it with the graphics.
• Afterfall: Insanity takes the cake. Even with professional actors, the dubbing is still unbearable. The characters sound either emotionally stunted or very confused - this could be excusable, since a lot of them are at least slightly disturbed people, but the main character's delivery might as well be a shopping list. Examples include: Defending himself from accusations of sabotage and blaming his superior for it: mild irritation. A (still powered) neon sign almost dropped on his head: mild surprise. Unleashing a Cluster F-Bomb when pushed to his limits: you'd expect an explosion of rage, but it sounds more like frustrated muttering. His girlfriend is aiming a gun at him and accusing him of betrayal: dull surprise. And unlike many other characters, Albert is voiced by a relatively popular drama actor (who also played Geralt in the live action adaptation of The Witcher... which should explain a lot.).

French

• The French dub of Kessen 2 for the PS2 was also a (quite obscure) source of hilarity. Mostly because the voice actors had an extremely strong accent from the region of Marseilles. Let's just say it had the same effect as having Roman warriors talking with a Cockney accent.

German

• The German dub of the original The Force Unleashed was okay (not that great with pronouncing Coruscant as "CorusAAAAHN" and Vader sounding nothing like in the movies) but Tatooine turned it down to zero with Obi-Wan and Palpatine being 20-ish dudes...and Palpatine having the worst impression of him in all of existence.
  • The DLCs make no attempt at doing their jobs right. A dialogue from the Jedi Temple DLC has the character talking when his mouth is shut and him being silent when he moves his lips.
  • Darth Vader is justified, as the voice is more or less identical to the classic American Vader. The German dubs before TFU were always content with Vader speaking a little like when you put a plastic cup on your mouth with breathing in the background.
• Assassin's Creed is rather well made in Germany, though there are a handful of characters that stand out like the occasional civilian, and in Assassin's Creed II, La Volpe (probably same 20ish dude as The Force Unleashed Obi-Wan from above) where the latter thankfully got a fitting actor for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. The Bonfire of the Vanities dub is a milestone as they apparently didn't record the mob voices, which leads to Ezio and Savonarola shouting "SILENZIO!" to an already completely silent city.

Russian

• Men of War is a very good game, but the voice actors are apparently all Swedish trying to sound like a German trying to sound like an Italian who is trying to sound Russian. One of the best voice actors in the game is Russian and whilst all his peers have awful Russian accents, his is British.
• Dragon Age: Origins' official Russian dub. Not a single blunder has been edited out.

Italian

• The Italian dub of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2. And that's not self-deprecation. Bland, emotionless voices and bad acting. The final blow is Lyran the Lich: in English he has a deep voice, the Spanish one sounds like chalks on a board but at least is fitting and scary, but the Italian one... dear god.... he has an extremely high-pitched, ridicolous voice who's pure Narm and totally kills the mood.
• Polda 5 is a rather obscure point-and-click, Surreal Humour-driven adventure game from the Czech Republic. Oddly enough, it was the only game in the series to be exported in Italy and had its title changed to ''Agente 610''. While the gameplay remained unchanged, the translation and dubbing were atrocious. Everything was directly and literlly translated from Czech, resulting in hilariously nonsensical things like a "Water Ship" (a pitcher) and a "Syphon" (a newspaper), an agent shouting "Cold!" (it was supposed to say "Freeze!"), and sublime Dadaist lines like "There once grew a twig that I need to have, whatever it takes" and "If it wasn't a cat, I wonder how a pig got there". Then we get to the actual dubbing. It was done by only three people who were bored out their minds and put no emotion whatsoever in their performance. For no reason, some of the characters had the most unfitting accent possible assigned to them (i.e. a pharaoh's guard with a heavy Sicilian accent). Just one playthrough is enough to cause earaches and vomit. Hear this masterpiece of a dubbing in this guy's review, with commentary and gameplay analysis (in Italian).

Japanese

• A simple Youtube search will tell you exactly how embarrassing Modern Warfare 2 sounds when it's dubbed in Japanese, not to mention a "Blind Idiot" Translation on the most controversial mission of the game. Even the demographics of this version (i.e Japanese gamers) expressed disgust toward the voice acting, so many insisted on importing the American version instead.

Spanish

• The "Neutral Spanish" dub for Halo 2. After the Latin Americans complained about the Spaniard dub job for the first game, Microsoft decided to provide a single "Neutral Spanish" dub for both Spain and Latin America, and to this purpose, they commisioned a dubbing studio in Miami to do the job. Except that the studio seemingly was staffed by Cuban and Puerto Rican ex-pats who then tried to mimic other Latin American and Spanish accents. The final product ended up having a lot of glaring translation mistakes, strange sentences, odd phrases, undefinable-sounding accents, even worse acting and unfitting voices. Fortunately, Microsoft learned from this experience, and from Halo 3 and on, they did a dub for the Spaniards and one for the Latin American market (most of them dubbed in Mexico nowadays), with better results.
• Each AI Leaders in Civilization V speaks in their own native language with varying qualities depending on the voice actors. However, many consider Spain's leader Isabella as the worst voice in the game not only due to sounding too young but also show little to no emotion in her voice, and not in an intentional way either. Case in point, when you declare war on her, she calls you a spawn of the devil...In the most monotonous way possible.

• RWBY suffered from a severe case of Dull Surprise in the first season, particularly from Blake and Weiss. Ruby's voice actress seemed to be the only one who was trying. This was particularly jarring since most of the voice actors were in Red Vs Blue, and have given decent performances in them. Thankfully, starting from season two, the cast underwent Vocal Evolution, and by season three, they have veteran voice actors such as Yuri Lowenthal and Vic Mignogna doing voice work in it.

Multiple Languages

• The Simpsons: Across the globe, in most foreign dubs, there's one character that almost nobody but the original English voice actress (Julie Kavner^note who also voices the women on Marge's side of the family: her sisters Patty and Selma, her mom, Jackie, her aunt Gladys from "Selma's Choice", and an unnamed grandmother on "Fear of Flying") seems to do justice: Marge! Most foreign actresses who try to dub her voice make her sound like a growling witch with laryngitis at worst and a bad amateur imitation of Kavner's performance at best. But the worst offender has to be the Czech voice of Marge, as in the Czech dub, she's obviously voiced by a man.
• Whatever your opinion on Angela Anaconda is, the title character's voice makes Nails on a Chalkboard a half appealing alternative. The Latin Spanish dub marginally improves her voice, making her listenable... as long as she is talking. The intro song, sang in character and with her voice, goes beyond chalkboard screeching and into rotary drill on your skull.
• Titanic: The Legend Goes On:
  • The one with the mice with wildly-varying accents (probably supposed to be Yiddish)? And one of the weirdest examples happens when the ship is sinking: a lady says "You had a tiger on board?" (don't ask). Throughout the entire movie, she'd spoken with a proper, upper-class, British accent. For that one line and that line only, she had a freaking man's voice! And then has her normal voice back by her next line. It's clearly a man imitating a woman's voice there, did the original voice actress have to leave for the bathroom while they were recording or something?
  "My BAAAAAAAAALLLL! It fell down there! MAAIIII BAAHHHHHHLLLLLL!!!!!''
  • The Continental Spanish dub is just as bad, if not worse. They seem to have only two, maybe three, voice actors winging their roles. Also, they didn't bother dubbing the music, the notorious rapping dog included.
  • Another example from the English dub, just before the dog starts rapping, the mouse thanks the dog and says "If it hadn't been for you, I would be now in someone else's digestion!" Did they just paste the script into Babelfish and not bother proofreading it before they started recording?
• The Brave Little Toaster:
  • The 2nd Russian dub is pretty lazy; as the songs vary between a mix of dubbing a few lines, using a Voiceover Translation, and leaving some parts in English. Also, most of the character voices either sound too quiet or not expressive at times.
  • The Croatian dub has a number of problems: First of all, Blanky and the Toaster are given deeper masculine voices that sound nothing like their originals. Second, Lampy is made a female and compared to the other four international female variations of this character (i.e. the Polish, 1992 Czech, German, and 2nd Brazilian Portuguese dubs), this version is just very un-fitting and can sometimes get annoying to listen to. Also, Kirby's voice is too high, so the only main character that sounds decent is Radio. To top it off, a lot of dialog is missing and three of the main songs aren't dubbed at all, so for example, when you hear "City of Light", you can clearly tell the difference in the characters' voices. But most of all, this dub has probably the WORST version of "Worthless" ever! It's basically an instrumental version and most of the dubbing in the song consists of repeated voice clips. The full version of this movie can be seen here.
  • For the 1992 Czech VHS dub, all of the songs are blandly spoken rather than sung and any verse that has multiple characters singing are spoken by only one voice actor, making the songs sound more like a Voiceover Translation without the English vocals. Also, Plugsy is (for some reason) voiced by a woman, who sounds NOTHING like his original voice actor.
  • In the Finnish version, Lampy has a high-pitched scratchy voice, which can become pretty difficult to sit through.
  • The Swedish version of the movie is actually pretty decent, except for the fact that most of the voice acting is either too weak or stuffy, like the film caught a cold.
• Both Hungarian dubs of the 1986 Transformers: The Movie. Issues found in both versions: embarrassingly-small casts; the characters' voices constantly changing; glaring translation errors (Unicron became Uni-CORN?); ignoring already established, official name translations (in the first dub, the Decepticons are called "Toads", while Hot Rod became "Fishing Rod"). On the other hand, even though it left out about half of the dialog and shortened every sentence as much as possible, the first dub had some very witty and clever translations, and the cast was composed of well-known, really talented voice actors. As for the second dub, it was technically more advanced and a number of actors showed actual enthusiasm in their line delivery. But the negatives far, far outweigh the positives.
  • The first dub could hardly even be called a synchronization, as the dialog only rarely matched up to the mouth movements. Many, many silent seconds pass without anyone saying anything, even though they're clearly talking or shouting. And at times, sentences spoken by multiple characters got combined into one! The whole "dub" was essentially just five actors reading a badly (if in places wittily) translated script and trying to follow what they saw on screen, but rarely succeeding. Arguably, it might qualify for So Bad, It's Good, simply for being so hilariously bad. Such lines really make one smile:
    Soundwave: Sondwave is the best. The rest are dumb!^note Especially as Soundwave's name was translated in earlier scenes. The original line is the now memetic "Soundwave superior. Constructicons inferior.", by the way.
  • Also the first Italian dub of the G1 Series. Season 1 and first 6-7 episodes of Season 2 are well done, after that... The whole dubbing cast changes. The characters have random accents or sound like total morons. The worst offenders are French Metroplex, but also Retarded Skywarp, Whistling Broadside, Siren-like cadence First Aid, Rhyming Blaster, and Rodimus Prime as Principal Skinner. That was fixed with the 2008 redub of the first two seasons... but then Season 3 was redubbed in 2011...well, not so much "redubbed" as "fandubbed by the hosts of a kids' TV show for aired only in a few places just for the sake of having a new dub to air their show, since the old one is no longer available". Galvatron is the only one who counts as passable.
  • Germany's second TF: The Movie dub is about on the same level as the second Hungarian one. While the first one had its share of problems, it did an okay job of adapting the film to German audiences. The later DVD dub is however pitiful in every respect — shrill, annoying voices, badly translated, unnatural sounding dialog, and cheap voice-altering effects layered on top of amateurish VA performances. Optimus Prime even starts out tal-king like a life-less ro-bot. See here for a comparison between the original English and the two German dub variations.
• Phineas of Phineas and Ferb has a very poor singing voice in the Latin American dub (but not the Castilian Spanish dub). Just hear how he sings "Gitchie Gitchie Goo", and that was just the second version. The first version showed how much the dubbers cared. Also, Candace has a poor singing voice when she's allergic to wild parsnips in the Russian dub. Just hear how she sings "E.V.I.L. B.O.Y.S.".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has been dubbed into dozens of different languages, and the dubs run the gamut from pretty good (coming close to one-upping the English original) to mind-breakingly bad, depending on the language or even individual characters.
  • The Macedonian dub turned Applejack and Rainbow Dash into male ponies; the Brazilian dub is infamous for giving Rainbow Dash a male-sounding voice; the French dub, while otherwise good, gave Pinkie Pie an oddly low pitched voice that doesn't convey her hyperactivity at all; the Japanese version, while for the most part awesome, made Ahuizotl sound like a gruff high school aged football jock; the Romanian dub can never find the beat in the songs (and Rarity can't sing); etc.
  • The Czech dub is legendary for its sensory-mangling badness that's comparable to the Czech dub of The Simpsons. The songs are badly sung (except for the Cutie Mark Crusaders Theme, which sounds better than their other efforts, even though that song is supposed to sound terrible), the voice actors for all the characters sound weird, and there are many more examples or what you shouldn't do when dubbing a show.
  • The Hungarian dub has some nasty casting calls as well: Spike sounds like Bugs Bunny, Rainbow Dash sounds like an old woman, Shining Armor's first voice is too young, and Derpy Hooves, Photo Finish, June Bug, and even Babs Seed are obviously all voiced by men.
  • Swedish Pinkie Pie. While her acting itself is decent, she has a really false, jarring and annoying laughter; accompanied with an absolutely terrible singing voice. Which is funny, when you take into account that Pinkie Pie is the pony who sings the most, and all the other Swedish singing voices in the dub are really good.
  • The Croatian dub. Both the voice actors and voice acting are rather shoddy; most voices don't fit their characters (Spike sounds like a late teenager, for example) and oftentimes aren't very expressive (like the river serpent's sobbing in the first episode), and there are also other flaws like missing dialogue (with The Ticket Song being one of the worst offenders), lazy audio editing, characters repeating parts or even entirety of their lines and cases where the singing characters have the exact same voice and/or just one voice when there's clearly multiple characters, like in Art of the Dress.
    • There's also the fact the voice actors are inconsistent at times (Twilight briefly gets voiced by a man for instance), some songs have lyrics and sometimes audio itself blatantly taken from one of the Serbian dubs, some characters names and song lyrics sound stupid or make little to no sense at all (e.g. "Scootaloo" ended up being named "Skakutalo" which basically translates to something like "Springy" or "Jumpy" which doesn't fit her at all), and the CMC theme sounds worse that it should.
    • What's even more saddening about this is that the dub had the potential to be genuinely good only to be ruined by unknown circumstances. Basically, a professional dubbing company known as Project 6 (which is known for its impeccable job of dubbing shows like Timon & Pumbaa) considered dubbing this show, having done a demo dub of episode 3 (so far, only clips like this one can be found), but unfortunately the full rights were allotted to a less known (and obviously unprofessional) company instead and as a result the dub ended up being a sloppy mess rather than the decent dub it should've been.
• The Fairly OddParents!
  • The French dub has slowly fallen into this over the past 9 years. After the dubbing moved from Belgium to France, every last voice actor was replaced, including Cosmo's (whose dubber had moved to France after the recast and failed to reclaim his role). The new voices are particularly miscast, such as Wanda having an insanely childish voice.
  • Denmark has 2 dubs. One quite good at Disney Channel, another at Nickelodeon. In the original English version, Tara Strong is known for voicing Timmy squeaky but making it work with her own charm, but the Danish Nick dub took out the charm and turned the squeakiness Up To Eleven, leading to the main character having a Hell Is That Noise voice.
• SpongeBob SquarePants
  • While the Japanese dub is hit (SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs) or miss (Patrick sounds like a child!), nobody will be able to take Plankton's Japanese voice seriously at all. Not only is he voiced by a woman (Chie Matsuura), but he sounds like a loli schoolgirl or Happy from Fairy Tail! Averted in the Japanese dub of the movies, where Patrick and Plankton are voiced by men.
  • In the Russian dub, Mr. Krabs sounds really gruff in the first few episodes of season 1.

English

• While Boys of Valor is already infamous on its own for its crude animation, the voice acting is even worse. The titular Boys of Valors' voices (who are, mind you, the actors of who the characters are supposed to be based on) appear to sound muffled and monotonous, evident by the way they put very little effort into their voicing and constantly mispronounce the word "valor". One of the oldest brother' actors literally phoned in his lines. The villains aren't any better - Most of the Mooks and the main villain, the Spirit of Division, have very poor low-pitched voice acting editing, and one has a very unfitting simpleton voice. Not to mention the Damsel in Distress in the second episode is very clearly a man attempting to do a feminine voice, but without putting any effort into disguising this.
• Try listening to Edmund in Rock-A-Doodle. Hell, try watching any scene that has him in it and see if you want to tear out your eardrums from his insistent Elmuh Fudd Syndwome and general mangling of the English language.
• There's this unknown movie called The Christmas Tree, and...the voice acting is just stiff, wooden, and completely emotionless. Nobody even TRIES to throw any emotion in it at all, and the only decent voice in the movie is the old evil orphanage lady, and even then she sounds battier than your normal hysterical woman. All but one of the child characters are voiced by actual children (note that the term "child ACTOR" was not used in the preceding sentence). Many of the children's lines are so slurred you can't understand what they're saying! Nobody had the sense to say, "Cut! Retake this scene!"? Not that this is the only thing wrong with this movie, though.
• The 1990's redubs of Thunderbirds done for FOX Kids. The entire cast consisted of only 4 voice actors, none of whom have any other credits to their name. Most voices sound the same, and almost all are bland and devoid of emotion. This is not helped by the fact that the episodes were cut down from an hour to 30 minutes, but still not excusable.
  • Even the other 90's slaughtering of the series, the absolutely abhorred Turbocharged Thunderbirds, has better voice acting.
• Captain N: The Game Master's voice acting is cheesy and not particularly very good, but the low-light has to be Mega Man's constant frog-in-throat voice.
• An Animated Adaptation of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine has been made, with some... rather questionable casting choices. While Rat, Pig, and Zebra sound decent (though Rat's deep voice and Pig's really high voice could be a case of Love It or Hate It), Goat has a British accent for no real reason, possibly to highlight his intellect, but it sounds very out of place and makes him sound like a pompous douche, which doesn't fit his personality at all. Guard Duck also has a deep, gravelly voice that makes him sound like he has a severe case of smoker's lung, and the crocs... dear God, THE CROCS.
• One of the few things fans and haters of Johnny Test agree on is that the voice acting is atrocious, with everybody constantly screaming everything at the top of their lungs (apparently because the writers think kids love this) and even the veteran voice actors in the cast giving very phony, overdone and just plain obnoxious performances (Johnny's in particular will make your ears bleed and that's when he isn't whining). One would think that it would improve a bit over seven seasons. It doesn't. In fact, it gets progressively worse!
• While the voice acting for Beverly Hills Teens ranges from So Okay, It's Average to So Bad, It's Good (given its age and low budget), the character Jett's whiny and nasal Valley Girl accent is utterly painful to listen to, to the point that many of her lines are actually difficult to understand.
• Dingo Pictures. While both the original German dub and all other translation dubs of all of their movies are quite bad, the English dub of Aladin definitely deserves to be mentioned here. The voice cast contains two or three teenage boys, who voice both men and women with a heavy, unidentifiable accent. It's pretty clear that they can barely speak English, since you hear them reading lines so utterly wrong it's sometimes hard to figure out what they mean. Not only that, you can hear them stuttering, turning the script's page very loudly, interrupting each other and chuckling when they fumble a line. Here's one hilarious example: "My lawfly sister is in low. It hurts me to hurt that my brother has passed away but I'm glat to see you and I'm a little neppheff I get". It sounds more like a failed school project than an actual official dub. If you want to check out the full movie, here you go.
• The English dub to the Italian CGI film Leo The Lion from 2014 mainly since some of the voice actors don't even try to sing or show any emotion during certain scenes in the film.
• A Car's Life has Speedy. Her voice is incredibly high-pitched, annoying and a pain to sit through.
• The Nutshack, already a terrible show, has some absolutely terrible voice acting to go with it. Many of the actors are mumbling and/or slurring their lines, rendering them very difficult to understand, something that isn't helped by the fact that a lot of the characters have thick accents. And many performances have other problems, sometimes on top of those. Phil talks like he has a sinus infection, which is makes his dialogue incredibly grating to listen to. Jack constantly uses a sarcastic tone, making it very difficult what emotion he's supposed to be conveying. But the worst of all is probably Horat, who has a very squeaky voice with so many filters applied to it that his dialogue is nigh-incomprehensible. The only character (in the main cast, at least) that seems to avert this is Chita, because she is the only main character who sounds like a normal person.
• PAW Patrol: The US English version is fine, but the UK English is...not, mainly because the voices don't match the character - Skye in particular. Oh, and while Marshall's US voice actor can sing, his UK counterpart fails miserably.

Spanish

• The Latin American dub of the Jimmy Timmy Power Hour trilogy. While Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius was dubbed by a Mexican studio, The Fairly OddParents! were dubbed in Miami. When the time came to dub the three crossover specials, problems arose. The first crossover was treated as a Jimmy Neutron episode, and was handed to the Mexican studio for dubbing. When Nerds Collide and The Jerkinators were treated as Fairly OddParents episodes, and given to the Miami studio. As a result, the first special features completely different voices for everyone in Dimmsdale while the Retroville characters sound normal. Of course, it's the opposite on the other two episodes. All three specials have very noticeable problems, and it's almost impossible to ignore them.

German

• The German dub of Robot Chicken. It seems like they only have like five voice actors for the whole show, which would be no problem for America with every actor having different impressions, here our actors have only one voice. Especially bad when it comes to the Star Wars specials, where Palpatine has a falsetto voice and several other unfitting ones for Luke and Lando. Makes no sense considering that the TV station ordering the dub could have hired the studio which dubbed the original Star Wars movies and Clone Wars shows instead of those dilettantes.

French

• The French dub of Family Guy. Peter sounds even more idiotic than in the English version, says 'ho là ho là ho là ho là' every five seconds, and has the most annoying laugh in all of existence. Meg was bafflingly given a very scratchy Marge Simpson-like voice in early episodes, before her voice actress then chose to use a more pleasant and normal-sounding voice. Chris, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky; he started out with a fairly okay voice somewhat close to the English original, but was later given a new voice actor who sounds like a mentally-challenged circus clown. Worst of all is Herbert; instead of his creepy effeminate whistle, he now talks in a deep, gruff tone. And on top of all that, the dub has one of the worst cases of Reading Foreign Signs Out Loud of any foreign-dubbed cartoon, in a decade and viewer age range where subtitling or overlaying is much more appropriate - for example, a "do not pull" sign being shown three times in a row and being read out loud each time (ruining a gag that partly depended on silence), and "Fin" (which is already in French) being read out loud as "Ze-end". The European French dub was aired in both France and Quebec, and proved to be highly unpopular in the latter region; it was eventually replaced with a local dub, with wildly varying opinions (some say that it's even worse than the dub from France). Even in France, it's no wonder that they like American Dad! better.
  • The European French dub is so bad, that Something… Dark Side did not use any of the series dubbers, but It's a Trap! managed to bring the entire voice cast back except for Sylvie Jacob as Meg. Furthermore, in the crossover special with The Simpsons, the dubbing director chose to only use the cast from Family Guy, with the exception of Homer and Marge's actors reprising their roles. For example, Stewie commenting that Bart sounds like a woman is completely Lost in Translation, as Bart is voiced by a woman (Nathalie Bienaimé) in the series proper, and a man (Benoît du Pac) in the crossover.
• On the subject of French dubs, there's also Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Some of the French Cartoon Network dubs are pretty bad, but for some reason they worked extra hard on this one and gave Bloo an immensely irritating scratchy falsetto for no good reason. Coco's voice is equally scratchy and less distinctive, and is dubbed/replaced even though she only speaks in Pokémon Speak and keeps the same name (and hence, speech pattern) in the French dub. At least Terence sounds decent, given that he's voiced by an actual teenager. In the typical Cartoon Network style of obliviousness he also ended up being Adored by the Network and even presented a few special events.
• Speaking of Cartoon Network, the French dub of Teen Titans Go! is particularly atrocious. While the Titans' original French actors all returned, they (except Raven's) give them a irritating high-pitch voice, with Robin being the worst offender with his whiny voice which make him more despicable than in the original version, which is quite a feat. Also, remember Family Guys problem about Reading Foreign Signs Out Loud? Well apparently, the French translators of Teen Titans Go! must have said "Subtitles? Overlaying? It's overrated!" and take this problem Up To Eleven by using an annoying female voice to read almost all English words when they can, even when someone else is talking or when a joke about silence is playing, destroying it in pieces by the process. By comparison, the original Teen Titans series has a much better French dub. And let's not talk about the really questionable choices of translation (For example: in the episode "The Spice Game", they translate the term "hot pepper" to "piment piquant", while in France, the term "piment" largely suffice).
• While not flat-out horrible, the French dub of Justice League clearly wasn't on par with the excellency of Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, replacing the very popular Richard Darbois on Batman with a considerably lesser known voice actor, whom most viewers found his voice too nasal and irritating, received the most flak with some occasionally unfortunate casting choices (Music Master and Kragger sounding like teenagers being the most obvious). But everyone agrees that things really went downhill with Justice League Unlimited: while Batman's voice being once again replaced was mostly considered an improvement, they also replaced the well-liked Emmanuel Jacomy on Superman with a man who clearly had no experience in voice acting and who therefore made the Man of Steel sound incredibly dull and flat (so much that his kid version exhaled way more charisma). Even worse, inexperienced flat sounding voices seemed to be the qualification to get a job on the series so many characters sounded just horrible, Wildcat and Stargirl for an example not sounding older and younger than in their 30's respectively. Aquaman also suffered from a unconvincing new voice despite his previous (and actually good) voice actor being still around voicing the Atom among others. Especially sad considering the voice director was the man behind the very good local dub of Superman: The Animated Series.
• Most of their DC Animation French dubs tend to be average, having both their strong and weak points. But for Batman: Under the Red Hood, it seems that everyone has been given orders to do their worst. First, there's Nightwing, whose actor voiced him exactly like he voices Robin, making him sound like a hyperactive teenager. Black Mask is pretty menacing when he is subdued but then he raises his voice (which he does a lot) and evokes all the menace of a little girl throwing a tantrum. The Joker and Ra's al Ghul sound exactly like in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, i.e. cartoonish, annoyingly nasal for the former and ridiculously raspy for the latter. And then, you got the Hood himself, who did get Eric Cartman's voice actor... and delivery. He sounds like a troll. True, the actor tries at least to play it more seriously when the character appears as Jason but the damage's already been done.

Dutch

• June's voice in the Dutch dub of KaBlam! makes her sound like a dying cat. Also, at the beginning of that clip, seems like that the person who says "KABLAM!", now has a weird accent, and thanks to how sometimes in Dutch dubs the different accents cause words to change into a more absurd version, that person now says, "KUUUUUUUUBLOM."

Polish

• The Polish dub of Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race is actually pretty good, with a few characters sounding quite close to the English version. However, there's one voice that absolutely no one likes: Geoff's new one! Despite being voiced by Man of a Thousand Voices Jaroslaw Boberek, viewers complained that he sounds more like Grunkle Stan (another Boberek character) than a surfer dude (which Geoff's first voice did a good job at).

Norwegian

• The Norwegian dub of Simba: è nato un re. How bad is it? Well it sounds like they found a bunch of drunk people that can't act. They make some of the worst noises in the Norwegian language. It's not even like they actually got anyone from Norway to dub this. It's like they found a bunch of tourists and paid them to speak Norwegian in front of a microphone. A bunch of drunk confused tourists that is. The lip syncing is all over the places and some of the voice actors (if you can call them that) sounds like robots for some reasons. See it for yourself.

• Agapio Racing Team (a Finnish dubbing company) was legendary for its awfulness. One would think they had just picked up a bunch of stoned teenagers off the streets of Helsinki, shoved scripts in front of their faces and forced them to dub the show live at 7 in the morning, without even the courtesy of giving them some morning coffee. Their voice actors, often known under different company names such as Golden Voice, were the bane of children's programming for years, until their dub for Digimon garnered enough complaints to warrant firing the group, and they haven't produced a single thing since. See their work on Digimon here, and a notorious musical number from My Little Pony here. The voice actors portray no emotion (aside from perhaps boredom or mild annoyance) while voicing characters who are running away from a giant monster while screaming.

  Aaaaaaaaah.

• BKS (formerly known as AIC) was a major dubbing studio in Brazil from the 1960's through the 1990's, but the company really started to go downhill at the turn of the millenium. There are quite a few Brazilian versions made at BKS that virtually no one would defend:
  • BKS acquired the rights to the second season of Pokémon, and many of the actors from the first season refused to work at BKS (such as Meowth and the narrator), so the studio decided to replace their voice actors to very negative reception.
  • Sailor Moon R and S was another controversial move for BKS, as the dubbing director decided to replace all the series' classic voice actors with new talent, and the dubbing director selected herself to voice Usagi. The reception was also very negative from the fans.
  • The final nail in the coffin was Dragon Ball Kai, where very few of the classic voice actors returned for the dub because most of them no longer worked at the studio. Goku's voice actor, Wendel Bezerra, had such a bad time working on Kai that he stated that he would never work at BKS again. Since then, Wendel has tried to take the dub of Dragon Ball to the Unidub studio, which he co-owns with his brother Ulisses, but they have so far only acquired the rights to two movies.
  • Another terrible dub made by BKS was a redub of The Fox And The Hound. Copper's voice actor (Dado Monteiro) voices him as a puppy and as an adult, and he absolutely fails to sound like a child at all.
• In Brazil, there was a time in which certain companies, to cut costs, would outsource dubs to Miami, where they would be done by local Brazilians - people with no experience whatsoever in the acting field, no control over accents, etc. The result, predictably enough, were dubs with an amateur-sounding cast, laughably-bad performances, different accents everywhere, terrible directing and so on. Fortunately, the practice died over time...for a while; recently, Viz Media decided to dub the (admittedly mediocre) Blue Dragon anime in Miami. The end result started to become a meme among the fandom mere days after the broadcast of the first episode. It's that bad. Check it out here and here (naturally, more recommended if you know BR-Portuguese).
  • Spanish dubbers have also been known to do this; however, the voice actors tended to be South American expatriates (as they're the ones who got hired more often) who made no effort to hide their native accents. Results ranged from So Bad, It's Good (The Fairly Oddparents) to really ear-grating (South Park).
• Odex, a Singapore-based dubbing company. They've produced a lot of English dubs over the years for Animax-Asia, but towards the end of the anime bubble, US-based studios would occasionally use them due to their being incredibly cheap (especially compared to the increasingly-expensive LA recording studios). Beneath their belts are butcherings of such shows as Zipang, Fantastic Children aaaaand...
  • The English dub of Karin. Karin's voice (played by American expat Chelsea Curto) is tolerable for a while - far more so than most of the other actors — but when she starts crying (which is common), it gets super high-pitched and grates on the ears. And because there isn't a separate section for bad scripting, the English dub has a pair of particularly stupid-sounding lines:
    Karin: "I'm gonna avoid that new transfer student! ...but if I can't my peaceful life is going to be turned upside down!"
    (from a later episode) Winner Sinclair: "Time for talk is over! I challenge you to DYOOOOOOL!"
  • Animax's English dub of Ranma ½ suffers from the characters' voices sounding too low-pitched and similar to each other that it is difficult to keep up what is actually going on. The only thing that can pass as audible is Akane constantly spamming 'MORON' to the audience and Ranma.
• Another English-language offender is Arvintel Productions, based in Southern California. They are known for being probably the cheapest dub studio in North America, and have the (total lack of) quality to back them up. Oftentimes it seems like they give their actors only one take per line, and if the actor didn't quite get it, too bad. Their dub of Green Green is especially notorious, but they have other disasters under their belts as well, like Ah My Buddha (not to be confused with a far better series that is known for its fantastic dubbing) and Eiken. What makes Arvintel dubs especially irritating is that they hire LA-based actors who are normally very good at their jobs, like Bob Buchholz, Bryce Papenbrook, Stephanie Sheh, and Wendee Lee. This can be explained since its owner, Ruben Arvizu, is a voice actor from Mexico, and he always tried to apply any voice acting traditions used normally in Mexico to other actors, regardless of whether or not they work out with non-Latin American VAs.
  • Green Green's dub is notorious for its lazy writing, terrible acting for most major characters, and a complete inability to pronounce names right or even consistently from scene to scene. Fortunately, the show itself is bad enough that the impact of the poor dubbing is lessened.
  • While most of the dub cast of Eiken sounded like they were phoning it in the whole time, Bryce Papenbrook's Densuke and Stephanie Sheh's portrayal of Chiharu are especially bad. It doesn't help that Bryce was 18 years old at the time.
• In Portugal, the TV stations don't bother with editing and keep the original background music, which is nice. However, the dubs are made by adults who have no idea how a child sounds. The adults (occasionally) sound good, but anything under the age of 18 will sound, if you're lucky, retarded. If you're unlucky, it's torture. In ascending order of pain: Digimon Tamers, Naruto, One Piece. Don't worry, the last one gets worse.
• Studio Loudworks, an English-to-Serbian dub company. The voices can be utterly grating at some parts, and even when there isn't, there's still the matter of their glaring blind idiot translations—They consistently (and very stupidly) translate word-for-word from English, resulting in a difficult (when possible) to understand script.
• Most of the Hungarian dubs released by the Romanian "Zone" dubbing studio. With only a handful of actors and actresses, most of whom suffer from horrible nasal and guttural voices and a less than firm grasp on the language's grammar, it's no wonder that a number of their works had to be redubbed (most notably Star Trek: Voyager) due to viewer outcry.
  • The Hungarian movie dubs on the former MGM station, made by the same studio but with proper Hungarian voice actors, qualify as well. Most of the voice actors working on them are fine, but the same cast dubs every movie, using the same voice, and sounding like they do not give a damn about acting. It gets on a person's nerves to hear the same couple of voices over and over again in every freaking movie. Some of the more classic films they play actually have older, perfectly passable dubs, yet the TV station still re-dubs even those, save for such isolated cases like Beetlejuice, whose dub has been described above (it seems it had a quality low enough to meet their standards). Some claim this is because the actors have fun doing these dubs, and the studio is very cost-efficient, so it can churn out as many dubbings as it wants within a given amount of time, but this is a horrible, horrible case of taking quantity over quality. After the station was replaced with AMC, a lot of these sub-par dubs continued to be shown.
• While Spanish dubs tend to be good, there's some real stinkers and some real inept voice acting, depending the country or studio involved:
  • If a movie made in the 2000's or later is dubbed in Los Angeles, chances are that it isn't going to be very good. There are no child or teenage actors at all, which makes the characters sound decades older than they should be.
  • Practically anything dubbed in the city of Monterrey, Mexico (like Recess) tended to be so awfully dubbed that the Recess direct-to-video movie was dubbed in Mexico City instead (with better results). Needless to say, they only dubbed a few series before disappearing from the voice acting industry later on.
  • In the same way, most shows dubbed in Cuernavaca, Mexico was pretty awful to hear on screen (with some exceptions, like Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Martian Successor Nadesico, and many animated series).
  • Until recently, almost anything dubbed from Colombia ranged from So Bad, It's Good (Rurouni Kenshin, Super Doll Licca-chan, Mikan Enikki) to So Bad Its Horrible (the awful dub of Kaleido Star destroyed any chance to bring the rest of the franchise in Spanish).
• Almost every single Malay dub has this reputation, especially in the late 2000s like Mobile Suit Gundam 00, Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny, Get Backers and School Rumble. The original Malay dubs of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are pretty good (heck, they're one of the better local dubs next to Doraemon), but they tend to mess up the names of the characters. For example, Piccolo Jr. was named Majumiya, a corruption of his pseudonym in the Martial Arts Tournament, Ma Jr., Yamcha and Krillin's names are tragically shortened to Mu and Ki (though Chinese translation in-between is to blame here) and Goku was given a different name until he grew up when they finally give Goku his name.
• The Latin American Spanish dub of all of the History Channel. It seems there is only 10 voices for the whole channel.
  • One of those voices is Luis Pérez Pons, the Latin American Spanish voice actor for Mr. Krabs. So there have been parodies about Mr. Krabs talking about aliens.
• The Brazilian Portuguese dub of the National Geographic Channel might be the worst of all time. It seems like there are only three voice actors - two men, one of them a lower-pitched one and the other a regular-pitched one, and just one woman. Most of the time, there's no acting: they just read their lines with no emotion at all, even when they're supposed to be singing. Worst of all, you can still hear the original audio underneath the dubbed one, suggesting a shoddy attempt at a Voiceover Translation.