There are certain things in a video game or other properties that can easily cripple a project if you’re not careful. In the case of video games, if you have bad visuals, it won’t matter how incredible all the other stuff is, as that’s what people will remember. If you have good visuals but bad gameplay, that won’t help you either, as you need a balance of both, and we can all think of games from 2023 that didn’t have a good balance of elements. But in the case of Naruto x Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections, its flaw came with some of its voice acting.
Last week, fans were playing the title and noticed that certain voice lines for specific cutscenes within the game, which were voiced by the official voice actors from the anime, weren’t lining up properly or sounded incredibly weird. So when they posted clips of Naruto x Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections being really bad and tagged some of the voice actors, the VO’s made it clear that this wasn’t what they performed, and they weren’t sure what happened. Even the voice of Naruto herself admitted that:
I can GUARANTEE I did not say that line that way. What’s that from? And I guarantee no voice director of Naruto or the games would have me do that in that way.
This was backed up by a recent tweet by the voice actor for Kawaki, who stated in a message that when voice actors are given lines for a video game, they don’t go through the same process as the anime dubbing. They’re often given “no context” for certain things, and then the voice directors don’t always take the best cuts:
you’ve got good ears! we weren’t!
they give you a list of lines and we go down the page and do 2 takes each and it miiiight say “final attack” “small pain” “attacking”
but I stg I do not