That being said, I found Ellie's voice actress to be really good. I imagine if I got to hear him emote in more ways like the proper game I'd probably warm up to his performance. Not sure Akio Otsuka (pretty sure he's Joel?) would have been my personal first choice to have replace Troy Baker's, although since he's one of my personal favorite voice actors out there regardless of language and has voiced other characters I really like, I can't exactly fault that decision, either. I haven't played the game myself yet, but I'll chime in and say that as a Japanese speaker I find the voice work on display in that trailer to be pretty solid. I've always found that interesting, even in Anime I've seen or film that were in Japanese (most memorable Anime I watched in Japanese I currently think of is. Just saying everyday things, at least in the context of drama, comes off so boisterous. I don't know if it's intentional, or whatever, but they always sound so angry. I really like Japanese as a language so much. I agree with your favorites, OP, those were probably the best of the bunch. The Russian one was the only one that didn't really do that for me. Even though I don't know what their saying I can feel what they're trying to get across. There are 2 big emotional points in that trailer and they transcend language. The only one I thought was lacking was Russian, and that could just be because its the last one but it felt less like they gave a crap (and that is unusual to me as I have played several games from that area of the world and Russian acting can really sell itself if you get the right actors). I cant really speak to the languages (critically), as I only speak english, but they all seemed to really bring it. (my vote goes to Portrugese or Japanese - though I guess I'm not really the best to judge either) Portuguese I find the choices made by the different localisation teams fascinating! Which do you think captures Joel and Ellie better? (this was news to me, but probably shouldn't be as we have the 8-4 podcast hosted on this very site :D) The reasoning makes sense, since in his words he wasn't really qualified to make intelligent choices for the cast for entirely different cultures - how would he know if his choice would resonate with them? As such, how it works is that Sony has publishing partners in various countries who actually make their own decisions for the cast/etc and record/dub the game themselves. Hearing that The Last of Us would be released with multiple languages on the blu-ray was interesting to me (considering how important the English voice cast was to the creation of the game), but perhaps more interesting was learning that Neil Druckmann wasn't going to be directing those other actors/actresses.

Joel voice last of us