Enjoyable voice acting. The elevation of the Red Prince is conveyed very well, same as Fane's arrogance. The narrator is excellent, I really loved listening to his short monologues. I will at some point do another playthrough with Lohse in my team as I'm curious how consistent her performance is. The barely avoidable recycling of voices is noticeable, though way less obtrusive than it was in other games such as Skyrim. (Of course Skyrim is of a different scale, but when all argonians or khajiit just got that one voice actor per sex that's hard to look past. Witcher 3 did a better job in terms of voice acting quality and variety despite the scale.)
Of course the voice actors can only move within the boundaries of their script, but it felt like the dialogue writers did many things right. Just occassionally it felt a bit off. *cough*
Some of Sadha's takes could've been paraphrased by the narrator, they're pretty awkward right now.*cough*
I usually play games with german voice acting and texts, but as Divinity Original Sin 2 does not (yet?) have a full german translation I was fine with the english one, changing the text language back to english as well. Mixing text and voice language would inevitably lead to confusion. I took this as an opportunity to practice my english a bit and expand my vocabulary. Ah, listening to the Red Prince's orations is great; I wish I could fluently speak that uplifting lizard snob.
I fear I won't ever be able to play the german translation of the game now that I know the english version. When playing german translations of games you're used to odd and sometimes nonsensical phrases, skill names and so on. It's most likely not solely the translator's fault as I can imagine they get a bulk of stuff to translate without proper context or lore knowledge, but it would help polishing if they had it.
When you know what the oddities are supposed to mean it will sometimes make you goggle how someone could come up with those translations. I'm not even talking about puns lost or inconsistent style, rather examples like the skill backlash. It describes an attack performed against the opponent's dorsum. (As backed up by the skill description which is its context. I really hope skill names and descriptions are handed out together in order to ease the translator's job.) The translator seems to have mistaken "back" of
backlash as
reverse, so the german translation ended up to mean "counter blow". ^^
I heard about the frequent usage of dialects and slang in english game versions and it was quite interesting to experience it in a game this extensive. I think I could make sense of most and it's quite believable that a drunk lower class boor isn't speaking clean english. I just can't imagine this could be done well in german, too. In games it just feels really odd and silly to hear
non-standard german.
