Rewatched advent children complete and…is anyone else super pissed that they switched out Sephiroth’s original English VA for this new guy? I mean not for nothing but this new guy does not hold the same amount of menacing that Newbern did when he was Sephiroth’s voice actor. Hoechlin, I do adore him but in comparison he sounds like what I imagine a young cadet teenage Sephiroth would sound like. So he isn’t bad he’s just not evil sounding enough and it’s easy to pick up from the new trailer that he’s trying his best but, like I said, he’s just not as evil sounding not as menacing as Newbern.
Now, if Square came out with a prequel predating the event’s Crisis Core with a younger Sephiroth, Angeal and Genisis well then Hoechlin would be perfect as a young Sephiroth. Just….I don’t understand why they changed the VA I know they said they wanted a fresher younger look but I mean the Japanese VA is the same VA. So why change the English VA at all when he was the perfect choice for such a phenomenal character?
Here’s to hoping that the remake game has an option for Japanese audio, with subtitles of course, otherwise it’s gonna ruin my experience. I don’t wanna hear Sephiroth with a teenagers voice I wanna hear the voice that sends chills up my spine that sounds so unquestionably evil and delightfully so.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one! There was no need to change the voice actors (since the Japanese cast is the same! Why?)… They’re all available and willing to come back too, if given the chance. They’re also disappointed as well, and so am I (seeing this tweet from George broke my heart so much —> https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1138572447593054208)
Sephiroth without George Newbern’s voice is… not Sephiroth. A “different” Sephiroth perhaps, but he’s not the Sephiroth I grew up with.
I really hope Square Enix will give George and the others a chance to voice these characters again (many fans do want this to happen, please Square!), since they’ve been voicing them for so long and in so many games that they only missed Final Fantasy VII and the Remake was the perfect opportunity to do so.
@crimson-materia
Honestly, I feel that they changed the voice actors because they wanted to draw in a new, younger and female audience. Why else would they cast these young pretty teenage and in Hoechlin‘s case popular superman/teen wolf actor from MTV?
The English voice change was done purely for “popularity”. Oh Hoechlin hot right now let’s cast him because everybody loves him as Clark Kent, oh let’s cast this kid a lot of people like him from that one CW show. And the thing is the Cloud’s voice change was bad enough, the kid who is doing his voice isn’t terrible but Burton put in a lot of years and hard work becoming Cloud. That was bad but to change Sephiroth’s voice? They shot themselves in the foot with that one because Hoechlin simply does not have the range and unfortunately for them they wanted to add someone hot to draw in a new audience but neglected to think about the huge following VII already has and the fact that you can’t see the voice actors faces when they voice the characters.
Newbern was perfect at Sephiroth, as I said, he brought to the table something completely terrifying and menacing and downright evil and his range and understanding of the character is so great that in Crisis Core he still had a menacing voice but he made but was able to convey a softer and kinder Sephiroth in the game. He made the good Sephiroth still a terrifying character but believably good so when he did eventually go evil you felt the brunt of the loss, knowing from the original he was bad that was nothing new but having gotten to know the good he was with the voice conveying his emotions you really felt the loss, you get what I mean?
Hoechlin does not have the range, he sounds entirely too young for this character despite being a 32-year-old man (he sounds younger or comparable in age to the new Cloud voice actor and that’s laughable) And he has no idea seemingly what he’s doing with the character at all if the trailers is anything to go by, it’s pure direction that he’s being given that he’s playing through, there’s no heart to the actual voice acting. I got that immediately after I was annoyed with the voice change.
Like I said before, I heard that they are having a delay with the US release hopefully it’s because they’ve gotten so many complaints about Sephiroth they decide to re-establish Newbern to replace Hoechlin, who honestly had no business being cast as this character to begin with. He was missed cast, they changed the original voice actor for the completely wrong reasons it would be one thing if Newbern wanted out, then I could have understood and accepted that fact as many of the other people bothered by the Voice Change would have been but he was booted for a pretty boy who has never played the game (I read that Hoechlin hadn’t and honestly, with his banal performance in the trailers it shows).
@blurbwitch (Too bad I can’t like the post again, because I’d really like to smash the like button right now!)
Yeah, I can totally see them thinking like that… “Oh right, those guys are famous and hot too, this is such a perfect marketing plan! While we’re at it, let’s change the other voice actors too, so people won’t notice our plan!” (because, seriously, even Aerith’s and Tifa’s new VAs don’t have any experience as a VA and one of them is a Youtuber too. Where did they find them?). Although people DID notice the change, even before the new cast was announced, so Square’s plan wasn’t that perfect. They should’ve changed the Japanese cast too, if they really wanted to draw in new fans without people noticing the cast change. I mean, if they changed even the Japanese cast, it would’ve made easier to accept the “new” English cast too, and that sentence Kitase said (“By bringing in a new generation of actors, we hope to provide the best experience for original fans and new players.”) would’ve made sense.
And yes, Newbern fitted Sephiroth 100/100! He made Sephiroth sound both “human” and “insane” so well in Crisis Core that just hearing Sephiroth talk can make us understand his character through his voice. And that takes talent, a lot of work and a lot of passion – something that Hoechlin doesn’t have and can’t get in a short amount of time (and the same goes for the rest of the new cast). The FF7’s characters are complex (especially Sephiroth) and a newbie can’t just appear from nowhere and voice one of them. It may be a “remake”, but it’s not a new game/IP/franchise/whatever with new and unknown characters that can be voiced by a bunch of people with zero experience when it comes to voice acting. Besides, Cloud’s “Not interested” and Sephiroth’s “I will never be a memory” lines (and many others) are so famous and so iconic thanks to Burton and Newbern. I just can’t imagine the FF7 characters with a different voice.
This should’ve never happened in the first place, and I can only hope they delayed the game as a result of the backslash. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! (Hoechlin never played the game? Seriously? Wow, this explains why he doesn’t give a fuck about his role as Sephiroth)
@crimson-materia
Exactly! They did it purely because these new guys were hot they thought that the original fans of the game would probably appreciate a newer cast on top of bringing in these fans of these actors but they screwed up. People have been waiting for years for this game to be remade, the original fans of the original game have been waiting and waiting and waiting and when we first heard Newbern as Sephiroth, I know personally that the voice made me even more excited about his character.
I’m a bit older in the grand scheme I suppose, I watched cousins and my older sibling play Final Fantasy seven before I myself played it. The story, the characters, everything about it was so complex p, you fall in love with these characters either good or bad so when we heard Newbern for the very first time it’s set up all our expectations for Sephiroth.
I feel like I’m focusing more on Sephiroth I mean the other characters voice actors were changed which is also a huge problem but Sephiroth in particular is the biggest problem. Hoechlin admitted to not having played the game and honestly there’s nothing wrong with that but you can hear that he has no idea of who the character is. And maybe it was like that for Newbern as well but Newbern came from a time where actors used to have to do their research, they used to try, voice acting is acting and I personally feel that newer actors don’t put in as much effort.
So it could be argued that Newbern like Hoechlin did not play the game but looked into the character and did his research to get it right. Ultimately what fails this new game in terms of the voice actors is the fact the the change was done purely for profit.
The Japanese team probably knew better than to change the voice actors, the new look where they make them look smoother in a little bit more animated and a little younger is one thing that was the cash grab on top of remaking the game. The English team for square wasn’t thinking about the story, the characters or the fans. It was all about making a buck. Think about it, the way that they make these big blockbuster Hollywood movies they don’t care about the plot, they’re shelling out the same thing they’re using actors that are OK that you see all the time it’s over inflated for profit. Same could be said for this.
It’s about who is hot at the moment and who is going to bring the most people to see their product because it’s about money. Only in this case changing the voice actors is working majorly against them. I don’t see this change going very well for them. Not at all.
Hopefully they put in Newbern and Burton back into the cast hopefully they replace all of the newbies with the older voice actors I feel like something this big should not have people who are so inexperienced with the product that they’re working on in it and with the actual acting that requires someone who knows what they’re doing, you can’t put somebody who’s never done something like this before into something that is huge.
Final fantasy seven is huge, everybody loves this game and the people who don’t even admit that it has a good story and the reason they don’t like it is because it’s too well liked and it annoys them, I get that.
And the backlash that they’re all getting they deserve it, not the actors because it’s not their fault that they’re hot right now and people want to use them so that they can make more money, final fantasy seven was going to make a lot of money for anyway so there was no reason to change anything, like you said if it ain’t broke don’t fix it which they tried to do and a lot of people are very upset about it.
There’s this whole huge part of the fandom for Final Fantasy games in general that a lot of the time you can’t change much with it, the Japanese team in square, they obviously know what they’re doing and they’re doing it right. They changed the designs a little bit made it smoother made them more lifelike with their everything right, but over here, this portion of square? You can see that they don’t care about the product though they really should because all they’re going to get is backlash.
This huge game which will still make them a lot of money is not going to make them as much money as it would have, it is not going to give them as much notoriety and praise because they screwed up the voices, which is the most important part of an English adaptation, which is just my opinion.
If they have an option for subtitles in English and Japanese voice audio I think that would work well for them also the person who decided let’s just change it all up I think he or she should probably really reevaluate what they are working with. This is a huge franchise seven in particular is the biggest in Final Fantasy. With multiple mobile games, side games, to chi/live action movies, novels and an animated movie it’s a wonder why they thought they needed to fix anything at all.
I’m really hoping that they change them all back otherwise it’s just going to ruin the flow of the game. I liked the look of the trailers I hated the voices. I was also very disappointed in the English portion of the company for square, they did not do a good job.
I don’t know how deeply George researches into this characters, but over the years he’s done various “bad guy” roles before. Here’s an article about him mentioning what he does for Scandal. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brick-brick/201702/george-newbern-is-acting-animal
I’m guessing, overall, because of his years working as the occasional serial killer/murderer/rapist/etc he’s gotten the hang of portraying manipulative and cunning characters to the point where voicing Sephiroth came natural to him. He also demonstrated his ability to become “an animal” when playing an “evil” version of Superman in “Superman vs the Elite”.
@morikun-rinari
He’s great,I love this guy does play a fantastic bad guy. Hoechlin does too, dark Superman in that Crossover for the cw dcu shows, he was a bad guy in a Netflix exclusive too. I think that he maybe he wasn’t feeling this particular character though, he wasn’t feeling sephiroth. I had wanted to reply to something that you commented on earlier about how he doesn’t hype of the fact that he’s voice acting Sephiroth I think that maybe he decided to look him up and realized that there were a lot of people unhappy with his casting and taking over for a Newbern, maybe he decided to leave well enough alone to not get huge backlash from the more aggressive fans. He hadn’t played the games and went in blind when he took this role and now he has to know how big FFVII is and how unhappy people are. That’s my personal opinion anyway.
