Valkyria Chronicles 4 - Opening Prologue

by Adam Vitale on 31 July, 2018

Sega has posted the opening prologue video to Valkyria Chronicles 4, introducing a few of the game's main characters and showing off the English voice acting.

Additionally, Sega Associate PR Manager Jonathon Stebel interviewed Associate Localization Lead Andrew Davis over on PlayStation Blog regarding the English voice-over recording process. We have the first two questions below quoted below, and hit up the link if you want some more insight on what goes on in the dubbing process for the game.

Jonathon Stebel: About how long was the English VO recording process for the game?
Andrew Davis: We spent about 10 weeks total in the studio, starting with the untimed lines – VO with no timing restrictions – and then moving on to the Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR), the scenes where we match voices to characters’ lip-flap. We also had some re-recordings to fine-tune parts of the localization we wanted to improve. We kept the exact same team members present throughout the recording process to ensure consistency in the VO’s direction.
JS: This prologue cutscene starts with a black screen while Claude, the game’s lead character, talks over it. Since you record to match lip flaps, is it kind of a nice break for the team when you have a scene like this without any animation?
AD: In most cases yes, it’s nice to not worry about matching animations. However, Claude’s Japanese VO for this opening scene had so many extended pauses that it took a lot of work to match the English script and VO to the Japanese even without animation to worry about. We also had to consider the length of the subtitles for each spoken phrase; each line needed to be short enough in subtitles to look presentable, but the audio needed to be as long and drawn out as possible to match the heavy, deflated tone in the scene.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 is set to release for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on September 25. Be sure to check out our hands-on impressions from E3 2018, as well as our interview with producer Kei Mikami.