Incidentally, both of those games were localized by 8-4, who also have a big hand in the VO direction on the projects that they work on. Treehouse is a great localization outfit as far as text is concerned, but they simply don't have the same kind of experience with VO recording as their professional colleagues, so that can get fairly mixed in terms of results when they do have to worry about that stuff. Some of it is out of their hands, like you mentioned with Other M, but it's not hard to imagine what having a better director could have done for BOTW's cutscenes, as I don't think most people take issue with the cast.
Unions are also not immune to self-inflicted wounds and incompetent leadership, either. Non-video game related, There was a situation years ago in Major League Baseball where the union representing the league's umpires attempted a negotiation tactic with the league by convincing all of the umpires to submit letters of resignation to the commissioner's office. Genius plan, right? Push the league with an ultimatum and bring them to the negotiating table. What could go wrong?
Non-union voice actors deserve to have roles and get paid as well. This is not unethical.
Matt Mercer voices several characters for Fire Emblem Heroes so he must be cool with accepting non union work, too.
Huh, very interesting.
*Lots* of stuff businesses do is unethical as fuck, no matter how commonplace it is.
Division 2, specifically the fighting game side of things, usually unionizes their games. But Division 1 has gone non-union as of late.
I don't think Awakening was unionized, but it was a solid dub.
I agree. In this case you have two options though. Pay more for union work and you are more likely to receive quality work. Pay less for non-union work and risk getting what you pay for. Nothing unethical about it. Business decision. If Nintendo made a deal stating they would use union work whenever possible and then reneged on the deal, THAT would be unethical.
But not all of them were necessarily better off in the long run, as not all of the umpires that petitioned to be rehired were, nor did they all end up receiving better work in the end.
I assume Nintendo values Martinet's Mario over every other voice combined. If there'd be some issue getting him they probably wouldn't think twice about using non-union.
I don't fault her, but rather the ADR. It's basically the same situation as Mike West in Smash Wii U/3DS.
I think in general poor dubs often come down to mismanagement or poor direction rather than bad casting.
I think what you're trying to say is that not every Nintendo game needs voice acting, but the games that do have it should be unionized. Did I interpret that correctly?
To be specific, the last game that NoA unionized was Code Name: S.T.E.A.M., which was released four years ago.
