13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is in an unusual situation. Due to the English localization coming together during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s influenced the production schedule. This means the English 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim voice acting will be added after the fact as a free update. Now, Sega of America localization team member Allie Doyon took to the PlayStation Blog to provide details about what it was like to record voice acting during a global pandemic. In short, it involved video calls and people creating home studio setups.
It turns out the 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim voice acting recording sessions started out in studios, before being forced to resort to video conference calls. Each actor had to create in-home, makeshift studios to get by.
Here’s Doyon’s full reply from the PlayStation Blog.
We started out recording as usual at the studio, but it wasn’t long before COVID-19 forced us out of that close-quarters environment. Everyone involved, especially the studio owners, engineers, and actors themselves had to come up with alternative solutions to get the job done. Actors’ safety is paramount—they need healthy lungs to do their jobs!—but nobody wanted to give up on this game’s incredible English voice track, either.
It took some time to work everything out, but ultimately, we ended up recording the rest over video conference call. It’s not as simple as just calling in and talking—we needed studio-quality audio recordings, a way for the audio engineers to work with said recordings on the spot and afterwards, and a way for each actor to view the director’s screenshared script at a readable size. To help achieve that studio quality, actors set up makeshift studios in their own homes, which sometimes meant getting cozy in a closet with a nice mic! Needless to say, there were a lot of technical complications, but everyone really went the extra mile to make it happen.
Doyon also pointed out that, due to how many “main” characters appear, things can get a bit complex. Doyon specifically said, “Since there’s no single “main character” of this game, each actor only saw their own side of the story, leaving many of them excited to see how it all comes together in the end.”
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim will come to the PlayStation 4 outside of Japan on September 22, 2020. Only Japanese voice acting will be available at launch, with English voice-overs added at a later date.
