In Japan, it is common to have female actors instead of children play the role of the child, but Smith and Reeder agreed that while trained voice actors can be extremely good at what they do, they were happy with kal online geons the decision to cast a young actor to voice the character Larsa in Kal Online.
Not only are the voice actors needed for their acting skills, but they also have to be able to time their spoken dialogue to the animation. It's common to watch cinematic sequences in games and notice that the lip movements are not synched to the translated dialogue.
Smith and Reeder would spend days on a single scene, writing and re-writing dialogue so that it would fit the animation.
Voice actors have to watch the video as it runs and time it while they deliver their kalonline geons. They went on to note that spoken text made up 7 percent of all the text in the game, and took nine months to translate. The remaining 93 percent took another seven months.
The Takeaway: It's clear that a lot of time and effort goes into localization, which can explain why there is usually a delay between the Japanese and North American release date for kal online geons.
For those who are interested in getting into this segment of the industry, the panel's advice was to become proactive and seek out opportunities.
