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Hideo Kojima explains why few Japanese actors appear in his games | VGC
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Is it because he's a westaboo?
Yep.
Remember when he got rid of David Hayter, the iconic long-time voice actor of Snake, main character of his most popular series, just so he could replace him with some Hollywood actor doing a generic gruff guy impression? Then said actor ended up being so expensive that there was barely any dialogue... in a Metal Gear game?
I would buy it if the excuse was they wanted an actor that could do voice as well as motion capture, and maybe David Hayter wasn’t cut to do both at the same time. In some promo it sounded like they wanted someone who could do both. In the age of motion capture, it’s going to be jarring to record voice lines in a booth separately. Particularly if multiple actors interact with each other in a scene.
But no. There was barely any interesting acting at all from Snake. Most of the acting was carried by the other characters, while Snake was just grunting doing nothing in particular.
I’d rather take MGS4 Snake any day.
The motion capture excuse would also hold more water if they didn't go for an actor only two years younger than David Hayter.
You do know there's a reason for that voice difference in MGSV right?
Except that Ground Zeroes exists and also Episode 46 of Phantom Pain. This would actually have made sense if ...
Tap for spoiler
Hayter were involved to voice Naked Snake for his parts and then if Sutherland had only voiced Venom Snake.But that didn't happen. No, Hideo and Konami were just idiots about it starting with Ground Zeroes.
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And it would have worked perfectly with Hayter as both parts. He's a voice actor; he can do a second voice of Ishmael pretending to be someone else. As for Venom sounding the same, well, hypnosis/mind control and plastic surgery are basically magic in this universe anyway (see Decoy Octopus, Liquid Ocelot, or hell just Ocelot in this same game).Though that'd be torpedoed by Kojima's feud with Konami over crediting and its result of every scene in MGS5 listing (spoiling) its participants with a credit byline. In that case the intro could have used a different voice for Ishmael, and then the forced replay later that shows what actually happened could switch to Hayter.
I do, but I also know he'd been trying to get rid of Hayter for a while by then even though he was the voice of Snake, so the excuse rings hollow.
But also
It's a video game. It's all CG.
I think the next quote explains it better:
He should get tips from the Yakuza team
That tip basically boils down to:
Use Japanese face models / voice actors who've been smoking for 20 years, rofl.
Or sucker punch. The cast of ghost of tsushima looks identical to their voice actors.
It's normal for CG artists to do their best to make their work look like real life and not CG, though. Death Stranding is clearly attempting to look as realistic as they can manage