The English trailers for Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road are out, and the English voice acting is definitely a bit unsettling.
Just to give a bit of context to those who might be unfamiliar, Inazuma Eleven is an old football anime. It was the “football anime” long before Blue Lock made its mark. Anime are made in Japanese and later dubbed into English. This being an anime game, the process was the same.
The Japanese trailers sound perfect. They captured the emotions of characters perfectly and gave them that authenticity we all love. But the English voice acting fails to do that. It just sounds fake and forced. It sounds like someone just went into the studio and read the line without putting much effort into delivering a good performance. The voice acting fails to convey those emotions. It lacks the boldness that the original Japanese voice actors delivered.
How Bad Is The Dub In Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road?
If you haven’t already, go watch the trailers, both in English and Japanese. You will notice the glaring difference between the quality of voice acting in both. It’s not to say that the dub is always bad — there are great animes and even games that have the same level of voice acting in both sub and dub. Death Note and Attack on Titan are great examples.
That said, the bad voice acting kinda plays into the anime’s history. The original Inazuma Eleven anime was notorious for having a terrible dub. The fact that the game also has the same poor dub is just weirdly comical.
Just to put it into perspective, how poor the dub for Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is, here is what fans have been commenting under a post about the English trailers.
This dub sounds absolutely terrible
That’s how you know Inazuma Eleven is back
Some fans are enjoying this disaster, while others are genuinely concerned as to why the dub is that bad.
You know, I was willing to understand why the English dubbing of the first games and anime was bad because back then, anime dubbing was not seen as important and was very niche.
But in our present day, we have improved so much in anime dubbing that you can watch an entire anime in dub and it will be just fine. Like it’s no problem anymore.
But somehow, for some strange reason, Inazuma Eleven VR, which comes out in 2025, has the same dubbing issues that the first season had a decade ago. Why?
