I'm leaving out Japanese games (except mentioning 1 for contrast), because their mediocre is awesome to us, generally speaking.
Mario series: We're so used to it, the colorful cast sounds bland to us, but imagine dealing with them for the first time all over again. Luigi's mansion needs a special mention: the few little bits of Luigi's dialogue are actually great enough you can still laugh at him by the end of the game.
Starfox 64:
-Japanese was serious, but kind of generic.
-English was probably trying to be serious, but it was so cheesy and terrible that it was good.
Punch Out: Yes it's cheesy, and that's why it's excellent.
Street Fighter series: Alot of the japanese voices are generic, but the english voices usually do a good job of fitting the personalities they're trying to create.
Dungeon Keeper 1,2,WftO: Peppa Pig's father!?
The Elder Scrolls:
-4: had some famous voices that were underutilized. Patrick Stewart has an awesome voice for the position he had, but it was way, way too short. Haskell and Sheogorath made quite the combination, and the dialogue alone would not have been successful if not for the talent.
-5: Great voice acting, but some of it was wrongly used. Plummer is largely famous for quoating Shakespear in Star Trek VI, and for good reason: he just has the voice for a wannabe bard or any other over-dramatic character. And who can forget Laura Bailey?
Metal Gear: pick up anything with David Hayter in it for your snake. 5 was OK, but that snake was not David Hayter, and they did come up with a very good end-game explanation of why they didn't have to use Hayter, but i'd stil lrather have Hayter anyway. The biggest problem with the voices in V wasn't the acting, but the bad dialogue planning just not matching well with the cinematics. That car ride was just awkward.
And these are just off the top of my head. I generally find that the game is usually best in it's language of origin, because certain archtypes are unfamiliar when the voice actors and actresses try too hard to sound like their original language counterparts, even when it doesn't work in english (female voices from japanese games are usually the biggest offenders of this: what sounds normal in japanese because females naturally do talk like they're talking to children or like they're trying to get you to ride the intonation to better empathize, such voices don't fit a mature english setting). Halo's Master Chief just sounds really weird in Japanese, for example.
Post edited October 20, 2018 by kohlrak