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Translated Interview With Takahiro Sakurai
| By Blitzballer 482 days ago Category: Square Enix News Tagged with : Advent : Children : FFVII : Interview : Takahiro Sakurai Linked games : Final Fantasy 7 : Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children |
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Takahiro Sakurai is the voice actor for Cloud Strife in the Japanese versions of Kingdom Hearts, Crisis Core and Advent Children among other projects. In celebration of the re-release of the FFVII 10th Anniversary Ultimania, Sakurai gave an interview on what being the seiyuu for Cloud entails, the process of voice acting and his love for Final Fantasy VII. A forum member, named Defade, at The Lifestream.net website, has graciously translated the interview- parts of which you can read below, more at the source link: [On playing FFVII when it came out] Absolutely. I was a gamer ever since the Famicon era, and I’ve played every FF game starting from I. VII was my favourite among those. Even if those polygons seem outdated now, the prospect of playing a game with such quality back then was like a dream. I was impressed by the impact it had. [On whether he played games that came after FFVII] No…since I had such an amazing experience with VII, I didn’t even touch VIII. After VII’s ending, I felt like everything was over, accompanied by a sense of loss. The last scene with Nanaki and his children looking over an overgrown Midgar was stuck in my head, and left me feeling sad and lonely. When I was playing the game, I had many fictional experiences, so it’s almost like an escape from reality. And I felt a bit sad that all of that was over. Plus, I played through the game wanting to see the end of this story, and when it really ended, it left me stunned for quite a while [On being asked to voice Cloud] Kingdom Hearts came before Advent Children, so the request for me at that time was for a character named ‘Cloud’ from a game called ‘Kingdom Hearts’. No visuals were given to me of this character, and all I had was the script. So I went to the recording site wondering what kind of character this ‘Cloud’ was, and it turns out to be Cloud. [Expectations and pressure] Recording for AC was different from KH since it didn’t have the surprise element KH had. I was informed about the story and its meanings beforehand. But since AC was a sequel to the popular VII and a high quality visual presentation, I felt a lot of pressure that I didn’t have during KH, and even fear as well. Some of my colleagues who were fans of FF knew about my role as Cloud in KH, and the men generally said “Heh…so you were Cloud.” while the women threatened to never forgive me if I didn’t do the role properly, giving me quite a lot of pressure(laughs) [On voice recording procedure] I first had to record the four lines used in the trailer shown at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show, but even those took up around one and a half hours to record. Mr. Nomura and and Mr.Shimizu from Tohokushinsha Film Corperation did the directing, but some of their requests were along the lines of “Mr. Sakurai, a tone nuance of about 4 grams lighter, please”, and really made me scratch my head. Just how are you supposed to represent ‘4 grams lighter’, anyways? (laughs) Although they’re only 4 lines, [the trailer] was the first AC visuals shown, where VII characters move in realistic proportions, actually talk, and since no one knows what direction this sequel will take, I’m sure the impact they gave to the audience must be quite big. That’s why I took the time to record, paying extra attention to the details. Talking it over [with the directors] for long periods of time, changing both my tone and the lines in subtle ways, it was a period of trial and error. Read a lot more at the link. Source: The Lifestream Add to Digg |
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