Brad and Sparky: I’m glad you brought up the points about culture, as that’s something I meant to talk about. There are a few tried-and-true thematic areas that games feel comfortable in — the Orwellian dystopia, the swords and sorcery fantasy world, the gritty war-torn future — and Fandango really stands out for avoiding all that. It’s such a quirky blend of influences, too — film noir, Art Deco, Aztec mythology, etc. In a lot of ways it’s a refreshing break from the standard “relentlessly white” games.

It’s interesting to see also that a lot of the best VO work I’ve heard hasn’t been from big-name actors, but from skilled voice/character actors. The Bioware/Black Isle voicework hinged on quality performances from skillful voice actors; as a result, with casts and directors that really got voicework, not to mention a development budget that acknowledged the important of voicework, they got some great results. Fallout is certainly of a similar era to Grim Fandango, and again, features excellent voicework. It’s not about the biggest name actors, either - whilst GTA has got good performances from its name actors, other games have failed miserably; see Freddie Prinze Jr’s performance in Final Fantasy X for one example - a lousy performance combined with a weak script. VO work requires different skills, it seems.

So perhaps the problem is with the quality that’s been “acceptable” for low-budget voicework - the kind of budgets only applied to cheap dubs for cartoons and anime, or the maximum that some games were willing to spend on voice talent.

I agree on the voice acting, but what was really refreshing for me was to play a game based on Mayan and Aztec symbols. Japanese and Western devs have freely slopped Shinto and Judeo-Christian myths onto any game with functioning code, so it’s really pleasant to play something different.

I think they picked a very good theme and culture to wrap the game around and it added a lot of character. Most games are relentlessly white.