7 PS2 Games With Voice Acting So Bad It Became Legendary

3 hours ago 1

Published Feb 18, 2026, 2:30 PM EST

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Something I once heard about the early days of English dubbing in video games was that the voice director for the original Japanese dub would get the final say on all English performances. This meant that, if the lines sounded wrong to them, they’d do them over. Obviously, the pace and intonation of English and Japanese are completely different, so normal English speaking is always going to sound weird to someone who only speaks Japanese. This, in turn, is why so many games from those days have weird, stilted voice acting.

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I can’t definitively confirm whether this is true or not, but it would certainly explain why so many games from the fifth and sixth console generations didn’t exactly have performances of the highest caliber. The PlayStation 2, in particular, due to its massive rolodex of third-party support, got its fair share of games with voice acting that sounds like a fourth grader reading aloud in class. As an ardent lover of all things genuinely and sincerely awful, though, I think these particular games are worth holding up and enshrining, both as proof of how far voice acting in games has come since, and to have a hearty chuckle at.

Just to clarify, we’re specifically talking about the quality of voice work here. The actual overall quality of the games has no bearing on this list.

7 Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color

“I am the Doodle King!”

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Garakuta-Studio

PS2

June 2003

There’s a particular phrase I like to use when discussing acting and voice acting called “dull surprise.” Originally coined by Mystery Science Theater 3000, dull surprise refers to a tendency by actors to react to major plot events and revelations with what can best be described as a gormless stare. You get a lot of this in video game voice acting as well, with Magic Pengel being a solid example. Even if you can’t see the actor’s face, you can just tell it’s not emoting.

Magic Pengel is a creature collector game where you draw your own critters and bring them to life to battle each other. It’s actually pretty cool, though it’d be substantially cooler if your protagonist’s companion, Zoe, were capable of displaying more than maybe two emotions, max: either dull surprise, or shouting very loudly while somehow still not actually emoting.

Zoe isn’t alone on this; nearly every voiced character in the game follows this same general acting direction. The closest to actual emotion any character displays is the antagonists, though in their case, swap out the dull surprise for generic bad guy smarminess.

6 The Sniper 2

“He smells the same as I do.”

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Best Media

PS2

November 2002

Not every game is released with the express purpose of being a world-changing work of art. Some games know what they are, and what they are are budget titles to be cranked out and sold for like, ten bucks in a bargain bin. In the early 2000s, a Japanese company called D3 Publisher specialized in these kinds of games, collectively calling them the Simple 2000 series. One such entry in this series that stands above the others is The Sniper 2, an EU-only sequel to a Japan-only game.

The Sniper 2 is kind of presented like an HBO show, following a professional hitman on the run from the mob, with each level bookended by opening and closing credits sequences. What it lacks is the performance quality of an HBO show; the characters all sound like they’re reading from completely different scripts, not even making a token attempt to match each other’s tones or moods.

This leads to some unintentionally hilarious moments where our protagonist, Henry, is monologuing about something or other, followed by the comic relief character Stanley suddenly chiming in about how excited he is to eat the chicken special from his favorite diner.

5 Eternal Ring

“I gotta be going, now.”

Prior to its blockbuster release of Demon’s Souls in 2009 and the creation of the Soulslike genre, FromSoftware had a bit of a scattershot approach to the games it developed. Some were serious, some were silly, some were high-budget, and some… not so much. A game more in the latter category, production wise, was Eternal Ring, no relation to Elden Ring.

Eternal Ring is a pretty standard sword and sorcery fantasy RPG, with a fairly nifty system for creating your own spell-casting rings. However, the game’s voice-acting, for lack of clearer classification, kind of sounds like it was performed exclusively by your parents. Every single character, male and female, has a weirdly placid tone of voice, like they’re not especially interested in whatever it is they’re talking to you about.

Even the non-human characters you encounter, like a giant talking water dragon, speak in this same tone, like your dad half-assing a bedtime story. Amusingly, one of the few exceptions is a rude old guy you encounter who sounds less like your dad, and more like a weird uncle.

4 Mega Man X7

“BURN BURN BURN TO THE- BURN TO THE GROUND!”

It might seem odd for such a major IP like Mega Man to be included on a list like this, but those in the know remember that the first few Mega Man games to have voice acting were… not great. Mega Man 8’s dub, in particular, has become the stuff of meme legend, immortalizing the name “Doctah Wahwee.” Even a few games after that, though, well into the PS2 era, things still didn’t quite even out. Just look at Mega Man X7.

Mega Man X7’s English dub not only has more ham than a supermarket deli, but a remarkably consistent mismatch of voices to characters. For example, when you think of X’s sword-wielding buddy, Zero, you probably think of a youthful, courageous voice like Johnny Yong Bosch, right? Well, in this game, he sounds like an exhausted 50-year-old man.

The voices of the Mavericks aren’t much better, but the most legendary dub performance of them all belongs to Flame Hyenard, a hyena-like Reploid who’s supposed to be in perpetual agony from the Sigma Virus. His voice flips on a dime between quizzical, dull surprise, and screaming at the top of his lungs so loudly and frequently, that his voice lines often play over each other.

3 Michigan: Report from Hell

“PAMELAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

Michigan: Report from Hell

Horror is one of the trickier genres to localize between cultures and languages, as not every culture considers the same things scary in the same way. This has led to more than a few horror movies and video games with notably stilted English dubs, as the dub cast isn’t quite sure what to do with themselves. One of the most infamous instances of this is the original Resident Evil, but a less prominent example would be Michigan: Report from Hell.

The premise of this game is that you’re a camera person who, along with a reporter and tech grip, are investigating a mysterious supernatural event in the city of Chicago (which is not in Michigan). Your protagonist is largely silent, but your tech, Brisco, has plenty to say for the both of you, regularly delivering jokes and innuendos that definitely don’t fit with the vibe.

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When your initial reporter, Pamela, is killed by a monster, Brisco delivers the most anguished, drawn-out cry for her you’ll ever hear, on par with the legendary “oh my gooooood” moment from Troll 2. Is it scary? Absolutely not. Is it hilarious? Heck yeah, it is.

2 RAD: Robot Alchemic Drive

“It’s called Bread and Water Soup!”

English dubbing in the PS2 days was not unlike English dubs for anime; that is to say, of extremely varying quality, and when it was bad, it was bad. It makes a kind of twisted sense, then, that a game like RAD: Robot Alchemic Drive that’s trying to emulate the particular idiosyncrasies of episodic anime in this era would exhibit the worst qualities of both mediums in its presentation.

RAD styles itself after mecha anime like Mobile Suit Gundam or Neon Genesis Evangelion, with you, a young student or businessperson, having been drafted into commanding humanity’s only robot protector against an alien invasion. There’s a lot of shouting from all the voice actors, a lot of dull surprise in the delivery, and a lot of proper nouns that don’t actually mean anything.

The highlight of this cast is your protagonist’s friend, Nanao. She’s supposed to be a put-upon girl who’s working odd jobs after her family is killed in a robot attack, but she almost always seems to have the same mildly upbeat tone to her voice, even when her grandma gets blown up. Also, there are several occasions where she screams in the midst of an attack, but her actor reads the line “kyaaaah” literally as “keeeeee-yaaaaaaah!”

1 Chaos Wars

“Wow! I really can’t move my body!”

Idea Factory is a Japanese game developer and publisher that’s got something of a reputation as a creator of “kusoge,” or “crap games.” You know, games low enough in budget and general quality that they loop around to be kind of interesting. You can find a lot of low-quality titles in IF’s back catalog, but arguably none more so than Chaos Wars. Remarkably, this one wasn’t completely IF’s fault.

Chaos Wars is a tactical RPG that was originally released in Japan in 2006, then in America in 2008. Notably, the localization process was handled by a company called O~3 Entertainment, whose CEO was a dude named Chris Jelinek. Why am I telling you about the localizer’s CEO? Because he’s also one of the voice leads, and he gave the other leading roles to his immediate family. Did I mention none of them are voice actors?

Chaos Wars’ English dub is of mind-bendingly low quality, the kind of voice work that inflicts psychic damage on you the moment you hear it. Literally, the first words out of my mouth when I heard it were, “Oh no.” I sincerely recommend everyone look up clips of it on YouTube, because any description I could offer up here wouldn’t do it any justice. It must be heard to be believed.