Friday, May 4, 2012

Armor Heroes Have Annoying Voices

Actually, I doubt it's their actual voices so much as spoken Mandarin (possibly combined with the videos' poor audio and the effect they've overlaid on the characters' voices) that bothers me*, but whatever.

The Armor Hero series seems to be one of the bigger tokusatsu series produced in China.



The most awesome guy is the big one with the axe blade thing on his helmet. (His solo fights start at 2:08 in the above video and 1:58 in the below video.)



To be fair, his design looks like it's probably derived from a specific Kamen Rider (scroll down to any picture labeled "axe form"), and the others are pretty close imitations of other tokusatsu heroes I've seen out of Japan. But at least they're trying. And I will give the Chinese tokusatsu this: Even if they're usually derivative (and it's not like the Japanese industry is known for not doing that as well), their designs are nice.

And there we have it: Unofficial Tokusatsu Week is concluded.

*Just to be clear: I just find the sound grating; this isn't an attack on the language. (Also, it isn't exclusively the sounds of these characters' voices; I've been annoyed by other Chinese-language audio in the past.) I'm sure a lot of people have languages they don't like listening to (and I'm sure that English is on many people's annoying language lists). I actually find a couple of other languages to be grating when I've encountered them in the context of a TV show; as an example, for some reason, every Italian dub of an anime I've ever heard sounds incredibly wooden and emotionless.

For the record, I love listening to a lot of foreign languages, and I probably listen to more Japanese and German music on an average day lately than I do to English music.


-Signing off.

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