Friends, we finally live in a world where Final Fantasy 7 has voice acting. No, I don't mean Final Fantasy 7 Remake—that rank pretender—I mean the clamour of polygons that is the original, PS1-era classic. Thanks to the dedicated work of a modding community called Tsunamods, Final Fantasy 7's very, very long script can now be enjoyed with your ears as well as your eyes using the Echo-S 7 mod.
The voice work was done by a global team of volunteers from the Tsunamods community, who came together to voice "Every main, minor, and NPC" in the game. If, like me, you have more than a few scarring memories of 'community voice acting' packs from ages past, you can rest assured: Tsunamods promises that "The main and minor cast are all well-trained actors with fantastic vocal and tech quality".
The trailer does feature some jarring cursing, but the creators explain that they never really expected the mod to garner attention outside their community, and the areas they wanted to show off just happened to be a bit swearier than others, so they "may have falsely represented [themselves] a little there".
The mod doesn't use FF7's original English script, instead opting for a retranslation of the game's Japanese script that cuts out some of the strange (or straight-up bad) translations in the original English version, although it has been tweaked "to sound more human," since "text boxes can read very differently compared to when spoken out loud".
I have to say I'm impressed. I can't judge the full breadth of the work, but the stuff in the trailer sounds good for a community effort. Plus, as someone who remembers playing through Deus Ex's Nameless Mod—which also drew voice actors from its community—and half the NPCs sounding like they were speaking through layers of tin foil, it's nice that we live in an age where everyone seems to have a good enough microphone to do a decent voice acting job.
You can pick up Echo-S 7 over at the Tsundamods website.
