Among the announcements at E3 was the cast of actors for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, a new 3D action game based on Konami's long running 2D series. Although the game itself doesn't look like much (it's from the developers of the disappointing Jericho and it seems to be yet another God of War clone), the trailer above demonstrates that you get your money's worth when Patrick Stewart, Jason Isaacs, Robert Carlyle, and Natascha McElhone read your dialogue.

Contrast this with Heavy Rain, the upcoming cinematic adventure game, exclusive to the Playstation 3 and created by Quantic Dream, the developers of the controversial Indigo Prophecy. You can see a sample of Heavy Rain's gameplay here, where you can also hear the wooden voice acting. Granted, this game has the disadvantage of more mundane dialogue. In that Castlevania trailer, it's easy to put a dramatic spin on lines about dark times, your wife being murdered, and how Gabriel is a good man as God intended. It's great stuff for English* actors to wrap their mouths around. And, of course, there's a dramatic soundtrack playing.

But because Heavy Rain is mundane, it's all the more important that it has talented, and maybe even recognizable voice actors. In a story-driven game, I need to care about the protagonists, especially if the game is going to be as exposition heavy as an adventure game. If I don't care about the characters, how am I going to care about the story?

In an interview here with David Cage, the founder of Quantic Dream, he said:

Initially, we really wanted to go for famous actors because we thought they would bring their talent (marketing as such was not a sufficient reason for us)...The main reason that made our decision [to use non-famous actors] was availability: if you can get a world class actor for a week, that's already a big challenge, but that was unfortunately far from what I needed. My collaboration with the main actors of Heavy Rain went through several months. We took time to cast them, we rehearsed a lot together, they had to learn their parts by heart for the dialogues, and when it was possible, we asked them to do the stunts. All this significant amount of work required time and availability, exactly like a real movie.

If it turns out that Heavy Rain suffers from bad voice acting, the culprit is going to be Mr. Cage's insistence on working so closely and extensively with the voice actors. We won't know for sure if it will pay off until the game is released next year. But in terms of pre-release buzz, Castlevania is getting a lot more mileage out of its voice actors than Heavy Rain.

* And Scottish, of course. Apologies to Mr. Carlyle.