The female protagonist of Pokémon Sword & Shield, Gloria, will soon be making her way into Pokémon Masters fully voiced. Despite being a spinoff game, this latest addition to Pokémon Masters gives a glimpse at what Sword & Shield could have been like if the game had voice acting.
There have been many criticisms surrounding Pokémon Sword & Shield, the most infamous of which being the dex cut, but arguably one of the more noticeable criticisms is the lack of voice acting. The main series Pokémon games have never featured voice acting, and it's arguable that the series never needed it before Sword & Shield, but the 8th generation is where it started to feel the most off, as if the game itself was set up to have voice acting but didn't actually include it. One of the more infamous scenes in the game that has received scrutiny is when the player reaches the dark-type gym leader in Spikemuth, Piers, and see him doing a performance in front of Team Yell, only for his mouth to move without any voice out of it. It's instances like that that show that perhaps this was the time for Pokémon to go the way of other fully voiced games on the Switch like Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
The good news is that now players will be able to hear the female trainer from Pokémon Sword & Shield with a British accent in Pokémon Masters. The announcement video that was tweeted has Gloria paired with the legendary Zacian. The actress is currently not listed as of yet, but it will probably be known when Gloria drops into Pokémon Masters on November 29th.
Before Pokémon Sword & Shield released, a meme depicting Gloria with heavy a Scottish accent became very relevant. The Galar region is set in the UK, and even the game itself features British slang from a lot of the characters. If all the characters were voiced with dialects from the UK, it would have made for a very immersive experience, and scenes like Piers not singing wouldn't feel as jarring as they do. It's not as if British voice acting hasn't been done before in Nintendo games either; Xenoblade Chronicles' voice acting is built on it, and while Pokémon isn't as massive a JRPG as something like Xenoblade, having the characters be voiced would have done wonders for the presentation.
Hopefully, this will be a lesson that will be taken into account when going forward with the series. Pokémon Masters features characters from all across the series that are fully voiced, including Team Rocket, who have their modern voices from the anime. Pokémon Masters shows the potential that the main games can live up to if they implemented voice acting into them. So whenever the next generation of Pokémon is revealed, the burning question will be if the characters will be voiced like other modern titles on the Switch?
Source: Pokémon Masters EX