Ok, here's my take on all of this since I've basically been dancing around it for this whole time.
So, I trained as an animator and part of my training was to take both acting classes and voice acting. Acting is a huge part of being an animator but the voice acting was so that we would understand who we would be working with. I don't have as big an insight into this as many others do since I never got to work on anything directly involving voice actors, I've just chatted with a few in my time. With that being said I still have a few thoughts not many others seem to grasp and some that many won't ever bother with since this whole ordeal has been one big reaction.
My first question at all of this would be, baring in mind that she probably did this in 2008 so inflation has to be considered, how much was she paid for her work in 1 & 2? Ideally, I would presume that pay would increase with every game. B2 is notably shorter than 1 but had more story. Not only that but she did play two characters. Granted, Rosa had very little dialogue compared to Bayo. Anyway. My point for this being that if she did get paid more than 4k back in 2008 then of course it'd be rather insulting to do so now.
Adding to this, think about all the people who say that this is, in fact, an insultingly low amount. Those who do are people who have either worked with voice actors or have an understanding of how the world of professional voice acting works do to whatever experience. The people from ClowfishTV, the video I posted earlier, for example, talked about how they had to paid 2K to a voice actor for a two minutes of dialogue. The people who accuse her of being greedy know nothing and try to pass it off as either 'well, I don't get paid that much' or don't understand how people in whatever professions earn a certain standard. Pardon another example but it's like saying that that high end lawyer you hired to bail you out doesn't deserve that 100k and hour because all he does is argue when your mother could argue all day, too. It's equally dismissive and shows a degree of forceful and reactionary ignorance enforced by an over bloated ego where you think your opinion of how the world should work really matters.
@Sparda's rejected son This isn't directed at you. I feel I should mention that. This is from reading posts on 4chan and watching a few pointless videos on YouTube that I thought might have insightful takes but, rather, once again, proving that people are dumb. In your case I think it's equally unwarranted to show malice at someone who isn't acting out of malice, even if you find their opinion to be misinformed. You can just as easily explain yet, as we are seeing, everyone would rather react than talk.
This actually isn't the first time there's been such a huge controversy involving voice actors. This happened when SH2 & 3 had their HD ports announced. The people who did the voice acting for those games were not professionals. In fact, the man who played James was actually a lawyer. Back then, Konami had basically screwed the cast, which was common for Konami. Usually an actor receives a portion of the profits from any sale of their work, including re-releases, this is known as royalties, but Konami never paid them for any of the subsequent ports of those games. In this case, it was not illegal but highly unscrupulous, which, again, was Konami's modus operandi. PS: If I'm not mistaken, on top of only being offered 4K Taylor would also not receive any royalties from her potential work in this game.
This leads me to another point. There's also the argument that she is an actress and nothing more. That she is replicable and thinking that she isn't was foolish and arrogant on her part, thinking she was special. We've been over this ourselves. When the actors for DmC were selected the cast of DMC mentioned a few times that they are not the owners of the characters, that they are simply borrowing them. Well, easy to say that when they are rebooting the whole thing but not so much in a situation like this. I've made no secret that I will always hold Drew Coombs as the one and only but for now let's put that aside. Let's say for the sake of argument that Reuben Langdon had been replaced in DMC5. As it is, his replacement in DmC caused quite the uproar but imagine adding yet another different voice to Dante when Langdon is perfectly able and willing and the fans want him there. That's just the replacement, imagine adding insult to injury by having him not asked to leave but rather offering him something so low there'd be no point in accepting.
Again, this is something Konami did with Silent Hill as a series. Their attitude was that team Silent were all just employees and replicable. That anyone else being contracted were able to do the same work and produce the same level of quality. After all, one artist or director is as good as any other. Yeah, Hale is doing a fine job replacing Taylor but that's because the foundation is already there. Had she been the one to build the character from the ground up the product would've undoubtedly ended up being very different.
I do have to mention that Taylor did talk about her time recording the games, that she did spend 16 hours on each game, which is where that perception came from. What people don't realize is that actors have to work on their characters
outside of the booth, too. Taylor said that she did 3 takes for each line. Well, the reason she managed to do that is because her and the cast had the scripts and practiced on their own, probably with a voice recorder. People keep trying to condescend and brush it off as just some lazy person (though they use less polite words) trying to milk more money. Listen to any voice actor talk about the process of creating a character and you'll see that this is far from true. If you see someone trying to be dismissive or diminishing the work of others then you're better off walking away from them. They got their heads up their own asses and are not interested in the truth nor can you converse with them with facts that their opinions are not the reality of the world. They just want to be a'holes about something or have spend too much time being condescending online to contribute anything real. Yeah, they can make memes but what intrinsic value do they really have?
Everyone seems to want to place blame on one person or entity. Nintendo, P+, Kamiya, Taylor. I don't think it's as simple as that. I think that this might be a behavioural problem. A problem with how Nintendo operates. A problem with P+'s lack of autonomy. A problem with the industry. A lot of people have mentioned that this is actually symptomatic of a larger problem with game development in general. It goes back even to the PS2 era when Samuel Jackson got paid millions for voicing a character for one game while one of its leading and most experienced personalities got paid a fraction of that for not being famous enough outside of games. Personally, I don't know who to blame nor do I think I have the right
to blame anyone since, like the rest of the internet, I don't know what, why nor how. I do, however, have an opinion. Of course I do. I'm a fan of both Bayo and P+. I think this is wrong. It is disappointing and disheartening. Not only does it show how people have reacted, how the companies have behaved but, on a fanboy level, it's broken something within a game I love and a group of people I admired. Actually, I've always held that one thing Bayonetta had over DMC is that the lead had the same voice and the same face in every game since they keep changing Dante around so much. Can't really boast about that anymore.
For the record, I am still getting the game. As much as I side with Helena Taylor on this I don't believe boycotting the game is the right response. For one, there are others involved in this and, essentially, punishing them all for this seems like a disproportionate reaction and not a solution. This is also something I've expected for years so as selfish as it is and as much as I understand how this has embitter the whole thing for her, and I would probably be just as bitter for it, I'm too invested on it to pass it by.
Anyway, I think I'm done with all of this. I don't like all this sensationalism and I also don't know what the truth is so I am tapping out. I feel like, as well intentioned as I might be trying to be it's just adding gas to a fire that's become a battle of opinions and most are not good enough to pay attention to. I'm going to ignore all this and judge the game on its own merit. If it all turns out to be a publicity stunt, so much the better, but till this ends I'm not going to bother. No matter what I do someone else has already taken it to an extreme by now.
Edit:
Here's another video that brings up some good points.
www.bloomberg.com
