There’s a new Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater trailer showing off an extensive array of the game’s early cutscenes, and it looks both gorgeous and absolutely faithful to the 2004 original. But there’s just something about the old voice acting coming out of the new character models that feels a little bit weird.
Metal Gear Solid Delta reuses the voice acting of the original MGS3, so all the line delivery is just as it was back in 2004. The original Snake Eater has one of the all-time great sets of vocal performances, with just the combination of military thriller drama and campy anime shenanigans to make it all extremely memorable. David Hayter’s performance as Snake is absolutely iconic for a reason.
But while the camp worked great in the slightly stylized look of the PS2 original, it looks a lot weirder coming out of a bunch of modern, highly realistic character models. Just take a look at the trailer below. Look at when Snake starts speaking around the 0:43 mark. It’s a little off, right?
Part of it is the lip sync, which looked a little odd even back in 2004, owing to the weirdly miniscule mouth movements. But the effect is about a thousand times more intense paired with the new character models, and extremely anime lines like “he has not yet found an emotion to carry into battle” just don’t play the same way with these aesthetics.
Some purists have been worried from the jump that Delta is losing some of the soul of the original, invoking the ‘Nintendo, hire this man’ meme in reference to the realistic visual style. I’m not sure I agree – I’m really just happy to see Konami working on Metal Gear in a way that seems to respect what people like about it – but it certainly seems like the new look is going to make the balance between camp and drama more uncanny than ever.