Mass Effect: Legendary Edition has been out for a little over a day now and by and large the remaster of the classic sci-fi trilogy is a great experience, except for those living in Russia. It turns out that the newly recorded Russian voice acting in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is so bad “it’s a crime.”
The only other issue that appears to be cropping up for players is that Legendary Edition is crashing for some Xbox players who are using wireless headsets. Thankfully the Mass Effect games do feature auto-save and the issue can be circumvented but have yet to comment on this new issue facing Russian gamers, however.
A post just yesterday on Reddit has already accrued nearly a thousand upvotes for explaining what’s wrong with the new Russian translation and voice acting. The post calls the new voice acting “atrocious” and “a crime,” and explains that the Russian interpretations of many of the characters are nothing like their English counterparts, citing Liara sounding like “a 12 year old girl” and Tali like a “juvenile drama queen.” Perhaps most egregious is Wrex, the lovably gruff Krogan squadmate, who is now weirdly polite and greets Shepard with “hello.”
A simple compromise would be to let players listen to the original English voices with Russian subtitles, but, bizarrely, that is not an option for Mass Effect 1, but it is for Mass Effect 2 and 3. Adding to the confusion is the fact that when Mass Effect 1 originally released in Russia, the translation was “nearly perfect” according to the Redditor. There is no explanation why there is a new translation, why the new voice acting is so bad, and why only Mass Effect 1 has these issues.
Several commenters pointed out that the Polish version of the game is also plagued with a bad translation and bad voice acting. Some commenters are hopeful that BioWare can fix these issues, while others think it will be up to modders on the PC version of Mass Effect Legendary Edition to do it.
It is a shame that the remaster of Mass Effect 1 isn’t very playable for Russian and Polish audiences, as Mass Effect 1 is the game that has received the most updates out of the trilogy. The comically bad controls on the Mako vehicle have been completely reworked and many of the barren environments have had additional details and foliage added to flesh them out.
While usually remasters don’t receive much additional support or content after release, Mass Effect Legendary Edition could be a different story. BioWare has already confirmed that it might bring back Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer if there is enough demand, so perhaps if enough attention is given to how bad the Russian and Polish versions of Legendary Edition are, BioWare might do something about it.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
