The English voice cast behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had a hilariously tough time trying to pronounce the Je’RPG’s French words, but actor Ben Starr assures everyone that they can just play the hit game with French voice acting enabled because “their French is a little bit better.”
“It was, like, you know in Friends where Phoebe tries to teach Joey French and he thinks he’s saying what she’s saying,” star Jennifer English (not Jennifer French) said in a chat with GamesRadar+. It got to the point where “we were just saying the same thing over and over” in the recording booth, she laughed. “Putain, no, putain!”
“I would have to get [game director Broche Guillaume] to say the French name and then I would say it back to them, and then we would just insert it into the sentence because sometimes I couldn’t say ‘Francois’… because you just want to do it justice,” Starr, who you might have also heard leading Final Fantasy 16, added. “You don’t want to look silly. And, fortunately, if you don’t like the way we say it, you can just go and play it with the amazing French cast instead.”
“Their French is slightly better,” English joked, before Starr chimes in to say “I think their French is a little bit better. I can’t prove it but I think it might be.”
In a behind the scenes vlog about the voice acting, Guillaume also said the “best part” of the recording process “was trying to make everybody say ‘merde’ and ‘putain,’ all the French words. It was always lovely to try to teach them to have the right pronunciation.” That video is also full of the cast trying – and sometimes failing – to roll their Rs. Well worth a watch for a laugh.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director is more than just a Devil May Cry fan: his YouTube channel is nothing but impressive DMC 5 challenge runs, which absolutely tracks
