Forum - View topicREVIEW: The Faraway Paladin Audiobooks 1-2
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18495 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Over the last couple of years, I've taken to listening to audiobook versions of some of my favorite franchises while on long drives. In some cases it's a reread (I find So I'm a Spider, So What? to be particularly fun when heard out loud), while in other cases I'm extending beyond animation/novels that I've already interacted with. In doing so, I have noticed that some readers are way better at conveying the tone of the material than others. Because of that, I'm happy to see an audiobook review and welcome seeing more done in the future.
As for the "single voice makes juggling characters a challenge at times" criticism, get used to that, I'm afraid. I have run across one LN audiobook series (86) which uses one male and one female voice actor, but single readers are most common. Most do at least make an effort to vary their voices for different characters; Caitlin Kelly, who voices the Spider audiobooks, seems particularly good at this, so I hope she's called on to do some other LNs with female viewpoint characters. |
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Cho_Desu
 Posts: 242 |
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Audibooks have been my go-to method of reading through novels in recent years, so it's nice to see more light novels getting that treatment (though none of the series I'm most interested in have gotten it yet). In the past I've had to scrape ebook text and run it through a robot audio-reader program if I want to listen to LNs while out for my daily walks. (Definitely not ideal, but not as terrible as you'd expect.)
The vast majority of audiobooks out there have a single reader -- it's definitely the exception when you have multiple, since that'd be much more costly I assume. (My favorite example of that are the YA novels Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, which has a narrator for each viewpoint character -- and they all do an excellent job. Very fun to hear each narrator's take on all the other characters' dialogue.) |
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LastPage 3
Posts: 215 |
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In my experience, audiobooks use multiple readers when they have to, for example in the case where a book has POV's with wildly varying circumstances or inner monologues, like 86 as Key mentioned above or Sam Hawke's Poison Wars series. With books like these, the differing readers really help bring out the contrast.
For this novel, Liam Price did a great job as Will's voice but I did feel that on the occasions where he had the speak as other people, he kinda fell a little flat, especially when it came to unnamed characters who were going through what was written as an emotionally difficult time. |
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Fluwm
 Posts: 1056 |
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I've only very rarely encountered audiobooks with more than one reader, and even then... it's only a second.
If that kinda thing bugs you, what you need to look into are "full cast audio dramas." And if you're a fan of Doctor Who, then hoo boy do I have some good news for ya'. Big Finish has made thousands of Doctor Who audio dramas over the past three decades, as well as licensed audio dramas pertaining to other old British sci-fi, but they also have various originals (ATA Girl, Cicero, etc.) and adaptations of classics (like The Time Machine, King Lear, etc.). And, of course, I am fully prepared to offer up a properly autistic deluge of recommendations upon request. A handful of other companies out there also produce full-cast audio dramas. They're essentially the modern version of old radio plays. They can be a bit intimidating to get into, but once you're used to the format (which does not take long) there's nothing better to listen to while you're doing something else that doesn't require your full attention (exercising, gardening, walking a dog, building an MS-07B Golf Custom model kit, what have you). .... Anyway, I'm a bit surprised to see audiobook adaptations of Faraway Paladin, of all things. Was this series really that popular? My recollection is that they were pretty promising, if not terribly unique, Isekai fare that never really went anywhere because it went on indefinite hiatus. It's kind of bizarre to think back on, since it was one of my first LNs, and in the time since... I've read so many hundreds more. |
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flamemasterelan
Posts: 497 |
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Unless I'm mistaken, Sword Art Online has been using Bryce Pappenbrook and Cherami Leigh for their audiobooks, and Spice & Wolf started with J Michael Tatum but then added Brina Palencia in the third volume, though I hear that she and Tatum just switched who voiced each chapter rather than the characters themselves. So this seems like just a general audio book thing. It's expensive to hire multiple voice actors for 6+ hours of reading, after all. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18495 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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You're partly right on SAO; the first novel was read only by Bryce, but Cherami did join starting with the second novel. Haven't gotten past v1 of S&W on audio, so wasn't aware of that change. (Glad to hear it, though, because as good as J Michael Tatum is at a lot of roles, he doesn't do a convincing Holo.) The 86 novels do something similar: chapters that are from Lena's perspective are read by Suzie Yeung (the English voice of Lena in the anime), while chapters that focus on Shin's perspective are read by a rotating cast of male VAs that started with Alejandro Saab (the English voice of Daiya). Curiously, a couple of months back I took a flier on what I'd call an LN-wannabe (i.e., fully styled like an isekai LN but not by a Japanese author) and it did have both male and female readers. The female reader was the base narrator, but the male reader voiced all the male roles. Seemed rather extravagant to me for a novel that doesn't even rank in the top 1,500 in its genre on Amazon, so maybe this is more common outside of LNs? |
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