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Bayonetta 3 voice actor controversy

Bayonetta 3, the third installment in the Bayonetta franchise, was announced on December of 2017, with little-to-no new updates on the game until September 2021, when a gameplay trailer was shown and so was its release date.

One year later, however, in early October of 2022, a massive controversy surrounding Helena Taylor, Bayonetta's first English voice actor, and her alleged pay for her role in Bayonetta 3 was caused weeks before the game's release.

Background

In early September 2021, a fan on Twitter stated that they couldn't imagine Helena Taylor not voicing Bayonetta, and Taylor herself responded with a tweet that vaguely said "Well, you'll just have to.", which somewhat aged well as the gameplay trailer for Bayonetta 3 was revealed weeks later with a different-sounding Bayonetta, which led numerous fans into believing that the character had been recast at the time.

On October 2022, weeks before the release of Bayonetta 3, it was officially confirmed that the titular character was recast with Jennifer Hale, best known for Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, etc., and Hellena Taylor suddenly made multiple videos on Instagram explaining the reason for not returning to voice her character was because she was offered a mere $4000, which she turned down because of how low the pay is for a game with a relatively high budget, and she also demanded that fans boycott Bayonetta 3 by donating to charities like ones about abortions rather than pre-ordering the game.

This news stated by Taylor caused a massive uproar by the general consensus, including gamers, which led to them calling out PlatinumGames and Nintendo for unfairly paying voice actors as well as feeling sympathetic towards Taylor. Hideki Kamiya, creator of the Bayonetta series, responded to the controversy by saying that all should obey his rules, regardless of how unethical they are, on his Twitter account and also shrugged off the controversy regarding Helena's offered pay, which led to Kamiya temporarily banned from the platform. Jennifer Hale, the new voice of Bayonetta, made a tweet saying that others should be more professional when handling situations like the one regarding the $4000 pay offer for Helena Taylor.

In October 18th, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg wrote an article clarifying that Platinum Games initially offered Helena Taylor $3000 to $4000 at the studio, which would've been $15,000 in total, and Helena declined that offer as she wanted six figures. 7 days later, however, Helena herself confirmed that she was actually offered $10,000 to $15,000 for the entire role of Bayonetta in the third game, and she was also offered $4000 for a cameo voice, which she turned down too. This comfirmation from Helena Taylor herself had turned nearly every gamer who felt sympathy for her when she was supposedly unfairly paid against as it was revealed that everything she said about how much Platinum would have paid her to voice her character and it may also result in her getting blacklisted from voicework in the entertainment industry.

Street Fighter 6

Street Fighter 6 is a fighting game published and developed by Capcom for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PC and Arcade and is the seventh mainline installment in the franchise.

Why It Rocks

1. Unlike the previous installment which was rushed, this game returns to the franchise's roots as it's more jam-packed with single-player content than ever before, and that includes World Tour, a single-player mode where the player gets to create an avatar and travel across Metro City and get into street fights.
2. The Arcade Mode comes with the game at launch, and it brings back the format of giving each character an intro and outro in their paths and even final bosses in the style of "rival" battles, similar to Street Fighter IV.
3. Not only do veteran characters such as Ryu, Ken, Chun-li, etc. return, but this game also introduces newcomers such as Luke (despite being the final DLC character of V), Jamie, Kimberly, JP, and as well as more new characters yet to come as DLC.
4. Like most of the previous entries, the gameplay is as addicting as ever before and even features a new gimmick called the "Drive System".
5. The graphics are as stunning as ever, combining the "cartoon-ish" art style the series has had since IV and a little bit of realism, thanks to the highly successful RE Engine.
6. The soundtrack of this game is full of bangers such as Not On The Sidelines (the game's main theme), the character select screen, and even the map theme in World Tour.
7. The walkout scenes after the character select screen is very mind-blowing to watch, and you even get to change their emotes afterwards before the fight, which is reminiscent to Soul Calibur II and III.
8. There are tons of nostalgic throwbacks such as a few classic arcade games by Capcom like Final Fight, the Street Fighter franchise's first-ever jukebox, which is full of songs from older SF games, and even the classic costumes for the classic characters.
9. The accessibility for those inexperienced at fighting games is mostly well-done and is completely optional as you have the option to turn off the auto-combos.
10. This game also saved Capcom's fighting game division after 3 previous fighting games that commercially and critically flopped in a row.

Bad Qualities

1. The Battle Pass is very underwhelming and a lot of the items locked behind it are overpriced, including the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-themed costumes for the avatars, which are all $60 combined.
2. The "Modern" control system, which is where you get to use auto-combos, may turn off longtime fighting game fans, as you may not be able to access a character's full moveset thanks to this system.
3. Oddly, none of the DLC characters have a third alternate costume, unlike the base roster.

4kids Entertainment

4kids Entertainment
File:4kids.png
Founded: 1970 Defunct: 2017 Founder: Alfred R. Kahn Headquarters: New York

4kids Entertainment was an American licensing company founded in New York in 1970 as Leisure Concepts until it was renamed to "4Kids Entertainment" in 1995 and then to 4Licensing Entertainment in 2012 until the entire company went out of business 5 years later after being sued by TV Tokyo in 2011 and then filed for bankruptcy months later.

It specialized in licensing Japanese anime and mostly changing the source material to appeal to children.

Bad Qualities

1. As mentioned per above, 4Kids was notorious among the anime community by heavily editing out content in anime, often making them look unrealistic and silly. Not to mention that a lot of these edits left massive plot holes in the stories of anime they dubbed. One Piece was the worst offender of this.
2. In addition to the massive edits they put in their dubs, they also removed several "mature" elements from them such as guns, blood, cleavage, alcohol, etc. While this is somewhat understandable considering that the company aimed their shows towards kids and because Japan has looser standards for what is appropiate for kids compared to other countries, the issue is that a lot of these anime weren't even meant to be toned down from the start.
3. They even removed content that weren't even inappropriate to children at all, like text on shirts, walls, books, or even signs, and they even changed Luffy's mouth during the scene where he awakens from the barrell he was in back in the first episode of One Piece.
4. In early 2011, it was revealed that 4Kids had actually been keeping the English distrubtion rights to Yu-Gi-Oh! without the consent of TV Tokyo, the Japanese company that owns the rights to the franchise, which led to the latter company suing the former company, which then resulted in bankruptcy of 4Kids a month later, forcing them to shut their Saturday-morning block in 2012 and then rebrand as "4Licensing Entertainment" in that same year.
5. The 4Kids National Anthem, which was an ad that aired on their block back in the Summer of 2005, was largely criticized by the media due to how poorly sung it was by characters from various shows that aired at the time, and the fact that half of these characters from those shows had different nationalities that were almost anything but American.
6. Speaking of 2005, in that year, the company replaced the entire cast of the Sonic The Hedgehog games with the voice actors who voiced the characters in Sonic X without letting their prior voice actors know about the recast beforehand, starting with the critically-panned Shadow The Hedgehog, and the company's voice actors would continue their roles in the rest of the Sonic games until 2010 where the 4Kids cast (with the exception of Mike Pollock, who still voices Eggman to this day) was yet again replaced with different VAs, ones who traditionally voice act in anime by Funimation, Viz Media, etc. and some other video games made in Japan.
7. Alfred R. Kahn, who was the CEO of 4Kids prior to his retirement in 2011, defended the company's actions stating that "kids don't read today" and he also claimed that manga is "dying in Japan".
8. In mid-2000s, the whole company had begun collapsing due to losing a variety of IPs to other companies such as Pokémon due to a legal dispute between them and The Pokémon Company, One Piece to Funimation in terms of dubbing rights, Winx Club and almost the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise to Nickelodeon in 2009, and the distribution rights to Yu-Gi-Oh! as mentioned per above.
   • This was proven true considering that their TV block had been declining after losing many of their popular shows, leaving them no choice but to rebrand said block a few times and re-air some of the only shows they still had left like Sonic X and they even aired the Funimation-dubbed Dragon Ball Z Kai in order to stay relevant in the English dub market and keep the trend of Saturday morning television alive.
9. They seemed to have double standards when allowing mature themes in their products. For instance, they allowed characters to be stabbed or literally ripped apart (albeit off-screen) in Ninja Turtles, and Shadow The Hedgehog, which was the first Sonic game to feature 4Kids voice actors, had a lot of mature elements such as cursing, death, and even suicide, and these two examples go against 4Kids' philosophy of making their products appropriate for American children.
10. They are also know to butchering some animes to make them awful or at least mediocre due to the edits or even some bad voice acting, the most notable exemple being One Piece and Ojamajo Doremi (although the former would get another english dub that still continue to air in this very day.

Good Qualities

1. They had at least good intentions when editing their dubs, even though they were arbitrary, they mostly did it because of regulations of cable television.
2. They made many anime well-known in the west, most notably Pokémon, specifically the first 3 generations of the franchise.
3. Despite how bad some of them are, their shows had absolute bangers of theme songs such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, Sonic X, and even the pirate rap in One Piece.
4. Most of the voice actors who worked at 4Kids like Mike Pollock, Eric Stuart, Veronica Taylor, Dave Willis, Dan Green, Jason Griffith, and many more were talented actors who at least tried to give good performances in the company's dubs, and some of them are still in the voice acting business to this very day.
   • Even Sean Schemmel, who used to work at 4Kids and still does at Funimation, was a decent human being during his time at the company.
5. They helped to produce the 2003 TMNT series and the Chaotic animated series which were pretty good.
6. They were mostly better at distributing western shows like Ninja Turtles and Winx Club than they were at dubbing Japanese anime.
7. They did have a few good anime dubs here and there such as Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, Pokémon (to an extent), and Sonic X.
8. A lot of the edits they put in their dubs were pretty funny to look at, and can be considered so bad they're good to some.

Trivia

• Contrary to popular belief the texts in Sonic X were not removed by 4Kids themselves, they were removed by TMS Entertainment for international distribution.

343 Industries

Redeeming Qualities

1. They made Halo 4 and Halo Infinite which were good at least.