Xenoblade fans have been glowing ever since this week's Nintendo Direct all about Chronicles 3, and the good news keeps on coming. Days later, someone has noticed the lip sync was different in the English and Japanese versions of the presentation, which likely means that will be the case for the entire game.SuperSavajin appears to have been the first to notice the difference and shared the evidence on Twitter (via Nintendo Life). The evidence focuses on a scene during which Mio and Sena are having a conversation. As you can see, their lip movements and the pauses in their conversation match up with what they're saying whether you were watching the game footage in Japanese or in English.It might seem like a minor, perhaps even unimportant detail for some players, but what video game characters are saying not matching up with the way their mouths are moving can take a lot of people out of the moment. It wasn't that long ago that most video games didn't match up these two things at all, regardless of the language being spoken. For a studio to sync up speech with lip movements in two different languages is a big deal, and would have taken a lot of additional work.
It also marks the first time in the Xenoblade Chronicles series that this has been done. Since the games are developed in Japan, the English dub of the first two has been a mismatch when it comes to the way the characters' lips are moving. It hasn't been confirmed that this will be the case for the entire game, but it would be very odd if certain parts were lip-synced for both languages and other parts were not. The amount of effort needed to make this happen hasn't been taken for granted, especially when other Nintendo games like Pokemon have little-to-no voice acting at all.
The hype for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is incredibly high right now. News that there was going to be a Direct, but it would only be focused on one game might have sounded disappointing on the surface. It has certainly done its job though, throwing the upcoming installment in the Xenoblade series into the spotlight a month ahead of launch. Detailing the extensive story DLC it will be getting between launch and the end of 2023 was also a big check in the win column for Xenoblade 3.