Tommy Williams, Konami’s head of communications for the Americas, has confirmed to The Verge that the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake will reuse the original games voice lines without any changes whatsoever.
Just what Konami’s plans were for the game’s voice acting have been a little hard to pin down since the game was announced—after months of rumours—at last week’s PlayStation Showcase. At the time, Konami said that the game would “star the original voice characters” from MGS3, which you could interpret as either the company getting the cast for the game back together or simply reusing the already-recorded material.
A later tweet in which Konami said “The story and character voices in Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater remain the same from the original game” certainly seemed to suggest that the company was just gonna yank the original’s audio to use in the remake, but it still had some room for interpretation and/or hope. But alas, Konami has now confirmed that we should prepare for a lot of sonic deja vu.
To be fair, several members of MGS3’s Japanese voice cast have died between that game’s release and now, which would have given Konami the undesirable job of locating suitable replacements, so it’s understandable that the company chose the path of least resistance. I’d also imagine that for fans who don’t really trust Konami to handle MGS without Kojima’s involvement, its lack of creative input on the remake’s voice cast will come as good news.
To be honest, I share their mistrust—I’m probably more excited about the original game coming to PC than I am about the remake—but I always struggle to see the point of remakes that adhere religiously to the format of the original. If the first MGS3 is going to be on PC anyway, I always figure it’s better to swing for the fences and try something new with a remake than it is to deliver fans an experience they’ve had before in glossy 4K.
But unless Konami is pulling an MGS2-style fast one and Naked Snake suddenly gets replaced by Kiefer Sutherland (not as a voice, as a character, ideally still voiced by David Hayter) after the Virtuous Mission, I suppose it’s not to be.