The Legendary Hochu Otsuka

 

Recently I've been playing Triangle Strategy on my Switch and by default the English voices are turned on.  Upon hearing them, I cringed myself inside out at the awful performances and then promptly went to the options menu to change the voice over language to Japanese and not only were the voices across the board MUCH better but I was greeted with a little suprise of a bandit being voiced by this dude in one of the first scenes. 

Born in 1954 and active as a voice actor from 1976 (according to wikipedia) Hochu is one of those big-bad motherfuckers in Japanese voice acting.  He's so prolific that I can almost GUARANTEE that if you're some kind of weeb that watches a lot of anime or the kind of person that enjoys JRPGs to a large degree and plays them with JP voice over like a sane person, you have heard this man at least once or twice in your life.  

I first discovered him when I was quite young, I forget how old exactly but it would have been primary school with his role as Skid Ops Gash in Panzer Dragoon Saga.  He appears shortly after the opening valley section in disc 1 so him, along with Akira Ishida, Masato Ibu and Toru Okawa were some of the first examples of spoken Japanese I ever heard in my life and considering how big of an influence that game was on me wanting to learn Japanese, these guys are kind of a big deal.  

But I'll be honest though, Akira, Masato and Toru, while talented voice actors, are not the kind of people I could pick out of any given production.  For example I googled Akira Ishida and he's been in TONS of shit that I've watched and played but I had no idea it was him at any point.  That's not a weakness of him as an actor, that's more me not paying attention to the credits but I think it says a lot, then, that someone like me who spent a lot of my life not paying attention to credits was able to pick this guy out, Otsuka puts in some really stand out performances.

His performances are all quite similar sounding and for some that can be a really bad thing.  Take Amanda Winn Lee for example, it doesn't matter if she's playing Yukiko Amagi, Jinana (Digital Devil Saga) or Heather Mason, she sounds basically the same every time.  Otsuka on the other hand is a master of injecting a great deal of the characters personality into each individual performance.  Gash, Jiraiya (Naruto) and the Kurata Dealer (Akagi) for example all have the same sounding voice but even just hearing snippits of their dialogue you can tell just how different each character is, he's a dude that really manages to encapsulate a characters personality.

The dude is 68 years old so I was surprised to hear, and this was the inspiration for this post actually, his voice doing some kind of advert in a Family Mart a couple of days ago.  According to wiki the last video game he did was Nioh 2 in 2020 but he's still going in the anime scene with a role in something called A Herbivorous Dragon Get's Unfairly Villainized (? what the fuck) and it warms my dried up little heart to know he's still chugging along.

Next time you're playing or watching something maybe you'll be able to pick him out, it's really not hard to do.  I found out while glancing at the wiki page that he's done dubs of English actors like Jeanne Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russel and that's something I just GOTTA go experience.  What an absolute legend