[resu_nimda]

It did work in English though. Maybe not as well, but I do remember noticing in the original Animal Crossing that there was some correlation between the sounds and the text. Even if it was just the timing and intonation, it could definitely be understood that the lines were actually being spoken in some form. I don't think it was TTS because it was too accurate in a really subtle way.

Or maybe it was and they tweaked it well enough to work. It's been a while, my memory could be off. I don't know if it would have been prohibitive on the GameCube to have audio of every line (there were a lot), but I wouldn't put it past them to have done so.

[marcan_42]

It's TTS. They absolutely don't go dubbing around every line for this, that'd be insane. That's the whole point of this system, to provide some fun sounding audio for the lines without having to actually dub them. You can tell because they speak your island name and your own name exactly the same way as the rest of the text, accurately. And because it's pretty monotone and consistent.

Besides, can you imagine voice actors dubbing this stuff in this kind of voice line by line? They'd go insane.

[resu_nimda]

Yeah that makes sense. I guess I figured they could have processed the spoken audio, not that the actors would have actually talked like that. I was just fooled by the fact that their TTS sounds more passably human than any other I've heard (in an abstract way).