This Week in Games

Interview with Patricia Summersett, Voice of Princess Zelda

Welcome back, folks! I tried making magnolia jelly last weekend, and sadly, it didn't turn out right. I don't know whether I used too much water or what, but the jelly never set (it came out more like syrup than actual "jelly"). Still tasty, at least. I also had the privilege of watching Trolls 2 with some friends; truly a crown jewel of so-bad-it-is-good films. We've got a lot to talk about this week, so let's jump right in!

Square Enix to Incorporate Gemini into Dragon Quest X

Dragon Quest has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism regarding its "refusal to innovate" for a long time—but maybe they should stay the course? Earlier this weekend, Square Enix announced that they'd incorporate Google's Generative AI engine Gemini into Dragon Quest X. The idea is for Gemini to power Slimey, a slime character who follows the main character around, allowing him to generate dialogue and conversations with the main character. This would also generate voice clips for Slimey. The reason? Dragon Quest X is a 14-year-old game, and head of development Takashi Anzai proposes that this will help players who get lost and don't know where to go in-game.

This is a move that's been a long time coming, and one that Square Enix fans have been dreading for ages; current Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu is a noted evangelist of generative AI and has been pushing to include it in workflow since at least 2024. This is the latest in a lot of, frankly, harebrained schemes on Square Enix's behalf, starting with a push for constant live-service games (many of which were EOSed within a year), the blockchain (the only genuine result being Symbiogenesis, which was excoriated by fans), and now generative AI.

That Square Enix is pushing for generative AI in Dragon Quest has not gone over well with the Japanese fanbase. While Dragon Quest producer (and onetime biggest mis-understander of the English language) Yūji Horii is totes magotes onboard with the generative AI train, fans in Japan are not happy with this. For reference: Dragon Quest is an institution in Japan (unlike the U.S., where Dragon Quest is a talking point). Just the news that Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Sky was going to be an action-RPG instead of a traditional turn-based RPG had fans so wound up that Square Enix backpedaled but hard. Dragon Quest including generative AI hasn't gone over much better; one Japanese user declared that their "trust in Square Enix is completely gone" (translated via Google). One Japanese artist bemoaned the possibility that they "wouldn't be receiving any more work offers from Square Enix"—but also, wouldn't want any, given the generative AI. One final user points out that if Square Enix were so gung-ho about using Generative AI, they could've developed their own engine instead of using Gemini, which saves them the trouble of using a model based on plagiarized art.

The sad thing here is that Dragon Quest X isn't even available for play in the U.S. It's a numbered title, it's 14 years old, and Dragon Quest fans have either had to resort to illicit means or just sit on their hands just to enjoy it. Meanwhile, everyone else gets to wonder why the numbered Dragon Quest games go from IX to XI. Also, considering the Dragon Quest franchise's reputation for dialogue... just how hard is it to write a few witty tips from a Slime? What the heck is going on at Square Enix?

Otome Overload: Big News for Visual Novel Fans

We here at This Week in Games are willing to do what it takes to make sure that the otome fanbase gets its news. So when my informant Rebecca pops in with some hot tips on upcoming titles, I jump at the opportunity to spread the word. Major thanks to Rebecca for helping with this, and to Otome Kitten for sounding the bell for everyone (be sure to give them both some thanks!) Anyway, we've got a lot of games to plop into people's laps!

The original 9. R.I.P. was a visual novel released in the U.S. in 2024. You played as Misa Isshiki, an anxious teenager who rejects the abundant ghost stories in her town. Naturally, she tries to avoid them—but it turns out, she gets dragged into them one way or another! 9 R.I.P. Sequel picks up where the Heavenly and Godly endings from the original leave off, allowing Misa to continue her stories with the first game's nine love interests.

What made the original 9 R.I.P.'s setting so unique was the nature of the various routes; while most games would have an overarching gimmick shared by all of the love interests, 9 R.I.P. instead partitions off each love interest into their own unique route, with Misa happening upon each in unique ways. In the School Ghost Stories routes, Misa encounters a few restless spirits haunting her school, Dusk maiden of Amnesia-style. Meanwhile, the Urban Legends route has Misa actually die in a car crash, leaving her to navigate her afterlife in town with the help of two local ghosts. The Other Realm routes have Misa accidentally winding up in Hell (as you do), and trying to escape back home while avoiding the temptations of a demon. And the Spirit World routes chronicle Misa's misadventures in purifying the local shrine.

9 R.I.P. Sequel is scheduled to release in the U.S. on the Nintendo Switch. There's no concrete release date outside of a vague 2026 window, but you can preorder the Standard or Limited edition versions right now.

Up next is some news for fans of Voltage Inc.'s Love and Legends! You may know Voltage Inc. as the studio behind Love and Deepspace, the otome mobile game that has taken the female audience by storm worldwide. Love and Legends was another of their mobile offerings, courtesy of the Lovestruck: Choose Your Romance story app. Though the app shut down in 2022, Voltage Inc. was very nice and listened to its audience, and it has now made Love and Legends available on the Nintendo Switch as its own dedicated game! While currently available through the eShop, Love and Legends also has a Steam release due out soon, although its release date is still TBD. Love and Legends allows your character to live out their isekai fantasies in a medieval-themed world with elves, wizards, and royalty, along with the addition of a few new quality-of-life features like the ability to rewind scenes or save and load your story.

Voltage Inc. will compile all five seasons of Love and Legends, and has also promised that more of the entries from Lovestruck: Choose Your Romance will also be available in the future. We'll keep you posted!

Finally, on the indie side of things, we have Can I Not Fall for Idols? from Mikimaki. This one came out this March 2, but it hasn't gotten much attention otherwise. It has a fascinating twist: you play as the manager of a new group of idols, but the idols start with maximum affection towards you! While you can choose options to further your relationship, doing so also decreases the odds of a successful debut of their group (since idols aren't supposed to date). It's a short-but-sweet title, clocking in at about an hour long, complete with a commentary from the voice cast.

Veteran Nintendo Producer Kensuke Tanabe Retires

Nintendo suffered quite the loss this week—not a death, mind, but the retirement of one of its major talents. Kensuke Tanabe, better known for serving as the producer on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, announced that it would be his last game with Nintendo, ending a 40-year career with the company. Tanabe's career stretched back into the past for Nintendo, including serving as director on Super Mario Bros. 2 and as a writer for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. He had also worked closely with Nintendo's affiliates like Retro Studios for several spin-off titles, as well as serving on a few fan-favorite titles like Chibi-Robo. 

These days, it feels very rare to see a noted developer retiring after a storied career of their own volition, especially given the unending layoffs we see in the industry (look at Epic Games laying off 1,000 employees just this week alone). Nintendo is lucky enough to have many of the people who've helped establish their major tent pole franchises still working with them. But also, 40 years is a long time, and many of these people are fast approaching their golden years. We've said it before, but the Nintendo Switch 2 is likely to be the last console to see games featuring many of these veteran developers. The good news is that Nintendo has made sure to pass on as much of its generational knowledge as possible, and to allow its newer talents to experiment (such as with Super Mario Bros. Wonder). But when you look at the news of people like Tanabe retiring, you can't help but feel this is the end of an era.

These sorts of retirement announcements will likely continue over the next few years. However, while we should mourn and honor the careers of these retirees, we should also be happy that they've had the opportunity to work as long as they have. Not a lot of people in the gaming industry have been allowed to work on their franchises like that.

I hope that Tanabe-san can enjoy their retirement knowing their work has brought joy to many worldwide.

Interview with Patricia Summersett, Voice of Princess Zelda

For nigh-on ten years, fans all over the world have enjoyed a voiced Princess Zelda in the Legend of Zelda games. This is courtesy of the performance of Patricia Summersett, a vocal talent with an impressive twenty-year resumé for both film and video games. I was lucky enough to get a chance to speak to this member of Zelda royalty and discuss their experiences as one of the premier princesses of gaming, how they feel about Zelda's 40-year history, as well as their earlier career.

This Week in Games: How did you come by the role of Princess Zelda?

Patricia Summersett: I came by the role of Zelda after a move to Los Angeles. I had been acting for about ten years, and I was expanding my career to the L.A. market. I sent out some packages, got this audition, and was essentially auditioning for something secret. I did the audition and some call-backs, then found out I got a role. When I signed the [non-disclosure agreement], I found out it was Zelda. As you can imagine, it was a pretty large surprise when I found out what the role actually was.

TWIG: Was it confusing, having to audition for a role when you didn't even know what it was for?

PS: It's so common in video games. It's always a little confusing because, as a voice actor or somebody who works on games, you're trying to figure out and decipher what an audition might be, or even just getting in the ballpark of what they're looking for. So often, you get specs that are sending you in one direction that might not be at all how they cast. You never know. So you are throwing a lot of spaghetti at the fridge, basically.

TWIG: How did it feel when you found out you had been cast as Zelda?

PS: Like skydiving. It was incredible. It was a huge adrenaline rush and came with a lot of emotions that would sort of stay and play out throughout the year as I was recording and working through the mystery of what it was going to be, actually, long term.

TWIG: What influenced your performance as Zelda? Be it personal experiences or external media, what kind of went into your performance?

PS: I had a ton of influences, obviously, by that point. I'd been acting for 10 years. Things I've cited in the past, which are just sort of true for whatever I come to as an actor, because my source is often nature. I grew up in Upper Michigan, and so I feel very strongly that Lake Superior makes its way into a lot of my work. It's where I grew up. Climbing trees, looking at white-tailed deer, and playing with frogs were a huge part of my childhood. So that was very informative. And then also things like training in London, doing my classical acting training there. Having been an actor for 10 years—well, I guess at this point now it's been 20 years. I guess going through a lot of ups and downs and failures and close wins and things that I thought would be the be-all, end-all, and they weren't, just leveling my expectations and trying to focus on what's in front of me. That's an important lesson, too. All of those things do come together in the way that really all of my characters are informed. And I would say that with Zelda, too.

But I also did play [The Legend of Zelda] when I was younger, so I did grow up with an NES in my house. So it was pretty exciting to know that this iconic character had made its way somehow into my life in this regard. I did game with my sisters when we were younger. We were mostly Mario and Track-and-Field players.

TWIG: You'd mentioned your tenured career up until the time you had already been cast in Zelda, and I'd like to touch on that a little bit. I looked through your backlog and saw you voiced Grendel's Mother in the licensed Beowulf game back in 2007. Was it hard to match Angelina Jolie's performance in that? Or were you given more leeway to just sound like the platonic ideal of Grendel's mother, as it were?

PS: Oh, that's a great question. And it's funny because in my life I've done matches for Angelina Jolie and Katy Perry. When I worked on Smurfs 2, I was the on-set Smurfette that she eventually took over for the film. And so I was like the on-set person who was trying to do a Smurfette. You're always wondering what that is when you have huge actors such as Angelina Jolie. They were looking for something that someone who naturally had the timber of her and could do a Slavic accent. So that role came to me when I was creating a demo, and the guy who was helping me with my demo passed it on to a casting director. And I guess they'd been looking for a while to do a voice match because she'd opted out of the game. So I wasn't expected to do exactly what Angelina Jolie did in that. It was really more just being in the ballpark, hitting the essence of it. And that was my first big AAA game. And I just thought, "Oh my gosh, I've made it." And of course, the game didn't do particularly well, but it was still one of those, like, unbelievably fascinating things to work on at that stage in my career." It was the first real huge test somebody had given me in a video game like that.

TWIG: We had also seen that he'd worked on Suikoden Tierkreis as two characters, Diadorah and Servillah. How hard is it to voice two different characters in one game like that?

PS: I don't think it's too hard. It actually depends on what the team wants you to do with the voices. Sometimes they want voices that are distinctly different, and sometimes they don't mind that they're really similar. And the animation is going to make the voices a little different from what they are. It's been a while. That was actually one of my first games, too. That's like nearly 20 years ago. Isn't that crazy? But [voicing multiple characters] is not so hard. I regularly do five characters in a video game. There's a video game that I'm working on right now, can't say what it is, but I voice two main characters, and they are both in their low register, but one is a lot more regal, and one is a lot more domestic. I also did five or six more NPCs. I love to do that, but usually you hope that they all hit a different range.

TWIG: So you like to sort of like flex your register, as it were, to have a variety of characters that have different registers and just play around in that area. 

PS: Yeah, I absolutely do. That's one of the really fun things about video game acting, specifically that you can do in a way that you can't do on stage. The first time I ever did a stage performance that deeply moved me in school was taking on the role of a 99-year-old duchess. It was in full makeup, and I was in full 99-year-old voice. Like I would speak like this [note: done in a convincing elderly voice]. I was 23, and people thought that I was 65 years old under the costume, which was my big win. It was a really informative thing where I realized, "Oh, I can actually do this." And boy, do I love the character work. So yeah, there's something about working in video games and other forms of animation that makes it possible. I love that transformative element about it.

TWIG: Okay, going back to Zelda a bit, what do you think that makes Zelda from Breath of the Wild such a unique character?

PS: Yeah, the iconic, mysterious Zelda. What makes her unique? I mean, what makes her unique is this incredible game franchise, for one. It's made her a deeper kind of princess because, first of all, she has so many iterations of her, and they keep on evolving through time. I'm lucky enough to voice one that didn't have as much of a developed voice before, but I think what gives her the wonderful nuance that she has is that they explore the fact that she is an outdoorsy princess. She's extremely intelligent, brave, but also soft. There is this really nice element of her softness mixed with a certain kind of power, and maybe a bit of a nerdy, quirky side. So all those things together make her, for me, so lovable--and obviously for a lot of other people, too.

TWIG: How does it feel to be part of the Zelda mythos?

PS: Honestly, I'm still pinching myself. I've been part of the series for essentially 10 years now. It's never a given that it's going to last this long. It's never a given that you're going to be asked back for games. The amount of people I have met in the real world and the ways that I've celebrated this game in the last 10 years, and the fact that the franchise is actually 40 years old, that it's a part of deep video game history in the development of video games as we know them today, in my lifetime... It's just really extraordinary. It's a really interesting lens on the world and the types of storytelling that have developed in the last 20 years. So I'm kind of. It's so much more than gameplay to me. It's really rocked my world. And it really is about the real people more than the games for me. I look a lot of people in the eye, I hug a lot of people, I cry with people, and we just have these real human moments, and the game is an excuse.

TWIG: Besides Breath of the Wild Zelda, do you have any other incarnation of the princess that is particularly close to your heart? 

PS: I do. I mean, I really enjoy Ocarina of Time Zelda. I also love Twilight Princess Zelda, both her style and also because I write in Twilight Princess Hylian. I feel like I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. I have an image of that game world that comes up more often these days. So probably those two, they're all really interesting and unique. They're all like these little strands of the same story. What about you? I'm curious, which is your favorite Zelda?

TWIG: Oh yeah, Twilight Princess Zelda is also like one of my major favorites.

PS: Oh, yay!

TWIG: Do you have any thoughts on the upcoming Zelda film? 

PS: I look forward to seeing it, and I think everybody's going to do an incredible job. I'm curious to see what they put into it. A lot of people have a lot of expectations for that film, and just judging on what Nintendo has done in the past with the other huge franchise video game films that they've done there, it's just gonna be full of lore and probably some unexpected stuff too. I look forward to hearing the music. I'm curious what the score is going to be in that, and I'm sure I'm gonna be wishing Bo Bragason a huge congratulations for it. It's such an epic opportunity. It's a feature film, and hopefully it's going to be great, and hopefully the fans will really enjoy it. It's never been a better time to be a Zelda fan because you have so many different iterations and so many opportunities for new ones, and they've just done so much with it with the gameplay and the innovation over the last few years.

TWIG: Going back to Breath of the Wild, how'd it feel to record Zelda's little audio diary entries for the updates?

PS: Oh, that was very cute. It was also an interesting challenge. I learned a ton about the lore of Hyrule. I think we all did, because it was sitting there and reading an encyclopedia or Hyrule Historia. Each line was like a whole diary entry. So that was an interesting challenge in and of itself. Trying to bring out each line. It was one of the most interesting challenges I've had with recording for Zelda because it was like recording a new game. You have the [Super Smash Bros.] games or whatever, and then you have the cinematics for the other games, and then there's this. And it was just like paragraphs and paragraphs of text. I loved working with Hari Leigh. She's an incredible director.

TWIG: If I can ask, which of the diary entries is your favorite?

PS: There are some pretty silly ones in there that I really enjoyed. There's one that references the Goron hot springs, and the fact that [they eat] boiled eggs. Like just the fact that Gorons eat something other than rocks. And that was news to me. I found that. I still think about that. That is really funny. I don't know why it hit me so hard when I was recording it, but I was like, of all the things, I just wouldn't have ever considered that. That one pops out for me. And then there are a lot of entries where she's revisiting her family; those are extremely touching. Anytime she's thinking about her mom. Those are such big, untouched, untapped, very heartfelt moments of a daughter searching for these memories with her mom.

TWIG: Do you have any final words for our readers?

PS: Well, as I said, I just think it's never really been a better time to love this franchise. They keep innovating with it, and it's really an incredible thing to be part of. Regardless of what comes up in the future, I'm still your Zelda. To quote Zelda, I could be one of many Zeldas that appear. But it's a big, wide world, and I like to think of it as one big inclusive world. So I'm just really happy to be here, and I'm happy to meet all the people that I do continue to meet at conventions, and if there are other opportunities for me to play this again, I certainly will [take it]. But I'm [still] pinching myself at how incredible the last ten years have been. It's been such an amazing part of my life. So I love sharing it with everyone. It's pretty cool.

Many thanks again to Patricia Summersett for taking the time to meet with me and answer my questions!

Let's wrap up with some quick tidbits:

That'll do it for this week. I've got one more surprise for my readers: I'll be joining the Axe of the Blood God podcast this weekend for a special episode on the .hack//IMOQ games! Look forward to that; I know I am. In the meantime, be good to each other! I'll see you in seven.

This Week In Games! is written from idyllic Portland by Jean-Karlo Lemus. When not collaborating with Anime News Network, Jean-Karlo can be found playing Japanese RPGs, eating popcorn, watching VTuber content, and watching tokusatsu. You can keep up with him at @ventcard.bsky.social.