Why is the 3DO dub so divisive?

Hi,
When reading reactions or comments about the dub, I see that many people (including me) love it while some seem to have a real hatred towards it.

I could understand that you find it somewhat amateurish (because it technically is, and some npcs are less convincing than others), or even dated (like the shofixti or the yehat), but I've read mind boggling comments of people having gut reactions over extremely random and arbitrary stuff (like some guy citing, as one of the first examples of why he hates the dub, the one part where Fwiffo quotes his mother... like wth?), or judging very harshly some voices that really have nothing especially bad, like Hayes.
Reading some of them is like being transported on another dimension, like when another guy says that "intonation barely transmit emotions, what they actually do is simply raising the volume of the voice", while posting that under a video of the Yehat, that happen to be one of the races for which this comment would apply the least.

And then there are people who just hate the Utwigs, and I can't tell whether they're just frustrated that the whole joke is for them to be whiney emos and not... what emos think they sound like, or if they mistake the fact that their voice is grating for a technical flaw instead of being the whole point.
And even then, if we admitted all those points to be legitimate, I don't understand why this would cause anything more than a mild dislike, instead of this absurd urge to claim whenever possible that the whole dub is one of the worst in history, while anglophone dubbing counts many many absolute dogwater examples that are miles worst than this.

I could understand that some people, who played it before the dub and then discovered the voice, be disappointed that they do not sound like what they thought it would; but I mean, it's been almost 35 years since then, they've got the time to grow out of such a childish reaction.
And there's also those who seem unable to process that silly aliens have fittingly silly voices instead of epic space-opera ones; it's not even as if it were on saturday-cartoon level of cheesiness, it's still bearable...
All of this sounds more like some people have decided beforehand that they were going to loathe this dub, and then just throw randomly-generated criticisms to justify they hatred...

All of this to say that I really do not understand the reason behind such a visceral and undeserved reaction, and I suspect some kind of culture shock between me (french) and what many english-speaking people expect from a dub...
I know you could answer that I shouldn't pay too much attention to random people's rambling on the internet; but it's not like it's only one looney who's behind all those comments, but it's a noticeable part of the almost 50% of people who express their dislike whenever the dub is mentionned -- sometimes reasonably and for justified reasons, sometimes vehemently for arbitrary ones.

I just want to understand human beings...

Posted Jun 10, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

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