Voice acting aside, what I really hate about all these
JRPGs are the character designs. Always the same generic design; girly looking main character with a short jacket and too many ugly accessories. The female characters are all pretty generic also. The stories are the same none-sense, too. Just looking at the screens again!! Typical over stylized junk. This genre desperately needs better art designs, and different settings.
Maybe if I were 10 yrs old I'd give it a play.

My first language is Chinese, and I can understand both JAP and ENG.
I prefer to play games with JAP subs/VA in Japanese games, and ENG subs/VA in USA/Europe games.
I think it’s the most native way to feel the games.
But usually, JAP games with ENG VA are pretty poor…….. And it does for this game too.

As someone who knows someone who does this, I can say that's about half of the issue. It is true: the normal person who enjoys JRPGs and buys them at Walmart but doesn't spend hours talking about it with others online prefers hearing English rather than some foreign language they don't know. And yes, this normal person outnumbers all of you that want Japanese tracks.

The other side is cost. Putting in Japanese voices are not free, nor are they something that can be done with a flick of a switch. New contracts and royalties have to be taken up for the Japanese voice artists, and as you all know they're huge in Japan: they don't come cheap. Many times localization companies can cut a large cost just by not paying for the Japanese voices and use a fraction of the money that would be spent to hire English voice actors.

That's how it works. And it won't change anytime soon until there's a way to directly target all of you people who are willing to spend money for Japanese voices. :)

A hope is that with DLC, companies can in part, offload the cost directly to the demographic that wants it most: you want Japanese voices, pay up another $10 for them and everyone is happy.

But for now, language dubs will be the norm.

I know exactly what you mean but I also understand why many Westerners don't feel that way. This game was done in Japan, by Japanese people, and someone who grew up in Japan or is very familiar with Japanese culture will look at this game in exactly that way, a game created in Japan, by the Japanese, imbued with Japanese culture. From that perspective Japanese voices will sound better and make the most sense because you're expecting the women to sound a little girly and the men to have deep voices but speak in a softer way than it's common for Western men.
However, someone who knows little to nothing about Japanese culture will expect the characters to sound "normal" ("normal" meaning they sound just like him/her and the people around him/her). Someone like that will expect the women to have more womanly voices and the men to sound "tough" because, let's face it, that's how most Western male game characters sound. Anything other than that will just sound weird and fake to them.I agree that it's not a matter of being ignorant but, in a certain way, it is a matter of being lazy. More than that though, it's a matter of not being open-minded enough.
I grew up reading subtitles. Nowadays most cartoons on tv here are dubbed, but when I was a child they weren't and I had to watch cartoons in English, Japanese, whatever, always with subtitles. Even though cartoons are now dubbed, nothing else is and so subtitles are still everywhere. My eyes and brain are used to reading subtitles to the point where I don't have to look at the image or at the subtitles, I look at both at the same time. Reading subtitles contributed to improve my brain's agility.

Subtitles can also be didactic. They're one of the reasons why I speak English fluently (I passed my FCE exam when I was 13, the average age is 21). Because I've watched movies, cartoons and tv series in English all my life (I also read books written in English frequently), I learned how to pronounce words correctly and learned thousands of words as well as expressions. Does it work like this for everybody? No, and that's why I initially said one needs to be open-minded enough.
I always loved the English language and was very much interested in learning it the best I could, so I paid close attention to what I heard on tv hence learning an array of new words as well as their correct pronunciation. Most people I know don't pronounce "apple" correctly, they pronounce the "a" like the "a" in "aim", and they do this with many other words. Why? Because they just don't care about the correct pronunciation. I say this because everytime I correct a friend of mine he/she brushes me off saying he/she doesn't care. That same carelessness is the reason why Americans' don't like to "read" a game or movie, it's not because they're ignorant.

I don't speak much Japanese but I do know enough to recognize the emotions being conveyed and to order food, ask for directions, purchase stuff, introduce myself to other people, etc (I had to do all this while in vacation in Japan) and I learned all of it by watching anime and listening to Japanese music. I understand a lot of things when I watch a movie or anime in Japanese, many times it's enough to know the subtitles aren't 100% correct. Same thing with French, I learned French for 3 years in high school but what greatly improved my knowledge of the language was reading manga in French (French editions are cheaper than American editions). I now speak French well enough to keep up a conversation with a native speaker and when I go to France I don't need to speak any other language.
This only happened because I was open-minded enough to care about a language other than my own. Is there something wrong with not being open-minded? Not necessarily, but it is, in my opinion, the reason why many Americans (they're not the only ones) only care for things written or spoken in English.

Having said all that I won't be buying this game until the 25th of September. That's the day when the Asian edition of the game will be on sale and I'm hoping it will have Japanese voices. If it does I hope it can be played on a PAL Xbox360. If it doesn't I guess I'll just have to listen to the English dub.

6.5 from gamespot why? but this game got a score from user to 8.5. I don't know why? However I sure to play this thnx for video^_^

I'm not big fan of jRPGs (but i like some of them) but imo characters are more uninspired and without characteristic style on this gen. jRPGs on this generetion needs more charismatics characters like for example in Dragon Quest 8 from PS2. You see them and know from which game they are (even people who never played jRPGs can recognize for example Jessica or Yangus from DQ).

You're Crazy.

Haha, they're even more cliche than in IU. No thank you. And IU has proper cutscenes, not that "press 'x' after every dialogue line" bullshit.

Thanks for the vids Blim!