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US Wii Release of Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces to Exclude Japanese Voice Track
The forthcoming US release of the Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces flight combat game for the Wii has been to ship without the Japanese launguage voice track as explained by an XSEED rep:
“Unfortunately, it looks like The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces will not have the original Japanese voice-overs included, only the new English voices, this appears to be mainly a licensing issue with the Japanese voices for territories outside of Japan, but even if they were available, there are some questions about the disc capacity being able to contain both the Japanese and English voices.”
It appears that the thorny issue of licensing has reared its head, but what was more telling was the comment on disc space.
As the Nintendo Wii uses proprietary optical media derived from the DVD standard, cost for dual-layer media is significantly more expensive on a per-unit basis, with the majority of retail Wii releases being released on single layer media to reduce costs, all but confirmed by the disc space concerns raised in the aforementioned statement.
The majority of Wii game audio is encoded in a variety of formats with stereo AAC being the most common and PCM being a secondary choice when possible. Despite prevailing “wisdom”, only a certain number of Wii releases are encoded using Dolby Pro Logic II in order to save money on licensing fees, as developers and publishers still have to pay licensing fees to Dolby Labs in order to utilize the technology in games.
Many higher-profile Wii releases are developed with the use of dual-layer media and Dolby audio encoding in mind (such as Super Smash Brothers Brawl) but few current releases utilize dual layer media and Dolby Pro Logic encoding aside from internally developed titles and higher profile third-party releases when necessary.
The game will be released during the holiday season for the Nintendo Wii and will be published by XSEED Games.
News: US Wii Release of Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces to Exclude Japanese Voice Track –