Somehow, most characters sound a bit grating in Mario Kart Wii… I would usually jump to singling out Funky Kong and Daisy as egregious too, but sometimes i wonder if they stick out at least partly due to being meta, and thus their voice clips being the most overexposed online? Maybe 12 of any character in every round and video of Wii would have just Done That to us
Like, i've noticed a massive difference between even Mario's voice in Wii and 8, and i've deconvinced myself that it's because of any difference in the performance itself, even though his timbre went way up. I think it's something to do with the audio mixing? Like, maybe Wii only manipulates voice clips by camera distance and 8 simulates actually throwing them away from the mic and bouncing back an echo to blend better with the environment, or something?? Maybe it's the compressor… like how, when you glide past the plane in Sunshine Airport, it seems to be set to play at a realistically high noise level, but the game brings all of the sound effects down while keeping them proportional to the total volume—maybe that whole system also reduces the stridency of voice clips somehow?? Would there happen to be any videogame audio reverse-engineers in this thread?
Anyway, given the time gap… Might have to throw in Talking Flower. The voice can be a really charming flavor of annoying depending on the bit, like SpongeBob perhaps, but suffice to say i'd hardly want it blaring in every circumstance in which you can play the Nintendo Switch™ family of videogame systems. (Your next line is "Oh! Was it something I said?")