Esteemed voice actor Gouri Daisuke passed away recently, leaving a hole in video games and anime forever. Voicing characters such as Mr. Satan in Dragonball Z and Mishima Heihachi in the Tekken series, he had continued to work up until his death and now the productions which were utilizing his unique, gravel-like voice need to find replacements. But how have works compensated for the loss of a voice actor in the past? That is something I am going to explore.

The best place to look is the Super Robot Wars series of video games. While the US-released Original Generation series of SRW games featured characters with no origin except other SRW games, the main thrust of SRW is in crossing over various popular giant robot anime and manga into a sort of Flinstones Meet the Jetsons with Fire and Destruction. Starting in the 32-bit era, these games started getting voices and using the original voice actors from the original anime. When you heard Amuro Ray talk, you knew that was Furuya Tohru.

But then they hit that inevitable event that befell Gouri and others before him. At that point, you have two choices: Recast the role with a new actor, or use existing voice clips forever. When Grendizer protagonist Duke Freed’s voice actor Tomiyama Kei passed away, Super Robot Wars MX used a new actor, probably due to the fact that Grendizer hadn’t really appeared in any later voiced games and they had no good voice samples. Similarly, when Sayla Mass of Gundam fame’s  voice actor Inoue You passed, she received a new voice for Super Robot Wars GC. But when Suzuoki Hirotaka, aka Bright Noah from Gundam and Haran Banjou from Daitarn 3 passed away, the creators of SRW must have had enough high-quality audio for them to continue using his voice. This is no surprise, seeing as both Bright and Banjou appear in nearly every SRW game.

But then Suzuoki Hirotaka had another role in a very popular anime: Pokemon. There, he was the voice of Sakaki or, as English-speaking audiences know him, Giovanni, leader of Team Rocket, and in that role it would be impossible to simply reuse existing audio and so he had to be recast. Currently, Miyake Kenta, probably best known at this point as Zangief in Street Fighter 4 voices the former Viridian Gym Leader.

Gouri Daisuke himself voiced a number of notable character in giant robot anime, such as Dozle Zabi (Gundam), who is pictured above, and Bask Om (Zeta Gundam), so it remains to be seen how the Super Robot Wars series will handle it this time.