Initial Thoughts: From the first conversation in the game.

These are currently 2 of my complaints. The first cutscene needs better facial animation, and their lip movements cannot be left as is. Miriam's mouth looks terrible, and doesn't match the speed and tone with which she speaks.

The grunts and yells she does don't match half the situations she's in. The Shard acquisition has her exploding with pain, despite it being something she endures many times. It shouldn't be so extreme.

The weapon sound grunts are random, and she does half a 50/50 change it seems to either yell or stay quiet. But she does sound very loud and far too exerted when poking with a rapier or using a single swing of the whip.

I switched to Japanese and started over shortly after leaving the first room, because I wasn't impressed with the English acting, and Miriam's combat voice was unpleasantly loud and forced sounding. The scream when she absorbs a shard for the first time was painful to listen to, and doesn't match the animation. I felt that her acting in dialogue wasn't bad, and the voice sounded reasonably appropriate, but the emotional range was too narrow, and the characters didn't translate well. The English dialogue was clunky; it was neither accurate enough to the Japanese to be considered a translation, nor was it good enough to stand on its own. I didn't have a good feel for the characters, their motivations, or their relationships until I switched to Japanese and watched the introduction again. Then it all made sense. Miriam's Japanese VA expressed a range of emotions throughout the few cutscenes in the demo, and it gave her a well-rounded personality. I'll have to play the demo again in English to comment on the characters' performances outside of Miriam and Johannes' initial dialogue, but in that scene, they both felt pretty flat in English. Not bad choices, necessarily, but a poor English script and poor direction.

As for the Japanese, I thought Miriam sounded a bit too breathy in that initial cutscene, but was fine later. Overall, I'm happy with her performance, particularly in combat, and for shard absorption. She manages to make it sound painful, but that she's able to tough it out and regain control. I actually thought Johannes sounds too young in Japanese for his model, but it may be that the model looks too old. Same with Anne. She sounds like a small child, but looks like a short, horribly disfigured adult. She's too tall for how she sounds. I didn't have any particular notes on the other characters, in either language.

Her mouth flaps due to it being the same model as her in game appearance. this means that her lip movements, unlike others, are over exaggerated for her loud 'hero of time' yells. When the game tries to utilize these limited facial mechanics for conversation, it ends up using the attack yells face. Hence Miriams gaping maw talk.