Why Resident Evil's English Dialogue Became So Strange

A Horror Classic With An Unusual Voice

Resident Evil is one of those games that changed the shape of horror. Capcom's 1996 survival-horror release helped define a whole style of tense exploration, locked rooms, strange keys, and slow dread. Yet its English script and voice acting became famous for a very different reason. To many players, the lines sounded less like polished horror cinema and more like a low-budget video release from the 1980s or 1990s.

That odd charm has followed the game for decades. Phrases like "Jill sandwich" and "Master of Unlocking" became part of game culture, repeated because they were awkward, funny, and somehow still lovable. Fans have long wondered how such strange English made it into such an important game, especially when the individual people behind the first game's English localisation were never clearly credited.

Tom Shiraiwa's Usual Role At Capcom

Tom Shiraiwa, who worked as a localisation lead at Capcom's Osaka offices from 1990 to 2004, has offered a helpful look at how Capcom localisation often worked in the early 1990s. His normal process was fairly practical. He would prepare a simple English draft from the Japanese game text, then send it to Capcom USA. After that, he would usually work with someone there, often the late Erik Suzuki, to make the English sound more natural.

That kind of back-and-forth mattered. A plain draft can carry the basic meaning, but it still needs rewriting if it is going to sound like something English-speaking characters would actually say. According to Shiraiwa, in some cases a trusted American colleague might simply revise the whole script and send it back in a more natural form. That was the kind of cleanup process that could catch stiff lines before players ever heard them.

Resident Evil Took A Different Path

Resident Evil appears to have skipped that familiar route. Shiraiwa said his part ended after he submitted a rough translation. Because the project was important to director Shinji Mikami, and because it had a large amount of voice recording, Mikami chose to record the English dialogue at a studio in Tokyo instead. Shiraiwa believed Mikami wanted to be close to the session and guide the atmosphere himself, aiming for a Western horror-film feeling.

Shiraiwa was careful about what he knew and what he was inferring. He thought the same Tokyo-side company may also have worked on the English text, but he did not present that as a fully confirmed detail. What he did make clear is that Resident Evil did not go through him in the usual way after the rough draft. In his telling, Mikami went around the normal Osaka-to-Capcom-USA localisation path for this particular game.

The Reaction Changed The Next Game

After Resident Evil launched, the team became aware that English-speaking players were noticing the game's more comical expressions. Shiraiwa said that this changed the conversation inside Capcom. For Resident Evil 2, director Hideki Kamiya turned to Shiraiwa for help. Shiraiwa had previously named Shinji Mikami in this part of the story, but later clarified that it was Kamiya who brought him in for the sequel.

Even then, the solution was not perfect in everyone's eyes. Shiraiwa said he and Erik Suzuki handled later Resident Evil work through recording studios in Canada and tried their best. Some people at Capcom were still unhappy with the result, partly because the characters were American while much of the voice talent was Canadian. It was an improvement in process, but not a clean end to the debate over how the English should sound.