Interview: Amelia Tyler and Alpha Takahashi discuss their time as part of The Hex
I really enjoy interviews; I haven’t done a heap, but they are always so interesting. This has got to be the most chaotic duo I have chatted with, though. I spoke with Alpha Takahashi and Amelia Tyler about being voice actors in Warframe, and whilst delightful, this required more than a bit of editing. Totally worth it. Enjoy!
Let’s get started with introductions.Amelia: Hi, I'm Amelia Tyler. I play Eleanor Nightingale.
Alpha: And I'm Alpha Takahashi, and I play Aoi.
With 1999 almost being wrapped up in a bow, can we expect to see Aoi and Eleanor in future expansions?Amelia: Yes, please! I don't know, but yes, please. I will play Eleanor until the end of time. I love her, I love all the characters in this universe that DE have created. And I think there's so much more depth to be mined there. I want to see them all interact more, and I want to see them interacting with other characters.
I've been talking to Elsie Lovelock, who plays Rusalka, and those two would vibe together. There's a shared vulnerability, a shared story there that I think Eleanor would really want to delve into. I'd love to see that. There's a lot of scope. So, this is my formal petition. DE, please, please let us do this more, because this was fun.
Alpha: Well, we know that DE does listen a lot. They listen to their players, their community. They're very receptive to it. It's amazing. They've been on this game for over 10 years, and they've developed it to their needs.
Amelia: And they listen to us a lot, right?
Alpha: Yeah, they do, they do, they really do. We've seen things that we've suggested actually implemented in the lines and the text, so it's really wonderful to see. And yes, I second Amelia's opinion. We want to interact with each other more! Reb (Rebecca Ford), please, please!
I take it you've been enjoying your time at Digital Extremes, then?Amelia: Oh god, yeah, how can you not? You so rarely get to work with people who take such joy in their jobs and who listen to their players. And they've done an incredible job of capturing our voices.
Alpha: They kept capturing our voices, our characters as people, as humans. I think they see us!
Amelia: Yeah, because when they did the initial session, they found out how I worked with the character, how I worked with the script, and then they wrote for me. Even the KIM lines are written by the same person who directed me, Adrienne Box, a phenomenally talented writer, to the point now where I've sat on my sofa sight-reading the Kim lines, because I didn't know about that. And you can sight-read it because it's in her voice. It feels natural and effortless.
Alpha: I was just telling Amelia, I've been on it since the end of 2023 for Aoi, and I've also seen the progression of how they've taken in who I am as a person and how I speak as a person into Aoi's speech. It's gotten easier and easier for me to speak as her. One of the lines, she said, "Thank you!" And there's a long you, and that is literally how I would say it.
Amelia: They've taken suggestions for lines as well. One of my last recording sessions, I said to Adrienne, "If we play these characters again, can I please have a line when I take the piss out of Arthur's voice?" Because I take the piss out of Ben (Ben Starr) in real life, and she definitely would as a sibling. Now there's a line in the KIM system where she says, “Has he done the voice for you yet?” And I love that because it's collaborative.
Amelia: We're going to talk about this a bit on the narrative panel, but I voiced all the apes in the infested ape scene. So in the zoo, when they're all like monstrous and Eleanor's talking to them, I'm both sides of that conversation.
That was so much fun as a technical exercise, because I got to be Eleanor, and it got to be a moment where Eleanor, who is constantly battling that darkness and that monster inside, lets go. There's something begging for its life, and she's just like, "No, you're dying."
Alpha: Favourite moments with DE. I think it's got to be TennoCon 2024. I was here last year. And I told Reb, "Thank you, this changed my life." Before TennoCon 24, I had turned down many requests to go to events because I was afraid of the reaction. I couldn't bear to think or fear actual human interactions with work that I've done. And I didn't want to face that. And then I got my courage up to come to TennoCon last year. And I had the time of my life. It was literally the party of my lifetime.
We had so much fun. And it is a very rare occasion where 3,000 people are gathering and cheering on for the same exact thing. Which just happens to be the thing that you poured your time, energy and love into. I think that moment really changed the course of my life and how I spend time and how I look at myself in my career as well.
Amelia: I'm so looking forward to it because I've met a few fans of the game over the last year, but not many. And certainly not to this scale. It's going to be wild. I think it’s very easy in our jobs to be quite isolated. We go into a little booth, we record our part, and then we leave. And months, years, however long later, we see if people liked it. It's easy to feel quite removed from that. But this feels like such a community. People love it, and they've been so supportive and loving, sometimes in a very graphic, artistic manner. And I see you, and well done.
Alpha: We have been talking about the fan art for the community. It makes me so happy. That's what I do at 3 am when I'm scrolling through the internet. I can't sleep, and I look at Warframe fan art, and it warms my heart and makes me really happy and giddy. The love from the community has been overwhelming, but in a positive way.
Amelia: We don't usually get a lot of that for Eleanor's type of character, where she is quite ballsy and monstrous, but also vulnerable. She's not going to give you an easy ride, and you so rarely see people gathering round and being like, “You, the one with the ten-foot tongue, you're the one for me”.
It's so fantastic to see people going in for the monstrous element of it, but then digging down deep into who she is and what makes her tick. Getting to value her as a person, because that's all she wants, and that's all any of us want. It’s certainly what I want. See me.
Let’s discuss the obvious topic: Baldur's Gate 3. How is it going from a sort of background narrator character to Eleanor?Amelia: It's been really nice to delve into something different. I absolutely adore BT03, but I was at the point before that game came out where people said, "Oh, you can act." And I was starting to get some really juicy cinematic roles. And then BG3 comes out, and now they want me to do audiobooks. And that's great. I would love to do some of that.
I want to get into doing acting work. And there was a particular version of the narrator in BG3 that was much more down the line. A lot of people don't know there are 17 different versions of the narrator, and they're all new. It depends on who you're playing as. So if you play as Dark Urge, you get something much more like the monstrous version of Eleanor.
I remember getting the script for the Dark Urge and being like, "Oh, I get to be a character now." This is great. Because it's a very different style of narration from what people have been used to for all the different versions. We tried to do something a bit new with it.
With Eleanor, I felt very seen. I felt like I could show complexity, because I come from a psychology background. The end goal for me was working with serial killers and that side of things. I have a Psychology BSc, and that's what I wanted to do with my life.
To be able to put that into practice, to show complexity to a woman who is badass, but frightened of becoming the monster, but knows that there's power there, and kind of enjoys it. There's so much delicious complexity and vulnerability that we rarely see in a female character. To get to embody that was just so fulfilling.
Amelia: I've always been an actor since I was five years old. But my mum said, “Don't you dare be an actor. There's no career in that, go to university and get a degree.” I'd always been fascinated by psychology, so I said I guess I'll do that. But it's not the kind of job you can leave at work, especially in the field that I was going to go into.
You have to be ready for some dark shit, and you have to be there for people. So I took a year out after my BSc to see if there was anything else in the world I wanted to do, and I went back to voice acting. And I never left, it just took off, and I'm really glad. Originally, it was just radio and corporate and commercials, that kind of thing. And then I broke into video games, and it was like coming home.
This is all the different areas of my life. I have screen training, I have stage training, mo-cap, voice, all of it came together. Along with psychology, I play a lot of characters who are very deep and unusual and have a slightly aside view of humanity. So getting to pull that all together in this sweet spot, yeah, that's what happened.
Alpha, what led you to acting? Was that always the plan?Alpha: I loved, I loved playing make-believe. But I think growing up with an Asian background, you're automatically pushed to be a lawyer or a doctor. It's a stereotypical view, but that's what happens. And I said, "What if I want to be both? What if I want to be this and that and all of these different things? What if I want to be a florist? What if I want to be a martial artist?"
I could not make up my mind. Same reason why I don't have a single tattoo on my body, because I want to do all these different designs, but I’d probably want to switch around every three days.
How can I make that work? And that was theatre for me. I come from a stage background in musical theatre, which has led me to go into voiceover because of the training of my voice and being able to manipulate that. Being a voice actor has worked out for me because you get to work in your PJs and run your booth!
I think all the things that I train for on stage are playing into video games. I do come from a martial arts background, which has particularly helped me because I've also voiced in fighting games and also Marvel Rivals right now, where there is combat, there are voices, lots of effort sounds. I never imagined that doing karate with my brother, only to beat him up, would help me in my career. It's become really realistic.
Because you play Psylocke in that and Marvel Mystic Mayhem?Alpha: Yes, I was very fortunate to carry over my voice to the other Marvel game that just came out. I still auditioned for them. Even as the same character. Same character, same developer, but still auditioned. Got the role, yay!
If you could pick any franchise to be in or role to play, what would you do?Alpha: [Anguished Alpha Noises]
Amelia: I think... I mean, all of them. All of them. I would love to do literally anything that Naughty Dog ever does, touches, or sneezes near. I adore their work. But equally, I love indie games, and I would happily get such a range of unusual choices being made by indie games. I'd love to be in The Witcher. That'd be fun. Or something like cyberpunk-y as well. That'd be fun.
Oh, no. I'll tell you what. Control. I love Control. Yeah, that'd be fun. Something by them would be really fun.
Alpha: I am screaming Kingdom Hearts. I love Disney. I grew up with Disney. And Disney taught me English. I'm not native. I grew up in Japan and literally learned English through watching so many Disney films. We played Kingdom Hearts all throughout our childhood, my brother and I. I do realise that I have to have a Disney character in order to get into the game.
Alpha: Oh, don't! Don't! You can't do this to me! [More anguished Alpha noises]. All of the princesses! And their animal characters. I've actually auditioned for a couple of the animal characters. I haven't gotten any yet. They always bring an animal sidekick to their princess or main character. And I just think that is so cute. It's just heartwarming. I have a dog. And I see that.
Obviously, you are both here for TennoCon. Alpha, you are returning, Amelia, first time. Are you excited?Amelia: Yes! I've never experienced anything like this, where it's a convention for one specific game. Everybody has been super supportive.
And, I'm sorry, can we just take a moment to recognise how much of a badass Reb is? Not only are they doing all this and putting on a concert, but she's the bass player in the concert. Stop making us all look bad, Reb. I want to find out the things that Reb can't do.
Alpha: I call them Queen Reb and Princess Megan. And then King Sheldon.
What can you tell us about the panels you will be appearing on?Amelia: My side of things, we're talking about how we came up with the depth of the character. How she thinks, how we work together. Because every relationship with a director and an actor is different. It's about finding that shared language that makes it magic. So, we'll be talking about that. About how much fun it is to work with branching narratives and different romance options.
Alpha: I think this is a rare time where the sound system panels are bringing in a voiceover person onto the panel. I've seen a couple of the past years, and it's been mainly set and sound designers, the engineering aspect of it.
It's fascinating to see how they create these sounds and how they match them to the picture and create this whole world and atmosphere. But to be able to participate in that from a voice aspect, I would love to touch on a part where our voice is an instrument. The text is our melody. If I can convey the message like that, that would be my goal for the panel today.
Amelia: That is the most poetic thing I've ever heard in my life.
