Re: Audio Game Console Sonus Interactive
Regarding narration:
There is sort of an uncanny valley effect. Good narration--which has a lot to do with the actor's performance, a bit to do with their voice (this tends to get into personal preference territory), and to a lesser extent, recording quality--can make games much more compelling. Not-so-good narration can sometimes feel like it'd be better replaced with a synthesizer.
I don't want to give an example of bad narration (mostly because the first example that comes to mind is someone otherwise pretty cool), but I'd go so far as to say that even Aprone's early games, like Towers of War, and Daytona and the Book of Gold, did narration pretty well, even though the recording quality left something to be desired and it wasn't the most exciting reading.
On the higher end, most anything from Blastbay Studios is pretty nice, I don't actually remembe
r the quality of Angel Gift's narration off the top of my head, and I haven't heard the voiceacting in the full version of Airik the Cleric, but I have heard the person responsible for much of the exposition in other contexts and expect it's toward the better end.
I haven't played many mobile audio games, but many of them are produced by more financially capable companies, so I expect their voice quality is some of the best.
Personally, I like it better when the events can speak for themselves - a "show, don't tell" sort of thing. Narration works sometimes, and audio games tend to have trouble keeping descriptions to a minimum (If I'm playing Mario, I'd rather hear the baddies move without having to ask for their exact coordinates, but spatial precision is a huge pest with Audio alone), but the more that can fit into dialog and action, the better.
There are
cases where narration works reasonably well--as a mainstream example, the first Harry Potter game for Playstation 1 occasionally used narration to handle timeskips and parts of the story that didn't fit well as gameplay or FMV.
For that matter, the Bokurano Daibouken games narrate on occasion (they all use text instead of voiceacting, but the principal is the same), and it works reasonably well in context. (And the Bokurano Daibouken games are pretty popular in spite of the need for translation, so Yukionozawa clearly did something right.)
Ultimately, it's an individual game thing, what works and what doesn't.
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