 Alright, we're here with Ralph Einstein, the voice of Sidolphus Telemann for Final Fantasy XVI, and I'd just like to ask you a few questions about your experience, what it's like to voice the character in the game. I'd love to ask what attracted you to this role, would you like to speak on that? Things are very couched in secrecy and codes and everything, so you don't really kind of know what you're getting involved in at the start. So I was asked to get involved in this video game and play this character and I read some of the lines and the writing was great, the world seemed wonderful and as an actor what you want is good writing, so yeah it was great writing, so I agreed to do it and then later on I found out exactly what it was and how big it is, but yeah it wasn't, I think if you approach any project with the whole weight of the project you're not going to do your best work as an actor, so I think it's kind of good to not kind of know the size of what you're doing because all you're doing is looking at the character, looking at the lines and doing your job in a very pure way, rather than going, oh my god I'm doing bones and bones and stuff, you know what I mean? What is it like to get into the mind of Sid? How did you prepare to voice this character whenever it was your time to record? It was kind of quite an easy one in the sense that I didn't, I speak with a Yorkshire accent which is quite a no-nonsense accent as far as British accents go, if you hear a Yorkshire accent it's kind of like a steady no-nonsense honest kind of accent, so I decided not to particularly change my accent for Sid because I thought that's kind of what Sid is, he's a rough soldier, he's a very very loyal man and I just thought that it suited that kind of rhythm of speech so I didn't change a lot to be honest when it came into the sessions, I just concentrated on making him as real and as vibrant as I could. What is your favorite thing about Sid? I love the way that as a lot of men do sometimes, sometimes toxically, but they take the piss out of each other and they push each other on and encourage each other by insulting each other and doing each other down and that's a very specifically male thing which can be very toxic but can also be something very beautiful. You alright? Never better. Sounds like it. And I think that's the thing with Clive and Sid, I mean they love each other very much, Sid absolutely loves and worships Clive and wants to help him fulfill his destiny but to get him to do that occasionally he's got to take the piss out of him and tell him he's a little bit of an idiot and get your head out of your arse and get on with it. For you what was the hardest part about your performance as Sid? I think the hardest part of it is the practicality of doing it over four years because as an actor I usually work in film and sometimes television and so you go and do a job for two or three months, you may go back a month later to do some ADR on it but that's it, that's your involvement with the project and you're on to the next project whereas video games take four years you kind of keep coming back to this thing and it's a completely different way of working to what I'm used to and it has many many positives to it. Was there at any point where you were able to kind of improvise your script to kind of give Sid's performance a more you feel? To a point and it's more to do with the rhythm of the lines rather than because the writing is great it doesn't need messing around with the writing it's great but sometimes the you know the back and forth between two characters we got the chance to work together me and Ben towards the start of the process to build that relationship and so to do that with another actor in the booth is unusual as well so we got the chance to really do some acting before we actually started putting the lines down you know some rehearsal and getting to know how we worked off each other and that was really helpful because I don't think it would have had the warmth if we hadn't had that bit of rehearsal working together before we actually got going and that's not that's not usual for video game work. So you mentioned the fact that you have a background in film and television can you speak about what it was like to make that transition from film and TV to voice acting for video games? It's very different but very similar in a sense because all acting comes down to the the same kernel of truth is that it's finding some truth whereby you look at this character and you believe that whatever is coming out of their mouth it's just coming to their brain for the first time so that's the same whether it's film television theatre or whatever you have to bring these characters to life it's just the way you do it in a video game situation is you're doing a three or four hour session which is incredibly intense just you or two actors microphones engineer and director and so it moves really quickly you get a lot done it's very intense so you are in character and intensely working for every minute of every hour that you're in the booth whereas in film and television there's a lot of sitting around a lot waiting for people to sort of lights out to do this people to check your costume or all this which which interrupts your rhythm as an actor so what is really nice about voice acting in video games is that you just go for it and you splurge so much stuff in three hours it was much acting in three hours as you would do in a week on a film essentially what does Final Fantasy mean to you Final Fantasy to me not actually being a gamer is it's just coming into a whole new world that I knew kind of nothing about yeah so yeah it's it's just meeting all these new people and this whole new world that I didn't know existed how excited are you for launch I am very excited yeah it's this publicity tour kind of thing it's not something that I normally get involved in so yeah it just builds up the excitement to it and lastly what do you hope fans will feel when they play the game I hope they'll from my point of view from Sid's point of view I'm hoping that they'll wish they had a big brother like Sid or a friend like Sid to guide them through their lives thank you so much for letting me take your brain today good luck out there I hope you enjoy the rest of your tour I'm sure well thank you