Jennifer Hale's 5 Most Iconic Video Game Voice-Acting Roles (& 5 You Didn't Know About)
Jennifer Hale is one of gaming's biggest and longest-running voice actors. While Hale has been voice acting since the mid-90s, with one of her very first roles being in the 1994 adventure RPG Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness playing the role of Katrina.
Since then, Hale has gone on to portray hundreds of different characters in hundreds of different games. Due to the nature of the business, some of her roles are more impactful and iconic than others and some are pretty forgettable for multiple reasons.
10 Iconic: Female Shepard - Mass Effect Series
Arguably one of the most iconic roles that Jennifer Hale has ever played is the voice of the female commander Shepard in the original Mass Effect trilogy. If the player chose to go through the Mass Effect series as the female Sheppard then the player got the privileged of playing through three massive games worth of content with one of Jennifer Hale's best performances. Female Shepard is also probably one of the biggest leading female game characters in history.
9 Didn't Know: Female Warden - For Honor
in a similar way to Mass Effect and female Shepard, if the player decided to play through For Honor's story mode they got the option to pick out the class of character they would play as for each faction. This choice included choices of the gender of the character, in the knight's case you could choose to be a female warden, which was voiced by Hale both in-game and in cutscenes. Considering how people really didn't buy For Honor for its story this largely went under the radar.
8 Iconic: Naomi Hunter - Metal Gear Solid Franchise
Going back to massive story-driven franchises with Metal Gear Solid and Jennifer Hale's performance as Naomi Hunter throughout various different entries in the franchise. Naomi appeared in both Metal Gear Solid 4 and 1 with Hale as her VA in the fourth entry.
Naomi's main job was to help Solid Snake throughout the events of the game, before tragically meeting her demise on Shadow Moses Island. Despite her short appearances, Hunter made a big impression on players.
7 Didn't Know: Tanya - Mortal Kombat X
Tanya has been a minor character throughout the Mortal Kombat series and its different timelines but Hale first took on the role in Mortal Kombat X, where Tanya appeared as a DLC character. It's pretty fair to say that the performance didn't make waves, as Tanya had never been that popular of a character, to begin with and the announcement that she would be made playable through DLC wasn't meet with the biggest amount of excitement possible.
6 Iconic: Kronika - Mortal Kombat 11
Keeping on track with Mortal Kombat characters, Hale did play a character with much more importance in Mortal Kombat X's sequel, Mortal Kombat 11. In the newest entry in the franchise, Hale took on the role of the game's villain Kronika, who was making her debut in the series.
Kronika was a much more impressive and imposing figure, helped by Hale's brilliant performance as the cunning and genius mastermind bent on resetting the timeline for her own sake.
5 Didn't Know: Cinderella - Kinect Disneyland Adventures
Yeah, probably no one remembers that this game was ever a thing. Hale has played the Disney incarnation of the character in multiple movies and TV shows throughout the 21st century and was probably brought on to play the character because she was doing a TV role as the character at the time. considering how most people would call the Xbox Kinect a failure and how this game isn't even one of the few it was remembered for, it's easy to say that this performance isn't remembered.
4 Iconic: Sarah Palmer - Halo Franchise
When the Halo franchise made its return with the surprise announcement of Halo 4 characters were speculating about what the world would be like after the events of the third game and how it would affect the story of the new game. Something most fans didn't think was we were going to see a new set of Spartans from the Spartan-IV program. Chief among these was Commander Sarah Palmer, who took a supporting role in Halo 4 and was voiced by Jennifer Hale
3 Didn't Know: Silver Sable - Spider-Man Games
Despite Silver Sable making her biggest in-game appearance in 2018's Marvel's Spider-Man, the character has appeared in several previous Spider-Man games. While the character was voiced by Nichole Elise in the latest game, Hale took on the role in several previous Spider-Man titles. Hale played Silver Sable in four separate games, including Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, Spider-Man: Friend Or Foe and 2005's Ultimate Spider-Man.
2 Iconic: Ashe - Overwatch
In 2018 it was announced that Overwatch was adding yet another character to its roster. That character was the western-based rival to the game's resident gunslinger McRee and was introduced through a nice cinematic trailer. Hale took on the role of the character's English voice actor. The character had some interesting mechanics, having a giant robot friend that she could use to help her and her team out in a fight.
1 Didn't Know: Trishka Novak - Bulletstorm
Bulletstorm was met with a decent amount of good praise when it first released, but it failed to really make an impact. This made the game something of a cult hit for a time but as of now, it has pretty much faded into obscurity as one of the many pretty okay games from the seventh generation of consoles. Jennifer Hale provided the voice for one of the games lead supporting characters, that being Trisha Novak, the daughter of a human rights leader.
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