Did Any Japanese Voices Get Better?

[ATA]

Howdy,

We always talk about how some dub voices got massively better as the show went on. Then Kai, Modern Z Movies, and Super had the best performances for that specific language. This is commonly used for Funimation but I've seen other dubs get that viewpoint as well

So to switch it up has any of the Japanese cast improved? This can be the original casting or some of the recast.

Example: Say if it's an OG cast member like Ryō Horikawa. Maybe you believe he started to find his footing on Namek or in the Android Arc. Now me personally I think he was always very good but this just an example.

My example would be Nozawa from Kai to Super as Son Goku. In Kai and the modern Z movies I wasn't a huge as she felt like Shaq on the Celtics. However once Super started doing original story arcs she took it up to the next level. Her work as Goku Black was phenomenal. Her screams from U6 to ToP arcs was elite. Even if you don't think she ain't what she was, she still top tier. LeBron on the Lakers type beat.

[GhostEmperorX]

It's most common with (in-house) Funimation for one simple reason, that being their origins as a random selection of people from anywhere that initially auditioned to imitate the previous Ocean voice actors and for many of whom it was their first time working on an anime series.
Of course, in stark contrast to the JP cast, the majority of whom had already accrued a rather stacked resume by that point (lots of them were even in Toei contemporaries of similar stature).

Don't quite have an answer to the question myself of course. Just that some inevitable replacements could possibly have gone better (like Yuichi Nakamura succeeding the late Hirotaka Suzuoki).

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Of course, in stark contrast to the JP cast, the majority of whom had already accrued a rather stacked resume by that point (lots of them were even in Toei contemporaries of similar stature).

Yeah, Masako Nozawa was 49 when she started playing Goku and played a load of characters in shows from the 60s and 70s. Even Ryo Horikawa, 20+ years her junior was an established actor having been in Dr Slump, Saint Seya, Fist of the North Star, GeGeGe no Kitarō and Dream Soldier Wing-Man by the time he was first cast as Charmy Yamada and later Vegeta.

It's also the reason many argue the Funimation cast's performances were better than the Japanese in Kai because the latter was in their prime for the original anime trilogy and were naturally fatigued from delivering the same lines yet again.

A better comparison would be the Ocean cast, who were not as seasoned as the Japanese cast when they started working on Dragon Ball but were trained actors nonetheless and probably still at their peak around the early 2010s. Sadly we can't judge for certain because we still haven't seen their Kai dub, although Brian Drummond's best performance in anything Dragon Ball we've seen thus far has been Copy Vegeta. And no, they didn't get worse in the Westwood dub, inconsistent direction will mess up anyone's routine and even in spite of that their performances were no worse than Funimation's inhouse cast at the time.