Localizers Suck But So Do You

 

I was browsing a certain video game forum when I came across this image complaining about the quality of the translation of the upcoming Vanillaware game Unicorn Overlord.  To me, the image at the top of the post seems fine.  Certainly a great deal more flowery than the original Japanese script but not wrong, you aren't being given a greatly different script to the original Japanese.  However this thread was full of people, who I assume don't speak Japanese, absolutely frothing at the mouth at how the translation was "wrong" and going off on conspiracy theories about how "they" are using video game translations to push agendas or whatever weird terminally online bullshit these people like to go on about.

But to some degree I can sympathize with what they are saying.  Not the conspiracy part, that is absolute lunacy, but there does seem to be a severe lack of skill within the field of media translation that needs to be adressed.  I have played some absolute fucking STINKERS in my time, the chief example which really sticks out in my mind in recent years has been Fire Emblem Three Houses.  Never have I quite had an experience where the Japanese voices that I was listening to compared to the English text boxes I was reading felt so wildly different.  I covered it in a blog post I did previously on the game 

https://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2021/04/fire-emblem-3-houses.html

Fire Emblem seems to be famous for it actually with 2 characters basically having a support conversation stripped from the game entirely

You can basically take any game from recent memory, give it to someone who knows Japanese and I guarantee they will be able to find some pretty bad errors in it.  Hell, even in games with generally good translations like Triangle Strategy there is one mission where the dialogue is basically flipped to have the opposite meaning.  It's only a small scene and doesn't really affect anything but the idea that someone who is supposedly fluent in Japanese who is being paid to put the game into English making such a basically Genki Book 1 level error is embarassing.

You aren't free from these problems though by avoiding official translations because Fan Translations are even worse.  While a few good ones do exist, most of these fan translations are done by hobbyists who probably couldn't pass the JLPT N3 desperately sitting there with a kanji dictionary and google translate cobbling together whatever they can to provide an obscure game to western players.  The only reason I don't rag on these guys harder is because what they are doing is actually pretty cool and fan translations are generally aquired for free.  For example, there's a fan translation of one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Baroque, and while it's probably awful (just assuming, I've not played the translated version, maybe/I hope I'm wrong) I would rather it exist and allow people who can't read Japanese to discover a great game like that than have it fade into true obscurity on a shelf in a Super Potato.

But on the flip side of all this are the people actually making the complaints.  Most people on social media or in forums who are levelling these criticisms at a games translation do not speak Japanese.  Someone with Google translate or a very surface level understanding of the language will tell them that it's wrong and then treat that as absolute fact when, a lot of the time, the things they are complaining about are daft.  Take that Unicorn Overlord screenshot at the top of the post.  Nothing that the guy is saying in English isn't reflected in the Japanese.  What I imagine happened is that someone on production looked at the setting to that game and said "ok we are going with ye-oldy flowery bullshit for the English" and then made those demands to whoever was actually doing the translating and English script writing.  In the few cases of game translations that I have personally been a part of, stylistic requirements for writing are usually made by a higher up who usually would have a mental break down if they tried to order a plate of spaghetti in a resturant.  I'm not sure if that's how it works in a much larger studio like Vanillaware but someone not related to the work making those stylistic demands is a situation I can easily imagine from my own experience.

That's sort of beside the point though because when you waste your time arguing so passionately about stuff that is generally fine not being 1 to 1 is that people who are within those circles will use idiotic rantings like this to dismiss large swathes of criticism and therefore things will never get any better.  I have known people who worked for Nippon Ichi who can't pass the JLPT N5 working on translations for Disgaea Mobile and another guy who had the creative writing skills of a well weathered rock claiming he worked on Scarlet Nexus and One Piece Odyssey.  The field is FULL of people like this who either suck at writing or suck at Japanese or both but the field is so underpaid that it only attracts these kinds of people.  Anyone who is worth a shit at Japanese language goes into things like Engineering or Computer Sciency type shit, you'd have to be a failiure or a weirdo to have a decent JLPT result and still want to do that.  What the field needs are skilled lingusts calling out the awful translation quality and maybe fighting for some actual decent salaries but that'll never happen so we're just stuck with this bullshit.

The best thing you can do if it bothers you that much is just learn Japanese.  I can promise you that it won't take anymore than about 2 years of study to get to a point where you can start playing most games without much issue and having language skills outside of just your mother tongue is never a bad thing.  

Hit the books, ya fuckin nerd

Otogirisou

 

Spike Chunsoft is a developer that you will be quite familiar with if you're into games like 999 or Danganrompa but I became familiar a few years back when I picked up a copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru in a used book store for about 100 yen.  After being quite impressed by that I took it upon myself to seek out their other games and came across their first foray into the sound novel genre with Otogirisou.

For those unfamiliar, a Sound Novel is basically a choose your own adventure book that you play on a console.  The difference between a sound novel and the much more popular visual novel genres is that while a visual novel will have elaborate art and CGs, a sound novel is basically just text with a couple of crap background pictures but tries to create more of an atmosphere using sound and writing.  While you may want to put Sound Novels in the same boat as something like walking simulators, they differ in the fact that a lot of them still have fail states and puzzles to solve.  For example in Kamaitachi no Yoru it's pretty easy to make a string of incorrect decisions and either blunder into death or pin the who-dun-it murder on the wrong guy.  There's a mystery to get the the bottom of and a killer to avoid in that game so while it is just text on a screen there's still a fair amount to think about.

Otogirisou on the other hand is a bit less like that, there aren't really any fail states and you essentially are just playing a Goosebumps choose your own adventure book but on a Super Nintendo Cartridge.  It feels more like a proof of concept for later games in the genre rather than an actually fully developed thing but it's story is still interesting enough to make it fun to play.

The game follows two characters, which you can name, as they are involved in a car crash and end up stranded in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night.  The two of them make their way to a mansion and then shit starts to get spooky.  In my playthrough the two of them explored the mansion for a while before accidentally triggering a bunch of memories in the female lead where she remembered that she actually used to live here and severely injured her long lost sister in a boiler fire many years ago.  The twin sister stalks the house trying to kill the both of you for a while before you set the house on fire (again, lol) and make your escape.  There's more to it than that but I'm not spoiling the whole damn plot line in the blog post in case you want to play it yourself.

But even if I DID spoil the whole plot line in this post it wouldn't matter because the very story being told in Otogirisou changes with the decisions that you make.  The car crash on a dark stormy night will remain constant every playthrough but what happens after that is up to the selections you make.  Other examples of plots that I haven't played through yet include an ancient curse, a mystery regarding the history of the houses construction and being chased by a giant fish monster.  The game doesn't have a chapter select feature so while that's kind of annoying for repeat playthroughs but the game is short so skipping through the repeat bits is more of a mild annoyance rather than a huge time sink

I played the SNES version but there does also exist a PS1 version and if that's anything like the PS1 version of Kamaitachi then it probably has chapter select and section skipping as well as a nice tree so you can see how many of the story lines you've finished.  I'm not sure if that's ACTUALLY the case, I'm just making assumptions based on how the other games are.

I don't think an English version of this game has ever been released or an English patch made available by fans so it's sort of hard to play unless you know Japanese or are willing to learn a boat load of Kanji to get through it, which is a shame really.  There's also a movie based on this game that is available through through Hulu and Amazon Prime if you wanted to watch a version of it rather than play it but I don't have those services so I'm unsure if they are subtitled in English either.  IF you can play Otogirisou though, I recommend it because the genre has come a long way since the SNES days and it's nice to see where it all started.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo Thoughts

I'm not usually one for demos.  When I'm even remotely interested in an upcoming title I try to avoid as much of the hype and marketing as possible and then just go into it on release day completely blind.  However when I caught news of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo dropping onto PSN my curiosity got the better of me in a BIG way and I practically ran home from work to download it.  Now having played it through I'll share some of my thoughts on it.

The game kicks off with the old opening that everyone whos even has a passing knowledge of the game is familiar with only this time its an absolute trip to see all that 1997 FMV done in all new PS4-O-Vision.  Not long after that cutscene ends you're in control of Cloud and are set upon by a couple of dudes to hack at.  I was playing with the combat on Normal mode but when you start the demo you are given the option of Normal, Easy and Classic and I will be going back to the demo very soon to try out the classic option but at time of writing I've not tried.

There's not really a lot to do in this demo since its just the bombing mission from the start of the game so the focus is really on getting some hands on experience with the combat.  At the start of the demo you have just Cloud to play with.  He can hack away at things with this Buster Sword in 2 modes, one for speed and one for damage or he can do an ability or cast a fire spell.  As you hack at things you fill up at ATB gauge which lets you use those spells an abilities and you can store up to two.  So for example, using the fire spell, a potion or hitting something with Braver uses up one of your meters and then you either have to wait or do some more regular hacking and slashing until you can do it again.  The more you hit things the more you fill up a little stagger meter and when that gets full you do extra damage to your opponent and exploiting weaknesses of enemies helps raise that meter even faster.  Things get real interesting when you get Barret into your party and you then have to manage a second character.  You can freely switch between your two guys and while your inactive guy while wander around the area killing enemies for you, their ATB fills up at a much slower rate than if they are actively fighting under your control.  So while, at least for the demo, its perfectly viable to control Cloud pretty much the entire time (outside of a tutorial when Barret first joins), if you really want to maximize damage then you'll want to be switching between your party members to fill up their meter and then take full advantage of a stagger when it happens. 

The one thing I didn't like about the demo was the English voice work for the characters.  It was hammed up and every time Jesse opened her mouth I got the pangs of cringe through my chest.  I'm sure the full game will have selectable voice tracks but the demo version just uses whatever language your system is set to.  My Japanese PS4 is set to English so everything was in English which means that if you're living in Japan the game will probably have full English support but its a little concerning for those that want the English text but the Japanese voices as there are no language options in the settings for the demo.  

Either way, the more I see about this game the more excited I'm starting to get.  I'm still a little skeptical of the whole, being split into multiple games thing but as far as gameplay is concerned its a solid action RPG experience and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the "full" thing.

Translation Troubles

I generally try to avoid topics like this that involve identity politics but given that the guy on the bad end of this story is a dude who translated a number of Megami Tensei games, I at least want to throw my two cents into the sea of lava rage that is this situation.

First, and I kind of can't believe I have to clarify this kind of thing, don't call people nasty slurs.  Even  if you don't like the person you're talking to, there's a million different ways to insult them without resorting to this crass, needlessly upsetting bullshit.  Get creative, get classy, there's no need to use this hyper offensive language because chances are it'll just cause the user more trouble than it's worth.

So the story is a guy who's name I'm reluctant to use since he's already had enough crap thrown at him, released a fan translation of Ganbare Goemon 3 for the Super Nintendo.  In that game a character in the original Japanese text refers to themselves as "new half", which this guy directly translated as "tranny"

Oof, to say the least.

This of course triggers Twitter to go up in arms about the whole thing and start throwing all sorts of anger and abuse his way, which then leads to him basically purging his entire Twitter account and leaving nothing behind but an apology for what happened.  Depending on where you stand on his apology, he says that he wasn't fully aware just how offensive that word was and he didn't mean to upset people (to paraphrase)

To some extent I understand where the mob is coming from, I get that if someone is using an extremely popular platform to spread genuine hate against people of any walk of life, it's probably better that it be shut down, people don't deserve to feel shitty about themselves just because some idiot has ignorant, backwards views about what is and isn't ok.  But the translator in question never came across that way, he's not some "alt-right neo Nazi" using Goemon 3 to try and normalize nasty slurs into the common lexicon, he's just a dude who made a bad word choice when working on a passion project.

I'd be willing to bet money that if it was pointed out to him, without the vitriol, his reaction would have been "oh really? so sorry! I'll change that!" but instead we now have a passionate translator out of the space and a nasty taste in everyone's mouth.  

Sweet Language Based Vindication

Hell is about to freeze over.  The dead are about to rise from their graves.  The moons have aligned.  The Elder Gods are on their way.  Dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA!  There's an article on Polygon I actually think is really good!

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/20/15356026/persona-5-translation-localization

Now granted it was written a year ago but I stay away from games "journalism"  so hard that it flew right under my radar.  Read it, now, it's really good.

Just for some context on my end, I played Persona 5 in Japanese roughly around the time of release here.  When the English version came out and I watched some of my friends play it I remember pointing out certain bits of the game didn't really match up with what was being said in the Japanese or that certain lines of dialogue were a little "off".  The nicer people that I know were willing to brush it off as just "oh well Localization!" and others responded by calling me a shitty weaboo piece of shit.

Turns out though I'm not the only one who felt this.  That Polygon article is just one of MANY if you Google it.  I think the one take I get from having a quick look around all the other articles (which I'll read in detail after posting this) say kind of the same thing.  It's not that it's outright bad (mostly) but it's amateurish and filled to the brim with stilted dialogue.

Take that line above for example.  It's a throw away comment in the middle of a fight that you might not really notice when you're playing it but if you take a moment to stop, slow down and think about it, it's a bit strange.  It's not "wrong" per se but it's a bit unnatural.  It's the kind of translation you might expect from an anime fansub group or a small group of passionate fans working on it to bring it to a nice western playerbase.  But Persona 5 isn't that, it's a full priced game (Costing 2000 yen more than your average new game here in Japan, by the way) that had a large team of translators and editors behind it and THIS is what we got. 

One thing that a majority of people still might disagree with me on, a topic I might go into in a later article is the voice work.  Not only was the localization bad but the performance was also atrocious.  I guess it's something we've come to expect with western anime voice actors but while in Persona 4 it was just a bit cheesy and campy in P5 it really ruined some things for me.  For example, in the English version of Persona 5, Ryuji doesn't sound like Ryuji in this game.  It sounds like a guy who played P4 and then tried to do a Kanji Mk2 rather than actually stay true to the personality of the character.  But Japanese voices were an option from the get go with P5 so I guess that's why no one gives a shit.

A good script and a good delivery of that script are important parts of story heavy games like this.  People shouldn't just settle for bullshit just because it's sort of expected of the genre.  ESPECIALLY from a company like ATLUS which we have seen do absolutely incredible jobs of localization with a lot of their other games.  Demand better quality for your hard earned money, goddamnit.

You Should Learn Japanese

Do you like Japanese games?  Sure you do but thanks to the wonders of localization teams bringing things over to the west I bet you haven't had much inclination to learn the language of the country they came from, right?  Well that's understandable, learning a new language is hard as balls and you don't really need to bother because most things get western releases anyway.  That said, it may be worth picking up a text book or taking a course because it does come with its advantages.

For me, I chose to study Japanese at university but I was always better at speaking it rather than reading it.  My kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japanese text) is for complete shit so that makes reading things in games kind of difficult at times.  It's only in the last few months that I've bothered to try and improve this and as a result it's been a little easier to play certain titles.  For example, I'm not at a point where I could play games like Mind=Zero or Persona 4: Dancing all Night with not much trouble but certain games like Bloodborne are still tripping me up pretty hard.

This is basically the games objective but I had no idea for ages because I just dismissed this horrible wall of kanji

However we're now at a point where we are hearing a lot more about games being changed from their original text or games having features removed from their original Japanese versions.  Fire Emblem Fates is the big one that comes to mind, which had huge chunks of dialogue changed because of a misunderstanding regarding the interactions of two characters which sparked the dumbest controversy I've ever seen.  Bravely Second has apparently had a bunch of content just flat out removed, mainly the "bad" outcomes from the side quests.  Other more minor things include a breast slider in Xenoblade X and some kind of petting mini game in Fire Emblem or something.  The point is that if you, like me, don't like these kind of changes being made by people who didn't develop the fucking game, then learning Japanese is a good way of giving them the finger because you don't need to play their butchered crap, you can just play the original.

Another good reason to get your head round the language is that while a lot of games do get brought over to the west, there are a pretty good number of good ones that don't.  I'm sure any fan of Japanese games has had that moment where they see something that looks really cool but then get sad because they hear it's not being translated.  Well you won't have to worry about that shit anymore and with things like PS4 having no region locks you're free to play whatever the fuck you want.

Aside from all the gaming stuff, learning another language is just kind of useful in its own right.  Sure, you could argue that there are more "useful" languages to learn but we're not trying to build a career here, we're trying to play some damn games.  Hell, Japanese isn't exactly a dead-end language, learning it for the sake of gaming may be that first step into some kind of successful career, who the fuck knows?!

Either way, if you like video games, especially Japanese ones, getting your head around some Kanji and Grammar seems like a good idea.  Whatever happens after that is just a bonus.

Why no Battle Royale Game?

There's a lot of movies that game video game adaptations and unfortunately most of them are complete shit and aren't worth bothering with.  A lot of these games are usually rushed so they can ride the hype of the movie release and as a result play like trash and just aren't worth playing.  However, if there's one movie that never got a game that absolutely should have had one it's Battle Royale.

Battle Royale is old as fuck but just in case I'll give a quick synopsis.  The movie follows a group of high schoolers as they are roped into the Battle Royale, a death game that takes place on a deserted island.  The idea is that each student has an explosive collar on their neck and they must kill their fellow students until only one remains.  If they fail to achieve this goal by the end of a number of days then every ones neck bombs detonate and they all die.  At the start of the film they are all given a bag with a number of tools and a random weapon and then they are let loose on each other.  It's a really good movie and I'd suggest that you go watch it if you haven't already.

Why has no one considered making a game based around this concept?!  In an age where multiplayer shooting games and roguelikes are stupid popular you think a game like this would be in a good position for a video game adaptation.  The best part is that it wouldn't even have to follow the movie that closely strictly speaking.

You could just have the player on an island with a randomly generated set of equipment running around trying to kill other players.  The layout of the island could be random as well as the equipment and survival elements such as finding food/water and other resources could be a core part of the game play.  If you did want to follow the movie you could give players the option to band together and try and beat the game itself but then there would have to be some kind of meta game going on to stop people just doing this every fucking time.

My rough idea probably isn't all that good but I imagine if a group of talented developers sat down and thought about it a Battle Royale game (or game with a similar theme) would be really fun.  Playing a game like this online would also be really fun I imagine so I'm hoping someone stumbles on this post and steals the idea.

Probably not though, I'll keep dreaming.

The Foreign Gamer Problem: Not So Bad After All

So as I've told you like a million and one times I'm a guy who lives in Japan, I'm sure you know this pretty well by now.

So today, I had a day off work and I decided to have a bit of a stint in my local game centre.  In that game centre there is a game I have mentioned on this blog before known as Code of Joker.  I did a post on code of Joker outlining what that games all about here

http://identitygaming.blogspot.jp/2013/10/return-to-game-centre-code-of-joker.html

To sum it up though its a card game that's sort of like smashing Pokemon, Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh all together at the same time.  Now my record on this game is bad, I think out of the 21 games that I've played I've won 9 of them (it might be 6 but I'm pretty sure it's 9), which is a less than satisfactory performance to say the least.

Now don't get what I'm about to say twisted, I'm not making excuses, I do genuinely suck at Code of Joker but my suckage isn't the only factor at play here.  You see, everything in Code of Joker is obviously written in Japanese and as a foreigner it obviously takes me a little more time to understand what each card in the game does.  However, when you consider how the game handles play time and credits it creates problems for someone like me.

Inserting money into the game doesn't give you a credit equal to one go, it gives you something called GP which is equal to time on the menu.  Playing one match of the game costs a set amount of GP and after each game you are given about 45 seconds of "Service Time" to make any quick changes to your deck before you start the next match.  If the 45 seconds of service time run out, then it starts ticking down from your GP.

So how does this create problems for me?  Well because I'm sort of bad at reading Kanji it's basically impossible for me to create and effective deck for myself unless I pump the machine full of money and take my time working out what each card does.  This isn't a fault of the game, it's all my fault for being terrible at Kanji.  This has become a factor in a number of my losses at the game where I think a card does one thing, and then it doesn't and the mechanic works slightly differently to how I thought I read it and this causes everything to go wrong mid duel.  I'm then left to lick my wounds and scour my dictionary to re-translate what the fuck was written on the screen.

But it's not all doom and gloom!

Obviously I don't want to lose and I do really enjoy playing Code of Joker so I do want to get better at the game and what's the one way I can do that?  Practice my Japanese more!

So by sucking at the game I'm indirectly being forced to improve my language ability in order to increase my win rate.  As someone who is currently studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, this is no bad thing.  So even though my performance at this game is laughably bad there is something positive to be gleaned from the situation at the very least.

Basically what I'm trying to say with this post is that if you're a foreigner in Japan and you enjoy going to the arcade, expect to lose...A LOT.  But don't get all sad and discouraged and use it to motivate yourself for some language study.  Doesn't matter if you've been studying it for 5 years like me or you're a beginner; if not wanting to suck at games is the kick in the ass you need to learn something new, then get to it.

Ao Oni Part 7

We are now entering what I assume is the final stretch.  Doll puzzles are bullshit.

VIDEO!

Ao Oni 4! The Return!

Well, after getting back from Tokyo I couldn't be arsed to make a proper post and after a long day at work I can't really be bothered to write anything of any particular length, so today you can watch a video of me doing pretty much everything wrong for 20 minutes.

I'm pretty sure the talking I'm doing is distracting me because I pretty much realised what to do with that doll as soon as I shut down the game after this session.  It's not like being distracted and looking stupid is going to stop me though. ENJOY!