The Games Industry Makes Me Sad

 

Let me just put it out there from the jump that this is not going to be a post bitching about the state of games themselves.  There is a lot to be said about the state of releases in an industry that's swamped year in-year out with remakes and sequels, an industry whos "best" game of the previous year just yoinked the plot of a PS1 game, the mechanics of a SNES game and the UI of a PS5 game smushed them together and made them French.  There's a discussion to be had there but that's not what I'm on about here.

I want to look back a little bit, to when I was a naive young boy.  A time before widespread use of the internet (my age is showing, I know, shut up) when most of the things I'd hear about games came from rare snippets on TV or magazines bought from the local supermarket.  One topic that always fascinated me when it came up was when development teams would get talked about, specifically Japanese ones.  Offices filled with people passionately bashing away at computers to make the latest and greatest games.  I remember hearing specifically, sometime around the Dreamcast era, that Japanese developers would quite often stay late at the office working on their projects, sometimes sleeping under their desks and then just waking up to resume work right away.  "Wow! That's so cool, these guys are so passionate about making games, I wanna do that, I wanna be like them" my young, idiot-ass thought at the time.  The sad reality of it though is that working like that sucks ass, even if its something your passionate about.  You may recall around the time of The Last of Us 2 coming out about the discourse around crunch culture, people working insanely long hours and burning out or suffering various mental and phsyical ailments as a result.  My dreams of developing games professionally got crushed by the staff at my high school because of my lack of general ability in maths was too much of a wall to overcome, according to them, but it was saddening to grow up and discover that the reality is not that these people are sleeping under desks and missing their commutes due to passion, but due to necessity and weird unwilling company loyalty, in a lot of cases.  Not a situation I would ever let myself fall into 

So my attention shifted, I may lack the skills to dev but I certainly have the skills to play games and write about them.  Having opinions on the media and reporting on industry happenings was something that a younger me rather liked the idea of.  But then, once again, this aspiration was mostly crushed by the reality of what being in games-media spaces is like.  An industry full of people who have no idea what they are talking about, writing bullshit in order to push magazine sales or, in the modern day, get ad revenue clicks.  A field where you aren't expected to have a deep understand or any real experience with a game before you review it, but where you play it for as short a time as humanly possible so that you can get a review up in time for release in order to drive traffic.  Not having any real opinions of your own but brown nosing indie developers and large publishers so that whatever outfit your writing for can recieve various perks such as early releases or even funding.  It sounds like a fucking miserable experience and judging from the joyless, skilless assholes that make up the majority of games media and games writing, I think if I had entered that side of the industry I would have left the mortal plane considerably earlier than intended.

So then I got older, I studied Japanese and became fluent and so the first thing I thought to maybe dabble in was game translation.  Well that turned out to be dogshit as well.  I started by doing a little freelancing, a few jobs for what mobile visual novels that I found on a website called Upwork.  The pay was low but it was a start, a foot on the ladder.  I figured if I kept plinking away at it then maybe I'd build a bit of a repuation, a bit of a portfolio and I could work my way up into higher profile things.  But then I got one job where the guy I was emailing back and forth with ended up just ghosting me after the job was complete and I didn't get paid.  I'm not working for free, so I took to looking for a salaried position somewhere and while I found some things I could qualify for, the salaries for these jobs are bullshit.  At the time, I wanted to get into translation as a way of escaping the English teaching trap a lot of gajin in Japan find themselves in, but the salaries for any positions I found usually only matched or were lower than the school I was working at.  Translating stuff is way harder than singing the alphabet to 3 year olds so I didn't really feel like adding the extra stress for basically no extra money, fuck that shit.  When my options were getting ripped off or extra stress for no reward I just bit the teaching bullet until I eventually got into translation and interpreting for an automotive company.  Not what I want to be doing per se but getting to use my Japanese and earning a real salary is nicer than having the field of education drain my soul

 All is not lost though.  Thankfully we live in an age where doing things by yourself is not only possible, but with a bit of luck and a bit of skill can even be profitable.  Working for a big game studio making things at the behest of investors and crunching so hard I never see my family sounds like shit, but engines and tutorials are avaliable and I can dev in my free time.  Thanks to services like Steam and Itch there's even avenues to put it out there.  The enthusiast press may be full of metrics driven idiots who couldn't tell a 3DO apart from a Sega Saturn but the mass adoption of social media and YouTube means it's extremely easy to just write your own shit and publish it to your own spaces and, once again, with a little luck even turn that into a living.  Translation is a bit harder to think positively on but at least I get to do it for real money even if its not about games.  A shame because the state of the average JP to EN translation for video games is actually embarassing, I'd like to do something about it, but without the coin behind it I'm happy to just play in the original text

So if the industry is making you as sad as it makes me on occasion, don't give up, just ignore it and get out there anyway.  Let me know about your indie projects so I can continue to avoid all this bullshit too.   

 

 

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

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.

Japan dropping the game ball?!

So I was talking with a buddy about some of the latest releases as we were sweating our balls off in the Japan summer when he said to me "Yeah, Japanese devs have really dropped the ball with game releases over the last few years" and while we moved on from that point fairly quickly at the time, it got me thinking about if that's actually the case or not?

Sure, if you're a fan of Japanese games and you live in the UK or America, you may find that the latest releases from the land of the rising sun have been a bit lack luster, and sure, you're probably right there, but to say that the Japanese aren't producing good games anymore is a bit unfair.

You see, the problem is that Japan actually has a shit ton of good games.  Walking around the various game stores I always find something that piques my interest and has me wishing my pay day would come sooner.  Plus you see all these booths for stuff coming out soon and it looks like there is some quality stuff on the way too.

So really, it's not a case of Japanese developers dropping the ball, but it's a case of Joe Bloggs westerner just not being aware of most of the quality Japanese titles!  That's not a case of me being "oh the uneducated masses aren't aware of the gems to be found in glorious nippon", it's more the fault of the big companies here than it is the consumer.  You see, Japan makes all these really cool looking games, then gives them no exposure or no mention in the west at all, and it's a bit bullshit really.  It's a shame that there is this huge selection of games to be found that most people will never even hear of due to this fact.

So why is it all like this?  I'm no industry expert, but my guess is that they just don't have the staff for put this stuff into English.  I mean, it's not like it wouldn't sell, I think the whole Xenoblade Chronicles thing proved that there is a market for Japanese games, but I think the amount of people who know enough Japanese to translate these games for a western audience are just far too few.

I mean I studied Japanese for 4 years, and right now, the best thing I can think of doing with that ability is to come here and teach English.  The work isn't too taxing and the pay is pretty good and I think this is the view that a lot of Japanese language students end up having, but the reason for that is something else entirely.  The people who do decide to push themselves into more language heavy work, aren't going to use those skills to translate video games, they will want to work for big companies as interpreters or whatever and earn metric craptons of money that way.

So to sum it all up, Japanese games are as good as they always were, if you enjoy the kind of stuff that comes out of this country, then you'll still love it now, but the people willing to bring you that stuff are a minority, I think.

As a disclaimer, this isn't really based on facts I've been looking up, this whole post is me basically musing to myself, but you never know, maybe I'm right....but I could also be completely wrong and the above text just makes me look retarded, but whatever.