I'm pretty sure the song was unused in the original Japanese release. It didn't show up until the Saturn version (and was added to the Japanese PS1 rerelease), so I can't blame them too much for not including it in the English version.Originally Posted by Aussie2B
hmm, i'm going to have to try the hardest dificulty on the japanese version again , it didn't seem much harder but it had been a long time since I played the us version.
Are we considering the addition of extra features an aspect of "localization"? Because there are plenty of games that are either on par or worse in terms of translation/dubbing/etc. but add a bunch of content, balance changes, or bug fixes.
That statement is 100% correct, but the reality was even worse than you describe. You *could* earn points from an arcade cab...if you were lucky enough to find one with a VMU slot! Most of the cabs in my area were conversions, so they lacked VMU support. And the online (Cross-Matching Service?) was a disaster. I attempted to log in every day for the first two weeks that the game was out and never got connected once. (I had no trouble connecting through the DC web browser, and other games with online play (Sega Rally, etc.) worked fine. It was Capcom's server that was messed up) I think I finally just downloaded a VMU save from the net somehow with 100% unlocked.
Super R-Type had at least one graphical change when it came over here: The background in Stage 1 is far more colorful. The Japanese version just had a generic star field.
For all their questionable translation work, WD did improve the load times in Albert Odyssey dramatically.
Super Mario World had a cheat code that allowed you to replay the castle levels that was added for the U.S. release.
Lightening Force had a 99 ships cheat code that was not in the Japanese version.
The orchestrated music in DQVIII U.S. is a vast improvement over the MIDI stuff in the Japanese version IMO.
Sorry, double post!
Last edited by DaddyMulk; 08-29-2011 at 06:03 PM.
River City Ransom. The Japanese version looks sorta silly with the characters wearing their school uniforms that look like pajamas. The North American greaser look localization is visually superior in my opinion.
Last edited by treismac; 12-20-2011 at 09:35 AM. Reason: I added photos to illustrate the point I'm trying to make.
Final Fantasy VI. Would you rather play as a character named Terra or a character named Tina? Exactly.
Along similar lines, Chrono Trigger. You can either have important NPCs named Nash, Bash and Gash, or named Melchior, Balthasar and... I forget the third one.
Sonic CD - this is a controversial one, but I honestly like the American soundtrack more.
And I may be mistaken, but didn't the U.S. releases of Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil have new game modes and features that weren't in the original Japanese?
...
Count me in as another Working Designs supporter.
I could also name like a ton of fan translated work, because generally the scripts are of higher quality than the officially released games. I don't know how they read in Japanese but Radical Dreamers and Famicom Detective Club Part 2 are two of the best written 16-bit games I've ever played.
I'll support almost anything that came from Ted Woolsey or Victor Ireland.
Victor's penchant for tinkering with how certain games functioned could either be perfectly harmless or completely game changing. But he ended up giving us that really badass Lemina glitch in Eternal Blue as a result so I'll forgive it.
His affinity for rewriting scripts hasn't really bothered me. Mostly because he always acted with care to restrict the changes to either mindless NPCs or supporting characters who were just generally boring in the original. The fart jokes with Myght in Lunar may have been juvenile but it's not like he was such a compelling character to begin with.
Even games like Vay and Albert Odyssey, two games I find pretty soulless overall, was at least somewhat salvaged by the spirit of the script. At the very least they made some forgettable games at least a little memorable.
And Ted Woolsey can do no wrong in my eyes. He basically gave us Kefka. Everything people love about Kefka more or less comes from Woolsey's interpretations.
There are some individual lines in a bunch of games I can see why people have problems with, some just silly nonsense and others outright mistakes (a few infamous Chrono Trigger lines spring to mind). But we're talking overwhelmingly good work, especially when you consider the constraints he had to work with.
Which lines from Chrono Trigger are infamous?
I think Woolsey did good work. The localizations of games like Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG are great if you ask me. I'm not sure what people would take issue with. He didn't make any really outlandish changes as best as I know. Definitely nothing as extreme as the pop culture references and innuendo and such in Working Designs' releases. When he did make changes, it seems like he still worked with the context and captured the spirit of the original script. I mean, like, with Ozzie, Flea, and Slash, the references probably went right over the heads of most players, but they still captured the silly spirit of the original names (Vinegar, Soy Sauce, and Mayonnaise). Renaming the three gurus after the three wise men was also fitting to capture their mysterious nature.
Shadow Madness for PSOne was awesome just for the Woolsey script. No really, the game its self is an ugly FF7 clone, but the dialouge is priceless. It's not a translation though, original English work so I didn't mention it earlier.
I'm mostly referring to Gaspar's "One of you is close to someone who needs help. Find this person, FAST." What he's really saying is something along the lines of "Talk to your friends for information" in reference to the side quests. Woolsey's line makes it sound like Gaspar is talking about a specific person in trouble leading to a few wild theories.
Another infamous line was near the end of the Tyranno Lair when Nizbel II says "The great Nizbel was defeated here!" Pretty confusing since Nizbel wasn't defeated there. It should have been more like "You'll have to defeat me, Nizbel, to pass."
Woolsey did great work but he did let a line or two slip in that pretty much made no sense at all.
What's funny is that all his intentional changes worked great. Aside from outright errors like above, he pretty much always nailed it. And he was constantly giving all kinds of compelling personalities and quirks to characters who would otherwise be pretty standard fare. Frog's quirky dialect may have been somewhat out of place given that nobody else talks like that, not even Glenn himself as a human, but it helped define the character. He pretty much wrote the manual to how to localize an RPG under tight conditions.
I really have nothing short of praise for Ted Woolsey. He even has his own trope.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 12-20-2011 at 07:35 PM.
Hmm, man, it's been WAY too long since I last played Chrono Trigger. If I'm remembering right, I think I interpreted that Gaspar line as being about Schala. (Not that that really makes sense.) And with Nizbel II, I assumed he was referring to the first fight with Nizbel. (I don't know if that would make sense either.)
Heh, Woolseyisms? I think that's giving the guy a bit TOO much credit. There's nothing unusual about his approach, so it's not like everybody is copying him. That's just good, standard localization. The end goal of editing and/or localization is always to make the final product read in a way that natural and clear. You change whatever you need to. It's pretty much impossible to use a raw translation without there being a whole slew of problems. I do some professional localization and editing, and I do the same thing as Woolsey. I'm very against changing things that need not be changed, so some people accuse me of being one of those sorts that demands a direct translation but the reality is that I change a ton of stuff in my work. Like I had some line that was like "Don't sleep with your stomach uncovered!" which can be logically explained but still sounds horribly awkward and stupid in English. I changed it to "Don't let the bed bugs bite!" which works better. Sometimes being direct actually gets you farther away from the real meaning. Sometimes you need to translate context rather than literal words. I had another big challenge with these two characters that had distinct ways of speaking Japanese. One was a guy that spoke using feminine Japanese and another used very formal speech. This kind of stuff is a pain and half trying to convey in English, especially with the former since we don't have male and female versions of words. That's where you really have to get creative and work the script to give a character a distinct voice. Even though you're changing/adding the actual words, the end product actually gets you CLOSER to how the Japanese script was. If any of this makes any sense, haha.
The two popular theories were that it referred to either Schala or Lucca's mom.
The reason why it doesn't make sense is because Nizbel was defeated in the Reptite Lair in the forest maze, not the Tyrano Lair you fight Nizbel II. It turns Nizbel into a cloudcuckoolander.
I agree that, in the end, being faithful to ideas and concepts is more important than being faithful to words. You want the audience to have the same cognitive experience that they'd get if they understood the original language.
jackal for nes.
in the fds version Final Command: Akai Yousai, the screen dosnt scroll horizontally , screwing up the look of all the levels.
My apologies to anyone actually named Tina. But that's my problem--its too down-to-earth a name for someone who is supposed to be a magical creature....
Not that I disagree with you, but that the userbase of TV Tropes decided to name one of their tropes after a translator they all happened to have heard of is not really any sort of sign of quality. It's really just a sign that most of the userbase are RPG fans.
Ah, yes, Lucca's mom. I think I considered that possibility back then too. Doesn't Gaspar still say that line even after you clear every side-quest? I think that's what mainly bugged me about it. If it's really supposed to be like "Talk to your friends for info", that would make a lot more sense. Otherwise I guess it could work, if it wasn't so vague. It's funny that the Woolsey trope says that his detractors think that he thought American gamers were morons. Really, that's how you have to edit, haha. Not that you believe that the readers are morons, but you have to pretend like you, in the role of a reader, are a complete moron, haha. I ask the dumbest, most no-brainer questions just to be crystal clear on every little piece. Unless a line is intentionally vague (and even then you need to make sure you're steering it in the direction of what the original author was implying), you have to be anal to the point of considering every possible interpretation, no matter how unlikely, and then narrow the line down to only one possibility. The Gaspar line failed in both ways.
While I'm entirely biased, haha, I think it's simple enough that it works. It's not like it's distinctively a specific ethnicity or something like "Mary-Sue" or whatever. And it's not like Final Fantasy never has Western names: Sara, Leon, Maria, Edgar, Rufus, Vincent, Zack, Fran, etc. etc. I never see anybody complaining about those.
But considering what gone through to the US unchanged, I think "Tina" should be the least of their worries. I mean, I know it's so ingrained into our brains that nobody even thinks about it anymore, but does anyone consider how utterly stupid and ridiculous the name "Cloud" is? "Squall" I can almost let slide because it's kind of badass sounding, but "Cloud"? Sheesh. And his hilariously bad last name "Strife" doesn't help matters. I remember a lot of people were commenting on how stupid the name Fate Linegod was in Star Ocean 3 and that they were glad that it got altered (except the change only made it worse because it's the same name except with a stupider spelling: "Fayt Leingod"), yet these people probably happily accept the name "Cloud Strife" even though it's every bit as corny and terrible.
I think most people who would be bothered by "Tina" probably just played the US version first and got so used to "Terra" that any other name would sound wrong to them.
Terra is the name that's down-to-earth. On terra firma, one might say.
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