/vr/ - Retro Games

Fucking PS1 localizations

I wish Xenogears was a Saturn title

>>3710265
They certainly localized it to American.

This wouldn't be a problem if you just learned Japanese.

>>3710294
Top kek. The greatest achievement of this generation was to appropriate the work "woke" to mean people who don't appropriate things. They can't even into their own language. How do you expect they could learn another.

How did panzer dragoon saga achieve such a perfect translation and why were square's western translations so messy

>>3710263
His father died in a submarine crash long ago

>>3710587
Translating Weebspeak takes effort. That, and the localization teams back then didn't really have a clue how to manage it all.
I bet a lot of them thought their job was to give the rawest translation possible, and not improvise which is absolutely required.
Some games were also a headache inducing to translate due to shit being hard coded, and sometimes borderline impossible. Hence some games have drastic cuts in Western release.
And Japan didn't think West actually cared about story. The support for the translation teams were so limited, there's was also business culture differences that is still an issue today.

All that shit combined, its really easy to not really give a fuck how much effort to put into translating. Just another job.

How bad was the localization?

>>3710265
>I wish Xenogears was a Saturn title
You mean so it would never have been translated at all?

>>3710619
It was excellent, actually. They did the translation in tandem with the original so everyone was on the same page.

>>3710587
>square's western translations so messy

>he never played Vagrant Story or FF Tactics

>>3710452
What are you even talking about?

>>3710778
>FF Tactics
The translation for that game was really awkward, and a lot of things end up not making any sense.

>>3710587
Einhänder was good. So was P.E. 2

>>3710587
Panzer Dragoon had a linguist savant design a fake german/russian inspired language for the game because that was just one of the things that guy does for fun. If there's a reason for the games making sense in English it's probably that guy.

>>3710851
That line makes perfect sense though, Dycedarg is using leaderspeak to confuse you on purpose.

>>3710587
Square didn't give a single fuck about localization until FF7 exploded in the West. Richard Honeywood (translator of Xenogears) explains their attitude in this podcast: http://8-4.jp/blog/?p=381

The original FFII (IV) translation barely sounded like English at times.

I've been playing this game for 20 years, and I'm confident that if I play it for another 20, someone will re-translate it.

>>3710874
I didn't mean that it doesn't make sense, it simply comes out awkward. They translated the text a little more literally than getting the original point across.
>Dycedarg is using leaderspeak to confuse you on purpose.
That's head canon; he was originally much more clear. He was referring to Ramza disobeying orders. In the re translation he says that they can't uphold laws if they don't also follow them.

>>3710910
the original text is actually pretty dry and dorky. I favor the original translation even over the original, because at least there I can pretend the game wasn't that lame in the first place.

>>3710294
Every translation thread.

>>3710887
man why does everyone keep laughing when nobody is saying anything funny

>>3710294
>spend half a decade of my life becoming fluent in gook gibberish which has no value outside of playing faggot baby games

>>3711059
>spend half a decade of my life
I'm sorry about your learning disability, it must have been hard.

>>3710851
My favorite is:

>Objective: Defeat Dycedarg's older brother!

>>3710672
But now everyone would be getting down to work on a better translation post-haste due to Xenoblade.

>>3710851
It's unfortunate what happened to the PSP version's script, because it's pretty damn hard to make any new translation that can't compete with some of the PS1's lines. They're both equally bad.

>>3711063
Be honest, in 5 years you're still nowhere near fluent level.

>>3710619
VIII was about where Square realized how to do it right. IX was damn good too, only a couple of references (don't blame the translator; not all of FF was even available to us at the time) and the infamous Dead Pepper are screwed.

>>3711059
>He posts this on a board all about faggot baby games
>Still being a EOP in 2017

>>>/Reddit/

I legitimately think that the only reason people like xenogears is some serious nostalgiafaggotry of the highest degree.

Theres no way anyone could look at the horrendeous pacing, the god aweful characters and borderline war crime of a plot and think to themselves "yes this is a game that more games should be like"

>>3711164
Fluency is not necessary to play a game. I played my first JRPG in Japanese after about 8 months.

>>3711223
W0t gaem?

>>3711226
Summon Night

>>3711205
They just really like square

>>3711229
I bet you butchered the plot in your mind. Might as well make some story up while you go along.

>>3711243
If believing that helps you feel better about yourself, go for it.

>>3711246
Nigga you can't learn jap in 8 months. Are you serious?

>>3711248
There isn't a switch that gets flipped where you all of a sudden have learned a language. It's an ongoing process that will never stop, you're still learning your native tongue even. But you can definitely learn enough to play a video game in that time.

>>3711253
Sure you can learn Katakana in a week to translate menu commands and items. That's nowhere near knowing Japanese.

>>3711157
wtf is wrong with you

>>3711205
Liking plots or characters is a personal, legitimate thing, I don't see a problem with that.
Xenogears' fault outside of the pacing was the almost nonexistent and mediocre gameplay.
If it was designed a bit better it wouldn't be that bad, but as it ended up being I would agree that most of its traction among people is largely due to nostalgia or in some cases an affinity of some kind for its plot, visuals or characters, which are all pretty legitimate arguments if that's the case.

Then again, Xenosaga did the very same mistakes, if not making them even worse to the point of being almost a parody of itself.
>>3711248
>Implying you can't get gud enough to play a game for children in eight fucking months
Are you lobotomized or something?
Eight months are more than enough to learn enough japanese to play a simple RPG for children, granted that you're constant in your efforts and apply yourself.
If you think that any language requires some kind of mystical gift or years and years of studying in order to play children's games you either have no grip on reality or are a single language peasant, or both.

>>3711063
It's called being adult you underage. Why mods are more stupid and don't read posts?

>>3711302
Sounds like you could use about five more years of English.

>>3710848

I don't think that's a troll. I think that person is schizophrenic. They have thoughts that blur together when they communicate during their episodes. That is too good an example of that to be fake.

>>3711278
Who the fuck would wanna spend 8 months of busting your ass to the max learning gook just to be barely proficient enough to play a game like summon night except the ultimate fucking weebs? Game looks like a piece of shit with very simple dialogue

>>3710587
>square's western translations so messy
I don't know about other Square's games but Xenogears was translate by one man. ONE MAN. In the 90's. That must have been translator hell.

>>3711205
>yes this is a game that more games should be like
Well, there's your problem. You assume wrong things.

>>3711567
That was the case for pretty much all their games in the 90s. Some of the were actually translated by three Japanese guys.

It's more usual for the translation to be handled by one guy anyway because it helps constancy but what was really difficult for them back then is that the text was usually just a spreadsheet and they just filled in the boxes with little to no context for what was going on beside having some basic character bios