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/vr/ - Retro Games

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4752131 No.4752131 [Reply] [Original]

Is Working Designs kino?

>> No.4752137

>>4752131
Their jokes are basically Carrot Top tier

>> No.4752159

>>4752137
>Top tier

>> No.4752181

My favorite things about WD is how they added more grinding to grindy J-RPGS to maximize profit and prevent rentals, how they lied about it and then said it was for harcore gamers, and 20 years later their "fans" harassed a romhacker out of doing patches to restore the sane difficulty stats.

Or when they had young girls in originally family-friendly Rayearth discuss anal sex.
Or when they changed most of the plot of Silhouette Mirage beyond recognition because christianity, but still fought to keep a sex joke they added to Alundra causing it to be rejected by Sony's QA in the eleventh hour.
Or when they got the license to a Daisenryaku generic war sim and apologized on its marketing for distributing such a nazi friendly game, killing whatever prospects that series still had in the west.
Or when they constantly try to deflect blame and throw other companies and even ex-employees under the bus for whenever they mess up (exile 2, silhouette mirage, phantasy star iv, lunar 2's text, rayearth, lunar psp...)

>> No.4752184

>>4752181
>anal sex
Got a screencap of that?

>> No.4752185

>>4752131
>HAHAHAHAHA
>DUDE SEX LMAO

>> No.4752190

>>4752181
They're like the bizzaro Treehouse.

>> No.4752232

FOR ME TO POOP ON

>> No.4752324

So which games did they fuck beyond repair? I know not to buy:

Exile 2
Silhouette Mirage
Vanguard Bandits (?)
Shining Wisdom

I have the PAL version of Alundra but i'm pretty sure they just used the Working Designs localisation.

>> No.4753361

>>4752324
I know Popful Mail and Rayearth are both playable.

>> No.4753395

>>4752159
Not top tier. Carrot Top is a "comedian".

>> No.4753445
File: 36 KB, 640x447, 1501556023124.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4753445

>>4752131
No fuck them for adding Bill Clinton Joke in my Lunar. They are dumb sjws that ruined every game they "translated". They forced shitty unfunny lewd humor but censored Lucia's pure butt and fucked up gameplay by adding artificial difficulty like requiring you to pay magic points to save the fucking game. Dont even get me started on how much they fucked up silhouette mirage.

>> No.4753508

>>4752324
>Shining Wisdom

this one was translated by Sega Europe

>> No.4753608

>>4753508
It was re-translated by Sega Europe because of how horribly botched the US translation was by Working Designs.

>> No.4753672

>>4753445
Wasn't there a Clinton joke in Albert Odyssey as well? Or maybe that was a Michael Jackson one..

>> No.4753683
File: 74 KB, 581x472, VfajrO2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4753683

>>4752181
Gives me a chuckle everytime

>> No.4753710

Did Dragon Force, Thunder Force V, and Growlanser II make it through without major story changes, gameplay defects, or fart jokes?

>> No.4753717

>>4752131
>kino
I really hope this fad dies soon

>> No.4753732

>>4753710
Go check the thunder force thread, there's relevant info in there.

>> No.4753736

>>4753683
what in jesus

>> No.4753741

>>4752232
Ha ha, epic cultural reference, Vic! Slam dunk! Print it! Next time can we reference Budweiser's WAZZZZAAAAAP ads too?

>> No.4753825

>>4753710
Played through Dragon Force recently and didn't notice any retarded jokes. The translation is pretty half-assed though and there's a few lines that don't make sense or have grammatical errors.

>> No.4753835 [DELETED] 

>>4753683
Sadly, this is literally me.

Except I would never use the wording "give head", ew.

>> No.4753996

>>4753741
That's rich coming from some random kid who's essentially the retro game version of every "le born in le wrong generation" kid on a Youtube music video comment section.

>> No.4754028

>>4753996
t. Vic Ireland

>> No.4754030

>>4754028
>you are this guy who did these video games because you hurt my feefees
wat

>> No.4754057

>>4752131
Working Designs is the cancer of videogame localizations and translations
Nintendo was like finding out some quists here and there with their censoring of sprites and family friendly stuff. But things were sort of manageable
Then Working Designs is the diagnosis that it's malignant. And you're suffering but you're still hopeful and try to focus on the good things and keep your mind out of the pain
Then it went into remission and you enjoy some years feeling better than ever and stopping other tumors from spreading like Jack Thompson and shit. You feel like things will only get better from here
Then the Working Designs cancer evolves into Treehouse, NISA and other shitty and political/ideological translators and localizers
At this point it's bone cancer. Every cell is contaminated and you question everything you do because you know there's no coming back from this. Translations and localizations are only going to get worse and so is your cancer
It's here that you just let yourself drift away into the abyss and try to remember those brief golden years when talented people cared about videogames and treated them with respect because they knew fellow nerds were excited and hopeful about them, even though the rest of society despised them

TL:DR they're shit

>> No.4754116

>>4752181
>and 20 years later their "fans" harassed a romhacker out of doing patches to restore the sane difficulty stats.

Is that why it's on the forum, but not submitted as proper hacks to the database?

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=23436.0

>> No.4754250

>>4753736
That was actually cut from the game. A translator posted it on NeoGAF in the past 5 or so years

>> No.4754394

>>4754057
Working Designs never censored anything because it personally triggered them though. They were just arrogant morons who thought they knew better than the original writers/developers.

>> No.4754405

>>4754394
Christianity triggered them hard, apparently

>> No.4754425

>>4754405
Censoring Christian references was standard fare in the 90's. Unlikely to be a WD choice.

>> No.4754436

>>4754425
But in the playstation era there were entire games with religious themes left uncensored like Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears.

>> No.4754438

>>4752181
>My favorite things about WD is how they added more grinding to grindy J-RPGS to maximize profit and prevent rentals

Stop rewriting history. Firstly, it was because of people returning games to EB and Software Etc, blame shitbag retards trying to exploit the system.

Secondly, they stopped this behavior very quickly, and in some cases fixed absurd encounter rates (Albert Odyssey) and in other cases fixed load times, added extra layers of scrolling that were broken in the Japanese versions of games (Magic Knight Rayearth) and otherwise gave you games that you were not going to get in the US otherwise, and gave others the confidence to do so later on.

But please, continue to try and tell me they're the worst company to localize stuff. Look at Wild Arms 2 (A Sony translation!) Almost every Bandai game ever released in the US, anything NISA has brought over, XSEED has broken games- but I'm sure you saw some YouTube video talking about the evils of WD, so you're gonna parrot this shit.

WD gave us shit that no one else was taking the risk to do, we were thankful to have it back then. Was it perfect? No. But they have an important part in the US game localization history lesson.

They never threw anyone under the bus with Exile 2. They said they fucked up, and had no way to fix it because they had no programmers on staff. Seriously just fuck of faggot, and stop pushing this false shit.

>> No.4754439

>>4752131
I personally met Vic, he's bro. He was truly passionate bout the work he did, and I wish there were more like him.

>> No.4754851

>>4754438
>But please, continue to try and tell me they're the worst company to localize stuff.
Sure, I will. Fuck WD

>> No.4755058

I have yet to play through the Arc the Lad collection. How badly did WD fuck up those games?

>> No.4755094

>>4754438
You ex-Working Designs staff or something? They were shit and they paved the way for the shit that's happening today. Fuck off with that cock-gobbling, m8

>> No.4755436

>>4752324
>>4753361

They stopped only when Silhouette Mirage (98-ish) was so bad it really affected the sales. In Lunar 2 you need money to even save on top of the grinding. Popful Mail where you die to 2 hits in bosses feels like the hard mode shit Konami put to punish bootleggers, not legitimate game design.

>>4753608
Sega Europe is used to retranslating American localized stuff.
Crusader of Centy for example drips with christianity references as a central plot point but Atlus felt it had to go, etc.. They took Dragon Force as-is though.
>>4754394
Sure they did. Of course it was because it's "dumb".
They did exactly that with Silhouette Mirage (Sony had no rules against christian references)

>>4753683 >>4754250
The joke here is that they argued with Sony's QA to have that stay in, even after they were caught red handed. For THAT.

>>4754438
>here's the thing you never said that there wasn't worse
>be thankful and never say anything bad about them
>is still stanning for the difficulty increases on behalf of WD's greedy marketing folks 20 years later
>it's all the market's fault, see
For Exile 2, they said the evil Japanese developers only gave them limited chances (master copies sent) to modify the programming, so when they only halfways changed their kewl "hardcawr murica version challengi modo" FEATURE©®™ it was their last chance and they had to ship that abortion of a version! The poor things...
...if you ignore that retarded assumption said FEATURE was needed to begin with.
>the reason we put that anti-consumer stuff going in dry on your paying consumer ass is that we were forced to do so by development realities! See, we ran short on time when we were implementing it so that could not be helped!

>> No.4755447 [DELETED] 

>>4753683
>Kino
/ourguy/ minus the christfag defending.

>> No.4755468

>>4755436
>In Lunar 2 you need money to even save on top of the grinding
Akshully you need magic experience, which is much much worse.

>> No.4755480

>>4755468
It's fun to hate on it but is really a non-issue.

>> No.4755489

>>4755480
Only if you're playing on emulator with savestates.
Lunar likes to one-shot kill you a lot.

>> No.4755498

>>4755436
>In Lunar 2 you need money to even save on top of the grinding.
Is that the Sega CD or PSX version?

>> No.4755517

>>4755498
Sega CD only. There's no magic experience on the PS1

>> No.4755542

>>4754057
>butthurt about literally nothing

>> No.4758206

Wrecking (game) Designs

>> No.4758303

>People complaining about WD upping the difficulty of easy games

I don't understand why people would be upset about that. The other criticisms are valid though.

>> No.4758309

>>4758303
It's less that they upped the difficulty and just made it so you have to grind more so that you don't progress as much if you rent the game
If they had actually bothered with a properly implemented and balanced difficulty adjustment or just made it a separate game mode/difficulty option, it wouldn't be a problem at all

>> No.4758315

>>4753395
jesus christ...

>> No.4758409

>>4758303
There's:
1- Developers who designed the game to be challenging on purpose. Its difficulty is hard but fair, and well designed.
2- US versions rebalancing easy games, to give (Illusion of Gaia, Treasure's hard modes)
3- developers of short games using difficulty and encounter rates to pad the game's length to meet contractual obligations (NES era NoA, Lunar Magical School Saturn)
4- US publishers upping difficulty forcing grinding and cheap deaths, to combat rental and maximize sales
5- Arcade versions throwing tons of cheap deaths and less continues to eat through your quarters
6- World versions of arcade games with mechanics removed to further please greedy arcade owners
7- Microtransaction app developers who develop the free part to eventually have the difficulty curve of a vertical wall to convince players to buy their way through. Still not the worst thing since those have timers that can be waited through, and the japanese devs don't push their luck too much because Konami pulled an EA years ago with the gasha system to the point the JP government stepped in, and a similar event happened recently with western games.
8- Badly balanced games by mistake that end up unplayable after the player invested so many hours in, just because of a balancing oversight. Sierra's adventure games for example. Often happens by mistake.
9- Konami and Earthbound's anti piracy and anti bootleg checks that try and make the game unplayable hard to punish the players of those versions. The developers don't want the player

Throughout WD's legacy, they attempted (3) out of greed, by fudging in hexadecimal edits of compiled game binaries to drive the stats up just low enough to be still finishable. In practice, they ended up with (8).
In some scenarios, the flute in Lunar can be lost, and the level scaling combined with Exile's W for Wonderful (or Wrecking Designs) changes to the stats can make a number of late game bosses literally unbeatable in a way not even cheats can help

>> No.4758505

wait, so what are the best versions of lunar to play? The PS1 games?

>> No.4759329

>>4758505
Short of Japanese originals, the romhacked versions of either the SCD or PS1 version, and then the ps1 us version that had bad changes but less than the other. The GBA/PSP/iOS versions are reimaginings, and made it just the way they were originally.

Of course, that's if you want to dodge wrecking designs' game design "redesigns".
Assuming all that crap didn't exist, then it would be the SCD version followed by the PS1 version, the PSP/iOS port, and the GBA one (which isn't bad, just with shitty colors, sound and menus)

>> No.4760196
File: 40 KB, 800x600, IMAGE_062.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4760196

>> No.4760252

>>4760196
HA I GET IT

>> No.4760515

>>4754438
Calm down, Vic.

>> No.4760553
File: 210 KB, 500x707, Mail.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4760553

I can see how people nowadays would hate Working Designs since they essentially do everything that's considered wrong in localizing japanese games (rewriting script, inserting Western and/or modern references, fucking with the game design), but I see them as a black knight of sorts. Sure the things they did could be considered abhorrent, but if it weren't for them I would have never played Popful Mail, Lunar II, and Vanguard Bandits. No one was going to bring these games over, and in those times I was too young and dumb to know about importing JP titles and installing translation patches. I also gotta give them credit for their commitment to high quality physical releases, too, which continues to this day. Seriously, Summon Night 6 has the biggest instruction booklet from any game this generation, full color, too.

So while what they do is bad, I think ultimately some good came from the fact that they brought over a ton of games that would have never been released otherwise.

>> No.4762784

>>4754438
>But please, continue to try and tell me they're the worst company to localize stuff.
>XSEED has broken games but I'm sure you saw some YouTube video talking about the evils of WD, so you're gonna parrot this shit.

Can't remember any broken releases from XSEED, that one is NISA.

It's funny that Vic Ireland hates XSEED so much because in many ways, I see XSEED as the successor to Working Designs. They don't change the meaning or context of what's happening in the game like Working Designs did, but they actually make the script actually snappy and interesting.

Honestly, I don't give Working Designs that much flack because the market for obscure Japanese shit in those days was tiny. But compared to Woolsey, their translations are dated as all hell and most of their difficulty changes were dubious in terms of game design.

>>4760553
>Popful Mail
People would be really surprised at how many of the jokes actually weren't from Working Designs. NPC guards being inept, Gaw being a fish-junkie, dwarf beards being the "old look", Venuncio's crazy-long name, the elder-dwarf falling asleep mid-sentence... the original game had plenty of jokes. On the other hand, even though they added a lot of questionable material on their own, I think there is something to be said for the way Working Designs got across the wacky, don't-take-this-seriously spirit of the original, which may not have happened if they had done a really straight translation. If there's any Falcom game that fits Working Designs, it's Popful Mail.

>> No.4762787

bump

>> No.4762794

>>4762787
but why?

>> No.4763580

>>4760553

Played all the Lunars as a kid, honestly I don’t even remember the pervy jokes and if I did, the last thing on my mind was “I bet they didn’t say this in the Japanese version!”

This is all just autistic stuff to get angry about 20 years later

>> No.4763587

>>4758315
>buttplastered over shitty taste in comedy
maybe come back when the hair on your balls has dropped, kid

>> No.4763748

>>4760196
I guess I remember that now. It's weird, I played that game all the fucking time when I was little, and usually my parents would pull the plug if some innuendo or something showed up.