I can imagine a lot of heartache and contention around where one lands with this. But I gotta be honest, my favorite Japanese properties are the ones where the translators took a lot of liberties and flexed some writing chops to make the most flavorful expression of something that fit what the creator was going for.
There’s a lot of Japanese/Chinese mystery games where suspects blend together because I can’t remember which person is Yuang Ho or Ryuiki Takachi. But I’ll always remember that in Ace Attorney, I play as Phoenix Wright, and am cross examining suspicious man Frank Sahwit. The cultural relevance of the changed names improves context learning. The series has been mocked for its adjustments, but I like them.
Other weird moments of creativity came from the dubbing team that did Ghost Stories as an “abridged series”, and the Trails in the Sky localizers that found a string table that duplicated “The chest is empty” for each treasure chest in the game, and decided to make each one a ridiculous message.
On the other end, there’s moments like the infamous quote in Rhapsody. The parentheses are part of it.
This is WhiteSnow, a town filled with snow. Enjoy the world of snow. (Note: This is what happens when you do a direct translation.)
And considering this is about the Dragon Quest creator, those games historically got high quality inventive translations as well with lots of different dialects for different locations.
I can imagine a lot of heartache and contention around where one lands with this. But I gotta be honest, my favorite Japanese properties are the ones where the translators took a lot of liberties and flexed some writing chops to make the most flavorful expression of something that fit what the creator was going for.
There’s a lot of Japanese/Chinese mystery games where suspects blend together because I can’t remember which person is Yuang Ho or Ryuiki Takachi. But I’ll always remember that in Ace Attorney, I play as Phoenix Wright, and am cross examining suspicious man Frank Sahwit. The cultural relevance of the changed names improves context learning. The series has been mocked for its adjustments, but I like them.
Other weird moments of creativity came from the dubbing team that did Ghost Stories as an “abridged series”, and the Trails in the Sky localizers that found a string table that duplicated “The chest is empty” for each treasure chest in the game, and decided to make each one a ridiculous message.
On the other end, there’s moments like the infamous quote in Rhapsody. The parentheses are part of it.
And considering this is about the Dragon Quest creator, those games historically got high quality inventive translations as well with lots of different dialects for different locations.