It’s time to put an old tradition to rest.
After spending a lot of time working intimately with the arte names, I have come to realize something. And that is that Hometek’s arte naming system is just too full of problems and is COMPLETELY unworkable. I have put a LOT of thought into this, I mean like, almost two hours worth… And I say, it’s time to scrap the whole thing. No more Demon Fang. No more Tiger Blade. From here on out, it’s nothing but romaji and Japanese English arte names, the way Japan intended for it to be.
I realize a small minority of you may be somewhat against this change, but it’s for the best. “Majinken” (that’s Demon God Sword in English) sounds way cooler than Demon Fang, after all. And I dunno what “Gels” are, but I sure do know what a “Gummi” (Bear) is… and they’re awesome. So yeah, Japanese will ALWAYS sound cooler than English. That’s a proven fact, proven by 9 out of 10 Japanologists. So unfortunately for the few of you that like Demon Fang and the other Localized arte names, too bad, it’s gone, and it’s never coming back, FOREVER.
I guess I ought to show you some other screenshots while I’m at it. I’m practically running out of sections of the menu I haven’t already shown yet. Well, here’s the Soma Evolve menu:
Man, those things look really convenient. I’d love to have, say, a backpack Soma that forms a Segway. Or a T-shirt Soma that forms the keys to my car, just so I can be sure I’ll never lock myself out (unless I leave my Soma in my car, and also my keys… then I’m just stupid).
And here’s the Customize menu:
Nothing special to note here.
I guess there is one other thing I should mention… I’ve gotten several requests to add a progress bar. Done and done. If you glance over to the right side of the page, you should see a spiffy progress bar. Hope that helps.
Well, that’s all for now. Until next time, guys!
September 9, 2010 at 5:35 pm | Permalink
Even without the Pokemon titles and the Tales titles, there are still good games for the DS that are well worth playing… Most of them are not very widely known… Nostalgia, Black Sigil, and Sands of Destruction are 3 very good examples… There’s a gaming world outside the Tales series… Has anyone else here tried Arc Rise Fantasia for the Wii yet? Transformers War for Cybertron is a lot of fun, the Halo series is always a good choice… The list of games I could suggest goes on and on… If all else fails get Starcraft, if your computer can’t run 2 get the first one’s battlechest pack…
September 10, 2010 at 8:57 pm | Permalink
Perfect for me!
Continue with this….
September 10, 2010 at 10:10 pm | Permalink
i don’t really care, please finish the translation, i want to play this awesome game 8D
September 11, 2010 at 11:49 am | Permalink
I’m so happy to see some more progress!
Can’t wait the release, though, I’ll be patient.
Can’t rush perfection after all!
September 11, 2010 at 1:41 pm | Permalink
Thanks for your progress~
September 11, 2010 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
DS Soma that forms my PSP… That would be incredibly convenient, wouldn’t it?
September 11, 2010 at 11:33 pm | Permalink
well, i liked demon’s fang better, but it’s no importance, you guys still do a great job, and we’re expecting so much, since namco just now ignore their fans now.
keep goin on!
September 13, 2010 at 7:48 am | Permalink
Japanese naming convention sounds much better imo.
MAAAJIIINNNKEN!
Also the menus and font and everything look perfect.
Looking forward to hearing more on this project 🙂
September 14, 2010 at 2:48 pm | Permalink
…Did no one look at the last screen shot?
September 14, 2010 at 3:02 pm | Permalink
When something needs to be in english (sometimes engrish) the japanese themselves do it, like “Indignation” or “Elemental Master”. Seriously, things like “Swallow Dance” and “Demon Lighting Hammer” sound way to clunky for my taste.
September 15, 2010 at 9:51 am | Permalink
Well, it’s your translation after all. And it’s a good decision. 😉 Keep going!
September 17, 2010 at 4:12 am | Permalink
The post itself was hilarious, but looking at all the comments from gullible people is just kind of depressing. Making jokes like this can have its negatives, because not only will there be silly people complaining about the change, but you will also trick the super-accepting people that will rationalize it and praise it even though it’s not going to happen, like the fellow in the post above mine as I type this. As they say, a joke’s not as funny if you have to explain it.
Thankfully, there are a few of us who can appreciate good humor, though, so it’s not completely hopeless (no offense intended to those who fell for it). Best of luck on the rest of the project!
September 17, 2010 at 3:48 pm | Permalink
It’s not that they didn’t get the joke, the thing is a lot of people are just too lazy to read the whole post. I think most people here simply read the title or the first paragraph at most. Then some went like OMG NO WAY YOU BE BETRAYING ‘MERICAN LANGUAGE!!eleven!1 while others thought YAYAYAY MAJINKEN WEEABOO POWAH!!11!
And of course there are those that will simply bow down to anything Kajitani-Eizan says because they think the project is moved by ass kissing and thanks spamming. It’s just like the comments sections at Absolute Zero Translations, same morons with diferent names. And by the way, I’m not generalizing here, so if you went to AZT and isn’t a lazy illiterate or a mindless adulator no need to get buttwounded.
September 18, 2010 at 5:24 am | Permalink
Oh, I’m sorry I oversaw the “Localized” in the second screenshot.
And I didn’t know Kajitani-Eizan was famous for these jokes, so if you’d excuse me.
Thank you for your cooperativeness.
PS: I think his work deserves compliments. Oh my god.
September 19, 2010 at 12:32 pm | Permalink
Yay progress bar.
September 19, 2010 at 12:34 pm | Permalink
Oh wait… that looks live a Windows Vista progress bar…. LOL
September 19, 2010 at 1:56 pm | Permalink
I have a question… Is it true that there’s something going on between Hisui and Innes?
September 20, 2010 at 1:49 pm | Permalink
Yeah, they have sex everytime the party stays at an inn. But, sadly, the video and audio are censored by a black screen.
September 20, 2010 at 11:42 pm | Permalink
lol
Jokes aside, the game never makes it clear they (Hisui and Innes) feel anything for each other, it lets the player interpret the dialogue any way he wants. I myself think Hisui sees Innes as a good exemple of how a adult should behave but I doubt she is attracted by him at all or would ever fall for any younger guy.
I love Innes, and really love female characters like her, Nanaly and Refill (Raine) which can take care of themselves. I would hate it if Hisui and Innes relantionship was as obvious as Kohaku and Shing’s. Most heroines are just loyal puppies following the hero around. Sometimes Kohaku’s “boo-hoo, I’m scared! Shing save me!” REALLY get on my nerves. You will never see a scene like that between Hisui and Innes though.
September 22, 2010 at 4:16 pm | Permalink
Haha, I C WUT U DID THUR.
Any way if people would pay attention to the actual content the joke wouldn’t be half as funny
September 22, 2010 at 11:35 pm | Permalink
Well, by not paying attention you wouldn’t realize it’s a joke, several people proved it already with their comments. Whatever for the skill names though, I just hopes this patch actually gets finished…
September 23, 2010 at 10:16 am | Permalink
@Carnivol – I am absolutely not passionate about anything I said above, haha.
I know very little of the fan-translation scene other than having played through the games themselves.
I dislike Working Designs’ translations specifically because they go out of their way to hide the fact that someone else actually made the game. I think it was the making-of video that came with Lunar that first made me dislike them, and then more recently Victor Ireland was running his trap on a forum about XSeed ruining Lunar and how the actress who played Luna reprising her role made her a traitor.
But, I seriously am not passionate about any of it. They could call Demon Fang “Chocolate Teabag” for all I really care. If they translated all of the dialog as “blah, blah” save for “blah, blah, the cave of wind, to the north, blah, blah” I would be perfectly happy.
September 23, 2010 at 3:47 pm | Permalink
@Wet – I never really felt that Working Designs “went out of their way” to hide who really made the games they translated and published. I never actually saw those making of videos they had on the bonus discs for some of their releases, but I honestly believe they deserve all the credit they could get. (A general mirror of this is of course how a lot of fan-translators seemingly do stuff just for the attention and/or any nod they give the company who’s hard efforts went into producing the supposedly “fine” game they’re working on, is almost solely directed towards how stupid and retarded the company is for not releasing their games stateside.)
Most of Working Designs’ efforts were done without anything but a license to publish the games. The general impression I’ve got of their work on some of the titles is that they were pretty much working in a similar fashion to how most fan-translation teams do things – just that they were a recognized publisher/developer and got to actually release their work via retail channels.
I’m not entirely familiar with the whole XSEED/Lunar PSP deal, as all I remember are a few comments on NeoGAF about how some of the other actors didn’t want to reprise their roles without him on onboard, how XSEED seemingly wanted just names and not the actual labor/quality offered by the original localization team, and how Jenny (Luna) sounds very different in the PSP version (’cause of reasons such as: different script/style, different direction, different equipment, different codec/playback device, a decade has passed, etc.)
Actually, a quick google brought me to this (all from roughly two months before the English release):
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=19321229#post19321229
Guess that’s what we’re both thinking of. Right?
If you skip to the next page, you’ll also see that his beef is seemingly directed towards how the franchise has received poor treatment from those who picked up the torch – after how Working Designs successfully managed to put a pretty much minor and insignificant franchise on the map (twice – on two platforms). It’s never any fun when you work really hard to achieve something, to then see it being treated like “just another translation” by the people handling the next installment(s) in the franchise.
From experience, I can tell you that this is made even worse when you express interest in participating and leaving your “seal of approval” on something, just for them to turn down the offer – as they claim they are fine with delivering an average product. Guess the chaps at Naughty Dog put it best when they said the current treatment of the Crash Bandicoot franchise was a bit like seeing your own daughter do porn.
September 23, 2010 at 6:33 pm | Permalink
I didn’t think a scene like that would play anyway… Hisui and Innes are older than Shing and Kohak so I had already assumed if they had a relationship they’d at least try to keep it on the downlow, showing only vague signs of it and a respect for each other on screen… Mature couples don’t like to openly show it as much as younger couples…
September 23, 2010 at 9:52 pm | Permalink
Names are just names. The localization names don’t have any description for what the skill actually does, so it doesn’t matter what you name it. In fact, since you’re naming it in romaji, it’ll be so much faster. If translating arte skills was as easy as select art, read, edit, save, done, i’d be finished with all the artes in a day or less.
Also, japanese sounds cooler than english
September 24, 2010 at 1:05 pm | Permalink
@Carnivol
lol do you plan to work in a game magazine company or the like? Reading your first book here I though you were just a sensitive gamer taking the internet and its dwellers too seriously, but that last post was actually quite interesting.
And no, I’m not being sarcastic. ;D
September 25, 2010 at 3:20 am | Permalink
@Seth – Glad you found it enjoyable. I currently don’t write for a magazine, nor do I currently have any plans to do so. For over 5 years now I’ve been doing the dirty work on retail localization efforts (mainly European releases) and I’ve been fiddling about with hobby translations for over twice that amount of time. Sensitive much? Maybe – but only allowing it to get to me on those channels where I’m either an active contributor or part of staff.
September 25, 2010 at 6:14 am | Permalink
@Carnivol – I know the Lunar GBA port and Lunar Dragon Song were not given any attention to their translations, but XSeed is principally comprised of obsessed RPG fans. I had the fortune of BS-ing with one of them awhile ago and he was the biggest Falcom nerd I have ever met (which I think is great). XSeed’s story about the WD deal was that they knew no way of contacting the voice actors as they were not professionals. Fans contacted them with Luna’s voice actors contact information. Ireland’s “rejection” he claimed was the fact that they never contacted him.
I love bad translations, really. I grew up playing RPG’s in the early 90’s and there was not a game out there until 95 or so that had a half-way decent localization. I remember hating all the dialog in Final Fantasy II (IV) because it was taking too long, haha. Lufia for SNES I think was the worst for that until I played Tales of Destiny on PSX. I hate the Tales series talkiness, but I love the battle system. So I deal. I would rather make fun of a poorly translated story than wait out melodrama so I can kill some more damn orcs.
WD’s translations were not the kind of “bad” I liked. They were too contemporary. Why was there a Roger Ebert fat joke in Alundra? I think it was Magic Knight Rayearth where a 14 year old girl made a crack about butt sex. And for the record, despite Victor Ireland saying Quark had the best dragon’s voice ever, I hated it.
September 26, 2010 at 12:19 pm | Permalink
I like the translation switch the AZ Team and the K-E Team put in their translation patches… I just wish it would spread to party character names too… Like for Innocence in the localized, it would say Ilia instead of Iria…
September 26, 2010 at 4:59 pm | Permalink
@Wes – People being “fans” of their own products is often a double-edged sword. I don’t know anyone at XSEED, but going by all the info shown to me on both ends of that case, it still seems like XSEED did not really put on much of an effort (as far as “gathering the old guys” goes). If outside fans went the extra mile of hooking them up with one actor, and the rest did not join in (for whatever reason(s)), then why on earth didn’t they contact Victor Ireland? It’s not exactly like he’s hard to get a hold of, and it’d certainly be their best shot for the rest of the cast (not to mention pleasing the fans – who already got things their way by having one actor reprise a role).
Also, I agree, certain games do get kinda too chatty for their own good. Don’t see how you had that problem with Tales of Destiny – I consider its dialog script one of the mid-90s localizations that unfortunately doesn’t get enough praise (along with some of the visual details it features, stuff that for some reason was neither emulated nor included in any form in the PS2 remake). I’ve got an on-going replay project going for that game at the moment and I’ve yet to feel the dialog gets even anywhere close to too chatty.
If you ever saw the screenshots and videos I once released of a proof-of-concept translation for PSP (using Radiant Mythology as a test bed), you could’ve seen lines of text almost directly lifted from a lot of NES era translations. There truly is a weird form for charm to the dialog that was written by non-native speakers and/or cut down to fit the physical space available in the ROM data. It might be something that belongs in the same bin as pixel graphics, the lack of voice acting, and so forth. Stuff that kind of acts as some sort of abstracts – putting your imagination to work, filling out the blanks.
As for the cultural jokes in WDs stuff – Some of them were probably new and introduced exclusively in the English script, but many of them also acted as replacement for equal types of pop culture jokes/references/cultural jokes that were there in the original versions. Stuff that normally either goes completely missing in most English translations (untranslatable) or makes no sense (culturally) if just kept as is. Personally, I don’t like “real world” references and “breaking the 4th wall” kind of stuff. I’d avoid direct 4th wall stuff and I’d twist “real world” stuff to the point where it’s turned into an “in-game” spoof/parody.
Either way, sometimes you just end up sacrificing a joke one place and taking the opportunity to introduce a new one somewhere else. A lot of people strangely enough find “foreign talk” a lot more interesting than what they can understand, making them blind to the sad fact that a lot of games are horrifyingly boring and stiff in its original language -often also far more chatty than their translated counterparts- and rarely have I seen English translations that aren’t in most ways worthy of being considered an improvement over the source content. Sure, it’s not true in all cases, but usually… the English version is basically a “second opinion” – if you want.
September 26, 2010 at 6:15 pm | Permalink
@Carnivol – That all makes sense to me. As for Tales of Destiny, I cited it as one of the first games I played that I considered really “chatty.” Comparing it to Tales of Symphonia or Tales of the Abyss, its practically reticent.
September 28, 2010 at 5:13 pm | Permalink
I read the whole article, examined the pictures, and still didn’t get it until I saw the comments. So yes, joke is all well and good, but make it sound like a joke a tiny bit more besides a screenshot apparently.. (which I’m not the only one who didn’t understand that screenshot, judging by the comments. :P) And the “j/k” tag, which most people don’t even see anyways. Of course don’t make it obvious, that’d be dumb. Okay, yeah, I’m done messing up the mood. (Yes, I did have a negative reaction to it, but I held off on posting until I read through everything, good thing too… lol.)
October 5, 2010 at 6:27 pm | Permalink
A good joke is never obvious. Unless its a Helen Keller one.
October 6, 2010 at 8:01 pm | Permalink
lol @ half-assed progress bar. I can’t wait for the trolls to appear. That aside, keep up the good work! It isn’t much of a loss to loose the localized terms. I believe an old SNES english patch of Tales of Phantasia did the same thing.
I’ll just leave this here… *places flamethrower in middle of room*
October 18, 2010 at 7:13 pm | Permalink
“(unless I leave my Soma in my car, and also my keys… then I’m just stupid)”
I’m stupid ‘cuz, I leave my keys inside car every now and then. >_<
November 1, 2010 at 3:32 pm | Permalink
Nyaahahahahas! Love it XD I do prefer the original skill namings too ♥
December 12, 2010 at 9:18 pm | Permalink
Hello. I decided to do a search for french and came across this site while I have been searching all over the web for advice and information to aid me to study the french language. I believed it could be a good idea to understanding of a fresh language and french looks like the simplest one for me to tackle. I will continue searching until I find what I want. See you later.
January 7, 2011 at 11:33 am | Permalink
Imagine if Kajitani did this same joke with the character’s names:
“I have been thinking about it and I have finally decided: If people are waiting for an english translation why the characters are named Hisui and Kohaku? Exactly, it makes no sense, right? Buh-bye Hisui and Kohaku! Welcome Amber and Jaden! I know there are some japantards that will be sad with this decision, but I’ve been thinking for a long time (like… 15 minutes) and this is the best option. Of course, there is no option to change character names just by pressing L or R: *insert here an image of the customisation menu*”
If someone has followed Innocence patch they will remember the sobbing for having Luca instead of Ruca; well, you would have that multiplied by 10.