And you thought Phantasia GBA was an embarrassing localization effort.
Okay, okay, I’m just kidding. Xillia’s localization seems pretty good overall. Several people seemed to dislike Meela Mathwell‘s somewhat unusual accent and possible lisp, but it kinda grew on me. That said, I’d like to highlight a couple specific points about the localization:
The Good
Thankfully, several Artes relevant to Hearts were in Xillia, mostly belonging to Agria and Gaius, and were localized with non-headache-inducing names. In particular, since Kasenrin/火旋輪 is now Burning Wheel, I can simply pretend that the tragedy that is Tales of Graces f’s cameo fight never happened, opting for Pyre Wheel over Crimson Disc for Guren Kourin/紅蓮皇輪. Another interesting one is Arc Fire, which is the localized name for Tide Bullet. This was originally one of Illia’s Artes, and it shows up in Hearts as Illia’s cameo summon Arte. It’s a water-elemental Arte that involves her shooting in a circle. In Xillia, Alvin’s version is fire-element for some reason, so I suppose it made sense to change the name away from something watery-sounding. It even kinda works for the water version, if you assume that “fire” refers to discharging guns and not to flames… which is good, because in Xillia 2, the Arte is water-element again–for Ludger, that is. Alvin’s is still fire-element. I hope they were aware of this…?
The Bad
Unfortunately, much in the same vein as Arc Fire, they saw fit to totally mess with a ton of Arte names. Some of the changes were probably to reduce the Engrish factor of the original Japanese names, but others were kind of unnecessary (e.g., Round Edge > Shimmer Spin and Assault Dance > Whirling Assault). The problem with changing Arte names around willy-nilly is that it becomes awkward if those Artes are ever reused on a different character who may have a different weapon type, Arte animation, or theme, making the original name overspecific and awkward. For example, we can see this in Leia’s Sword Rain being called Staff Rain this time around, even though the name of the Arte is identical in Japanese (Chirisazame/散沙雨). This gets even worse when the bonus boss, who is supposed to be copying your party’s moves and weapons, has Sword Rain instead. (I guess because his initial form has a big sword and they didn’t realize the form that uses Chirisazame uses a staff?)
I can only assume they similarly thought Light Spear (Senkuu Reppa/閃空裂破) was too awkward for sword users, even though every Light Spear user thus far has used a sword, when they decided to rename it to Tornado Drive for Alvin. If you ask me, this is a totally unnecessary change that just makes the whole Arte naming system even more confusing. But okay, you want to change it now, after like six or so games that used it and/or had Artes that were derivatives of it, fine. Can you at least be consistent? Apparently Ivar’s version of Light Spear is… Light Spear. What? Why? Is the attack animation at least different? (Which is presumably the reason it was Spiral Attack for Reid and Spiral Destruction for Cress back in Eternia?)
My next nitpick is also kind of regarding Artes, yet kind of not. It actually has to do with the levels of effort involved in the dubbing and localization process. It will also contain very mild spoilers, so you may want to skip ahead to the next section if that is a concern for you.
As no doubt you are aware, we here at KAJITANI-EIZAN’s Patch Site sure love our High Ohgeez, or Mystic Artes, as they are less popularly called. Usually, these flashy, cinematic attacks are meant to showcase how totally awesome and/or badass a character is, with their careful choreography of action, special effects, and totally cool line delivery. Take Gaius, for example:
He is a king looking out for the interests of his people, and his Byaku Majin’ouken (闢・魔神王剣) is supposed to exemplify his authoritative power in all regards. My rather flowery interpretation of the meaning of the kanji would be something along the lines of, “the sword of the demon emperor who has had the rightful privilege of rule from the beginning of time”. And it’s totally badass. The guy leaps into the air and cuts an explosion in half, with you in it. And then he lands on the ground and clenches his fist in victory, savoring the knowledge that he has shown you your place, i.e., horizontal, with your face planted firmly in the ground.
What did they decide to call this awesome High Ohgee in English? Absolute Domination:
Did you see the problem? The name is just fine. The problem is the execution. Go back to the Japanese clip and note the timing of his voice. “BYAKU! … MAJIN’OUKEN!” He shouts the first part as he slices through, then lands before continuing with the rest, ending with the epic fist clench. Now look again at the English clip. At the same point in the animation as the Japanese version, he starts shouting, “ABSOLUTEDOMINATION!” And it’s too short. He’s basically done by the time he lands. What follows is an extremely awkward couple of seconds while he recovers from his landing and then proceeds to take his sweet time to silently clench his fist. What was supposed to be totally badass is now suddenly a headscratcher. What does he think he’s doing, standing there and posing?
If I wanted to be uncharitable, I would call this an example of US dubbing companies being lazy and incompetent. I’m pretty sure the real reason, though, is simply a lack of time and money. With a tight schedule and relatively low budget, everything has to be done in a totally disconnected fashion. For example, some guy translated the Arte name. Then some guy told the voice actor what to yell, and he did so. Then some guy had to replace the Japanese sound byte with the English one. All at different time points and without much time to go back, check it, and see if it can be improved in some small way. I’m pretty sure that if the English voice actor and the voice director were to see the High Ohgee, see what makes it tick, record an English version, see how the English version would look, on the spot, and re-record as needed to avoid awkwardness, this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened.
Now, I’m going to go really far out on a limb and guess at an additional potential problem source — a lack of support from the Japanese side. I don’t just mean time and money… I mean programming support and the provisioning of tools. How was the High Ohgee developed and voiced in Japan? Surely the voice actor saw the Arte in question and worked on his delivery so it would match the onscreen animation perfectly? They probably had to show the guy the animation, with his voice overlaid in real time, just as I described above. If they had a special program or debug function or whatever for that, shouldn’t they have offered it to the localization team? And it’s not just that… wouldn’t it be nice if the original programming team made sure to implement features that would be relevant for the Western localizations right from the start? For example, how about word wrap, a concept that doesn’t exist in Japanese or other East Asian languages yet is important in basically every Indo-European language? General interface design? I don’t know how many of you saw videos and screenshots of the Final Fantasy X HD Remaster, but the battle GUI is horrendously ugly due to weird text/number size choices, huge swaths of blank space in UI elements with center-aligned text (likely due to Western/Japanese font differences), etc. I think this is due to a lack of consideration for the needs of the Western localization teams during the development process. I feel that if localization teams were to be contacted earlier in the process and their input taken into account, things would go a lot smoother on the localization front.
The above is basically pure guesswork, so please take it with a grain of salt. My apologies if I turn out to be totally wrong and Japanese development teams actually are very mindful of this already and offer tons of support to the localization teams. I just think it’s rather unlikely that this is the case, considering the fact that they didn’t redo the lip sync (go back and compare the two versions again!). It should be a REALLY simple thing to do if you have the tools… just run an analysis on the dubbed audio file and automatically adjust the character model’s lip flap to match. You know, like what they did for the Japanese dub.
Alternately, they could have just added around a second of padding to the beginning of his voice file to ensure that he starts yelling the name after he lands. That would avoid the name from ending too early and would at least partially, if not entirely, fix the lip sync issue. You can do that even without tons of Japanese dev team support or a re-recording session for the voice actor.
The Ugly
Well, Arte names and slightly muddy Arte name delivery and lip sync aren’t really huge issues. Here’s a huge issue:
This was one of the skits shown early, as a promo. I’m not sure if this is the reason why it got translated that way, because they didn’t have enough time to do the research before putting it out there, or whether they felt they had to go the extremely in-your-face route to make it funny. Either way, it’s not really a good precedent for how localization should be done. In the Japanese version, Teepo keeps talking about having a “baribo” body, which is a made-up word. It could be a contraction of “baribari” and “boubou”, in which case the implied meaning would actually be something along the lines of “strong and athletic, burning with passion”. Teepo is basically voicing Elize’s jealousy over Milla’s lithe figure. It makes sense that Jude doesn’t know what it is, because it isn’t a real word. In the English version, Jude, despite being some kind of overachieving, precocious MD/PhD student who is a total genius, not only has somehow never heard of the word “bazongas”, he can’t even infer from context that it is directly referring to boobs. This is rather out of character for him and rather unbelievable. If it were limited to this skit, that would be the end of it and it wouldn’t be a big deal. But no. The topic comes up again several times, with Milla being proud of her even more “baribo” body when she gets more muscle tone (while English Milla yells “yoked-out bazongas!” … and I guess it’s implied that bazongas are maybe referring to biceps and not breasts?? wat), and Elize even continuing to seek a “baribo” body in Xillia 2 (did no one tell the poor girl she’s yelling about boobs all the time at any point in the intervening year?). Given this context, I think “bazongas” gets wildly off the mark of the original meaning and intent of the original phrasing. First and foremost, it isn’t supposed to be a punchline about Jude’s naivete; it’s supposed to be a celebration of the female form. It’s about Elize’s desire for a beautiful female body, not Jude’s desire to know about bazongas. Call me KAJITANI-SARKEESIAN if you want, but I think that’s the sort of change that’s best avoided where possible. Also, you’re dreaming if you think any party member other than Milla is going to have enormous bazongas at any point in time… at least until Xillia 2! Wait, is that a spoiler?
I don’t want to draw too much attention to these small details, because as you can see, the rest of the skit was dubbed amazingly, especially Rowen, who sounds like he is really having fun with his role. But it’s still small details like these that are most vulnerable to getting lost due to imprecise translation or localization, so it’s important to point them out and keep them in mind. What could have been done about it? Some English-ish made-up word like “amazonculous” (amazing + ridiculous, with hints of “amazon”) might have worked. Who knows, maybe they even tried to make something like that work before deciding it was too awkward and opted in favor of bazongas. Maybe they didn’t. If they didn’t, it highlights the importance of making sure the localization team is intimately familiar with the source material before embarking on the arduous journey of turning it into an English product.
Speaking of which, I have good news for you! It seems that many of you are curious as to how the Tales of Hearts: Translator’s Cut project is going. As I’m sure you know, we here at KAJITANI-EIZAN’s Patch Site are not particularly motivated to share more such information than we feel like sharing, i.e., the progress bar on the right. However, I thought we should throw you guys a bone, so I consulted with my translator and talked about what would be all right to discuss. After some debate, we decided that, despite our pact of secrecy, we could pull away the veil a bit and release a tidbit of information: We’re done up through at least the second town! Yay!
Well, I hope you found that insightful. Please discuss and leave your comments below, and keep an eye out for news on Xillia 2!
September 22, 2013 at 6:28 pm | Permalink
“After some debate, we decided that, despite our pact of secrecy, we could pull away the veil a bit and release a tidbit of information: We’re done up through at least the second town! Yay!”
Now that was just mean.
September 22, 2013 at 9:46 pm | Permalink
This ^ is what i was just thinking lol
September 22, 2013 at 10:24 pm | Permalink
after so many years and its only up to second town???!!! are u kidding me?
September 23, 2013 at 12:53 am | Permalink
If you are already on the second town, your doing it wrong. You need to slow down the pace and do it right. May I suggest scrapping your current work and rewriting?
September 23, 2013 at 6:34 pm | Permalink
Wow, second town? Talk about a rush job. I agree with Mr. X. If you go any faster you’re going to have a mess of a translation on your hands. Just sayin’.
September 24, 2013 at 9:07 am | Permalink
guys, what are you talking about? the patch was released several months ago. just pay more attention to his posts. what he’s addressing now is most likely that bug from the second town. it was kinda annoying but still not game-breaking. but then again, thank you Kajitani-Eizan for this new version of your wonderful patch! the less bugs the better…
(also, don’t tell me you STILL don’t see the patch link. it’s not even that well-hidden this time)
September 24, 2013 at 10:11 am | Permalink
to Ochu: What patch?
September 24, 2013 at 6:20 pm | Permalink
^ i agree with Stahn Man tell us Ochu
September 24, 2013 at 6:51 pm | Permalink
That’s great! How many towns there are?
September 25, 2013 at 2:20 am | Permalink
Holy shit fuck off.
September 25, 2013 at 1:59 pm | Permalink
Have to agree with you on Rowen, the guy is just simply amazing.
Not just the English dubbing, I’m also quite fond of the actual character. The Tales Studio does seem to have a knack for writing older men, Raven, Malik and Rowen just to name a few.
I just met Gaius for the first time but I’m liking Xillia so far. Likeable protagonists, more mature treatment of characters, better sidequest tracking, Xillia is definitely a better game than Graces F overall.
September 25, 2013 at 2:05 pm | Permalink
@Confused: Depending on what you count as a town, there are 11 to 15 “towns”.
@ochu: Stop revealing everything, jeez! At this rate, they’ll find out about the ToHR patch, too.
September 25, 2013 at 7:12 pm | Permalink
0_0
September 25, 2013 at 7:42 pm | Permalink
so @Kaji will you make a release post
September 25, 2013 at 8:00 pm | Permalink
lol thanks for the info ochu
Great work Kajitani-Eizan, now I can play ToH after all
September 25, 2013 at 8:09 pm | Permalink
evidently ochu is the most observant of us all
September 25, 2013 at 8:11 pm | Permalink
Can somebody clue me in here?
September 25, 2013 at 9:20 pm | Permalink
I still cant find it
=[
September 26, 2013 at 10:17 am | Permalink
Apparently some kinda new patch is around so check the most recent posts guys. I managed to find the last one everyone was stuck on so I can find it again I suppose.
September 26, 2013 at 10:23 am | Permalink
can you tell me where Stahn Man2
September 26, 2013 at 11:09 am | Permalink
Looks like you’re keeping these commentors on their toes as usual, Kaji and gang~
September 26, 2013 at 11:40 am | Permalink
lol lol
Damn, I shouldn’t post that comment before.
Oh well, what’s done is done.
Just wait for the release post everyone, while I already finished the game by then
September 26, 2013 at 11:50 am | Permalink
To Leon Rulez: This new patch found by Ochu i haven’t found yet if you read my post it said the earlier patch the one that has you playing through the Volcano level. I will find it though!
September 26, 2013 at 1:30 pm | Permalink
i will too eventually lol
September 26, 2013 at 1:37 pm | Permalink
good luck my friend
September 26, 2013 at 2:55 pm | Permalink
Well, I’ve checked all over for this patch implied by Ochu. I even check the first Demo patch zip file, though sadly, I have yet to find anything I haven’t already found. Which is to say, the first demo patch, and the volcano demo patch. If there truly is a full patch about, with a 2nd town bug, I’d very much like to find it. I’ve read and reread to many posts here already today, so the search is over for now. If its hidden there Kaji, and you hinted at, the hint went over my head, good job.
September 26, 2013 at 3:08 pm | Permalink
Same here
September 27, 2013 at 6:27 am | Permalink
Stop searching the posts already guys, there isn’t a new patch in there.
There will be no patch for the original ToH version, just a half-baked TC that he wanted to make only.
I’m quite disappointed, I followed this site since the first demo released and hoping this project will go smoothly just because the first patch looks good.
I just don’t understand some people whom don’t like to state the current status of the project (well, some of them became dead projects though)
Fiuh, I feel refreshed now lol
September 27, 2013 at 7:59 am | Permalink
Ochu mentioned something about a patch several months ago. A clue about earlier posts? Idk but Kaji’s the man for translating this game for us. Still your #1 supporter!
September 27, 2013 at 9:58 am | Permalink
Don’t bother with the patch, you still have to wait till the final patch to finish the game anyway.
Even a menu and item translation patch is already good for me if I can play it till the end, not just in first town, second town, third town, etc.
September 27, 2013 at 4:40 pm | Permalink
I’ve been watching this site for some time. I was very happy to find some years back that Hearts was being translated, and patched. So trolling aside, and even though its taking a long time to finish. I personally am still happy. I know at the end, I will be greeted with a solid piece of work, so Kaji’s trolling doesn’t bother me at all, I actually find it rather refreshing. Keep up the good work team(seriously is it team Kaji? Team Jacob? Oh an Edward fan?) Team Edward go! lol
September 29, 2013 at 1:28 am | Permalink
yes, we do indeed root for Edward Elric, just not here since alchemy is (likely) not involved in the translation of japanese to english
September 29, 2013 at 9:58 am | Permalink
Haja Juujisei is localized as Obliteration Cross. It’s surprising.
September 30, 2013 at 4:04 pm | Permalink
Why can’t Jude be naive about bazongas? It’s not like it’s completely an unheard of trope in anime to have a really book smart character be naive about things that should be obvious.
October 1, 2013 at 3:45 am | Permalink
Ahaha….2nd…town…AHAHAHA…I really hope…that means…that you are actually further than that….but you went back to fix some critical bug…yeah! That’s what Kaji is doing! AHAHAHA! YES!
October 1, 2013 at 3:48 pm | Permalink
For all anyone knows, by 2nd town he could mean, up to the 2nd town in the final sweep of the patch before its released. So for now, the only choice we have is to preform a black magick ritual to discern the truth behinds Kajis comment. Anyone got a rams skull and some virgin blood?
October 1, 2013 at 7:11 pm | Permalink
Menus Translation, after 2nd town the menus back to japanese.
Items Translation, after 2nd town the items list found after it still in japanese.
Skills Translation, after 2nd town the skills learned will be in japanese (Better leveling faster to get all the skills before 2nd town)
Characters and Places name, after 2nd town the new characters and places name still in japanese.
Conversation, after 2nd town the chats will be in japanese.
That’s what I caught from his comment.
October 1, 2013 at 11:36 pm | Permalink
Hahaha. A lot of that comment couldn’t actually be true. As skills, items and such are not tied with story progress. Plot items would be, but other such items would be handled in a different part of the coding. So what you though, can not possible be true. Coding in regards to story progression wouldn’t make any sense. If they adapted that approach, then this translation could take another 3 years. Makes far more sense to translate by type and listing. So anytime the item is called to code, the in turn translated text would be brought. Seems that would be a much better approach to translation. As far as storyline is concerned. Sadly there wouldn’t be any such shortcuts.
October 2, 2013 at 5:11 am | Permalink
Sadly that’s what I think what they were doing right now, looking at the speed of their works. Or they simply don’t have the time to spare at all for doing this project, which makes this project just a BS.
But looking at the videos they have posted (don’t know they were edited or not), I think they (at least the one posting) have the time to spare.
This is what I assumed of their current status:
Menus — 99%
Ougis — 99%
Items — 99%
Character and Places — 99%
Story — 99%
I think there are no news about localization of ToHR
October 2, 2013 at 6:02 am | Permalink
hideo baba already confirm it many times that he said no english version on tales of games vita!! thats include tohr and toir(watever)!!
go import your damn japanese version of TOHR if u want since its 100% and definitely not gonna be localized!!
u guys better give the project to absolute zero translations group if u guys don’t plan or no time to release this patch!
October 2, 2013 at 4:11 pm | Permalink
Hideo Baba said “there are “currently” no plans to localize the Tales Vita titles” He never said it would never happen, just that the Vita isn’t really taking off, so localization of the titles wouldn’t amount to much. Its all business. If the Vita starts to sell much better, there would then be far more reason for a localization for the Vita Tales of titles. So instead of acting like its hopeless…Go buy a Vita. Thats how we get official localized Titles for it. Supply and Demand…Its the first rule of business.
October 2, 2013 at 6:25 pm | Permalink
@Leviathain: You are correct, to add such functionality to the game would be both pointless and a lot of extra work. Except for very specific changes to the game, we’re basically just replacing the existing Japanese text with English text, so such conditional language switching would not be feasible.
@Hahaha: If by “edited” you mean Photoshopped, then no. It’s basically all footage recorded from the debugging emulator. And I wish those percentages were as high as that!
@Leviathain: Buy a Vita just to sort-of-maybe convince them to localize a couple of mediocre remakes? I’m not THAT big a Tales fan.
October 2, 2013 at 7:37 pm | Permalink
Finally got a respond, then I better add this:
Skit — 10%
Library — 15%
Debugging — 10%
My percentages should be right except for the story part, since in your 2nd demo everything was translated (well, if it wasn’t just a TC )
October 2, 2013 at 10:31 pm | Permalink
sorry bro, already have a vita and damn regret it
vita is doomed to be failed even sony themself said it! :
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-02-shuhei-yoshida-vita-vita-tv-and-sonys-future
October 4, 2013 at 4:21 pm | Permalink
@Kaji- Well buying a Vita hoping only for that small chance is pretty stupid. Though, eventually, they will properly hack the Vita, just as the PSP was, and it will be open to fan translations of many titles that never hit the states. Just because the hacking community has been hitting brick walls with their Vita hacking, doesn’t mean everyone will give up. Someone will get it eventually.
October 9, 2013 at 2:15 pm | Permalink
[…] The stuff he’s put into his Translator’s Cut is crazy and awesome. Some people have ironically been giving Kaji a hard time when the fault really lies with me, so please redirect all complaints about slowness to me in the […]
October 9, 2013 at 2:32 pm | Permalink
http://a0t.co/2013/10/09/project-annoucements/
October 9, 2013 at 8:21 pm | Permalink
translation is moving too fast for me
October 10, 2013 at 7:03 am | Permalink
Does that mean this project translated per town, or just left the conversation texts that need to be translated?
So that’s why Kaji have a lot of time doing his TC.
December 16, 2013 at 12:49 pm | Permalink
@aytoqyeto
They can’t just give up on the vita now! We still need Tempest!
WE STIIL NEED TEMPEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!