Here’s the final part of the localisation article in which we learn of all the rude Japanese words and names that have been translated into inoffensive English over the years. Boo! Start here if you missed Part 1
With the arrival of the Internet, videogame hype machines normally controlled by a publisher’s PR department were blown open.
Suddenly anyone could buy a copy of Weekly Famitsu and, in one sitting post more information on forthcoming games than most western publishers would have lined up for six months.
Websites such as The Magic Box began publishing Japanese screens and adverts with accompanying translations. This led to discrepancies between the Japanese game details in those areas that were being changed for the western audiences. Hence, in the early stages of Final fantasy VII’s pre-Japanese release hype, it was widely understood that the leading female character was to be called ‘Aerith’ not ‘Aeris’ as in the final US game.
Other changes to character names have not been so superficial. Sega notoriously had to change the name of Phantasy Star’s antagonist from the inappropriate ‘Dark Phallus’ and Xenogears’s ‘Citan’ was renamed from the Japanese ‘Shitan’. However, it’s not only names that get changed in the trip across the oceans. It was allegedly thought that the Japanese PSone game Dew Prism, could be misheard in conversation as ‘Jew Prison’ and so the title was changed to the phonetically easier on the ear, ‘Threads of Fate’ for America.
This touches on the censorship debate, an issue that localisation teams have long had to contend with as Honeywood explains: “Back in the old NES and SNES days it was common practice to have to change sensitive wordings. Chrono Trigger had alcoholic drinks replaced by soft ones and pubs changed to cafes. In Xenogears, there were mature, controversial themes, with an evil ‘church’ betraying its common believers (‘lambs’ with Hebrew-sounding names) to an evil empire (‘Solaris’, a city in the sky whose inhabitants had German-sounding names, who slaughtered the lambs for use as Soylent Green).
“It was an obvious parable of WWII. The game also dealt with young priests being molested by the clergy. Although these themes were acceptable in Japan, the US distributors were eager to tone it down. They ended up forcing me to change the name of the ‘Church’ to ‘Ethos’, but I was able to get the themes across regardless, by careful rewording. In terms of expletives, I find Japanese doesn’t use as many rude words as English literature and broadcasting tend to. It’s often hard to express rough sentiments in English without resorting to swear words, and yet not sounding forcibly saccharine or family-friendly.
“Sure you can always try to use ‘gosh’ or ‘gee’, or do the old comic book ‘@#$%!’-type replacement but this often makes the game lose its realism; in these cases, we allow our translators freedom to do what they judge is best. Even when we do use expletives, we always notify the ratings board of how many times they appear in the title as it’s the frequency with which they appear which affects the rating rather than their severity.”
Similarly, Atlus, who frequently port games examining darker themes, are always careful. “In Robopon” explains Alexander, “there were certain sexual references in the game that were geared towards a different age group in Japan than our target audience in the US. We also always use lowercase “g” for god or gods and any pentagrams are filled in to look like stars. One of the characters in Go! Go! Hypergrind had a ‘Christ Air’ move, which looked too much like an actual crucifixion, so we requested that it be changed to the way that it is performed in real life”.
Sensitivities in translations can even be market specific notes CD Projekt’s Skladanowski: ”Some markets, such as Germany, have very specific guidelines for game rating, stricter than most other European countries. This will sometimes mean that the language needs to be toned down, or that rude language needs to be changed to something more acceptable.”
By working together at an earlier stage with the development team these days, localisers are able to influence changes and even add new original scenes in via an unlikely cross-pollination of practice as Honeywood explains: “Over the years we’ve built up close relationship with the dev teams so they trust us with making changes (within reason) to their text. Sometimes the planners are so impressed with changes to the translated version we propose, they give us extra information or add extra scenes into the game to improve the presentation of the changes.
“It’s more like we are planning the game together than translating. Take Horii-san in the North American version of Dragon Quest VIII. All naming choices and changes had to be painstakingly approved by him. Gradually we built up trust with each other, and by the end, not only had he allowed us to make a lot of naming changes to make the game more natural and funnier in English, but he worked with us to practically reinvent the game with British voice-overs, orchestral sound, new menu systems and added animations and graphics that were not in the original Japanese release. If the DQ team had just out-sourced the translation like Enix used to, the game would have come out as just another straight translation of the Japanese original. I believe this latest DQ is one of our greatest localisation masterpieces ever, and shows what happens when you work closely with the original creators.”
Atlus too implement some gameplay changes to better suit western tastes. “In most cases we try to add features that were not included in the Japanese version,” says Alexander, “such as the ability to switch between the original Japanese and English dialogue as is the case with Disgaea, SkyGunner and Rhapsody. In Thousand Arms we adjusted the encounter rate so gamers would not be stopping for a battle every two steps which can be often frustrating”.
Outside of gameplay changes Alexander explains how any changes to the actual storyline are decided on: “The amount of freedom we have to make changes to the text in a game depends on the nature of the game, the flexibility of the developer, and on how the project lead wants to approach the title.
“With Thousand Arms, we added many pop culture references to make the game funnier, but with Disgaea the game was already pretty funny to begin with, so we stayed fairly true to the original”.
Skladanowski agrees: “Generally, the more liberties the creators of the game took while writing the texts, the more leeway the translator has in rendering them in the target language, especially in humorous contexts. One example of this was during the translation of Warcraft III with its numerous references to American pop culture that weren’t part of the game’s main plot. They were in many cases supplanted by references to popular Polish movies, characters and events, no doubt contributing to the game’s warm reception by local gamers.”
The sheer amount of work that goes into successfully localising a contemporary videogame today raises the issue: how do companies decide which games to translate? Alexander explains Atlus’s practice: “Firstly, the overall quality of the game is rated. We will play the game and review it in a number of categories such as graphics, sound and gameplay. If the game has been released in Japan we will look at the reviews it was given in magazines. If the game receives positive feedback from the majority of the staff, then we hold a meeting to look at the title more closely. At this time, other factors are analysed such as cost, time, effort, and availability of the development team. The target audience, projected sales, expected release date and competition schedule are decided upon and a decision is subsequently made, although success is never certain.”
What is certain is that localisation will only get harder as games become larger and more complex. Nintendo now employ a team of editors, which works four hours behind the translators, reworking translated text into rich, textured English. Such financial commitment shows the importance of getting a translation just right and increasingly, the decisions that publishers have to take regarding localisation are becoming more complicated.
When Sega brought Shenmue to the West, it opted not to translate the game’s thousands of incidental items, such as street signs and advertising. However, they did replace all the voice actors with English speaking parts resulting in a confusing dichotomy of play world experience. The European Dreamcast release of Shenmue 2 then saw the original Japanese voice acting still in place but with accompanying subtitles giving the game an entirely different dynamic. These are not straightforward choices.
Sometimes, in acutely Japanese themed games less is more. The PSone’s Incredible Crisis, the epitome of a leftfield Japanese offering, remained largely untouched losing only a couple of levels because they relied too heavily on knowledge of kanji. Reportedly when the US localisation team received Treasure’s Bangaioh, rudimentarily translated with instructions to be finished, the publisher found it so funny they just decided to leave it alone.
Similarly, titles like Gitaroo Man, Wario Ware and Bishi Bashi Special have played on their unique Japanese-ness as a selling point. Diametrically opposite this viewpoint is publisher XS Games whose port of Japanese shooter, Shikigami No Shiro, lost all trace of its Nipponese origins and styling when released in the US as Mobile Light Force 2. Localisation is no exact science and, has no set rules and, as such, exemplary releases should be lauded by the videogame industry; an industry that still has some way to go in regarding translation as an artform rather than an inconvenience.
This article originally appeared in Edge magazine in 2005. The version presented here is pre-subbed.
Here’s Part 2 of the localisation feature. It reveals one of my favourite gaming facts: Princess Peach was first voiced by the editor of Nintendo Power, who simply got involved because she was afraid the dialogue was going to suck if they didn’t get a professional writer to smooth over the raw translation. Start here if you missed Part 1
For many companies the basic, no thrills approach to translation has been hard to shake. It generally takes a high-profile title to convince producers of the need to properly invest time and expense in bringing their game to a foreign world.
Leslie Swan who is in charge of Nintendo of America’s localisation teams began working for the company on magazine Nintendo Power. “I worked on the magazine for ten years before switching over to localisation,” she explains. “Just prior to the release of Super Mario 64 on the N64 I approached some of the development team working on bringing the game to the states and suggesed that they hire a professional writer to work on the game’s dialogue. It was something I felt very strongly about and so I pushed really hard.
“Eventually one of the team heads asked if I would consider coming over and doing the job for them. So I joined the studio to begin creatively interpreting the work the translators were doing. That was actually the first game that we did voice recording for and so while I was there they asked me if I would record the voice for Princess Peach. I went to the studio the next day, recorded all of her dialogue, which was implemented the day after. The text translation worked out so well on Super Mario 64 that Nintendo asked me if I would create and head up a new localisation team for them.”
Being at the forefront of an emerging discipline threw up major difficulties for these semantic pioneers. Pawel Skladanowski from the Polish localisation team, CD Projekt, was responsible for translating the first foreign videogame into Polish. “The first game we ever worked on was Baldur’s Gate,” he says. “Not the easiest title to start with. Think of any localisation problem or difficulty and you can be sure that our team encountered it in this game.
“There was a very tricky question of gender – in Polish there are different masculine and feminine verb endings. Some texts were common for the male and female characters, so we had to make them ‘gender-neutral’, which is not easy and sometimes resulted in very odd sentences. Also, we had to implement special Polish fonts, as the game did not display them, and we had to do a lot of a programming work so that the Polish assets would be integrated properly.”
Likewise Kaoru Moriyama, one of Squaresoft’s very early translators, recalls in the 8 and 16-bit days: “we had such limited memory capacity for each game it was never really a ‘translating’ job; more a case of chopping up the information and cramming it back in. We usually had too much text already in Japanese to fit in whatever the ROM size was, let alone the English translation, which, in a perfect translation would often have six to eight times more letters than we could afford. So for example in Final Fantasy Legend on the GameBoy player names are limited to 4 characters.
With cartridge-based media, to actually increase the allowable text required expensively expanding the ROM. However, for Swan, these tight restrictions made her and her teams better writers. “I tell my teams that it takes a really good writer to translate a game like Wario Ware,” she explains. “Anyone can be a writer when you have ten lines to play with but when you have just three words you have to use wit, skill and precision.”
Another area translators have to improvise effectively is when dealing with specifically Japanese sayings and jokes. Honeywood explains: “Wherever possible we try and change culturally specific jokes, sayings or references to something more fitting for the new target audience. There are many titles where we change graphics, animations and sounds to better suit English. During a scene in The Bouncer where Koh is infiltrating Mikado’s office in disguise he has to do gestures so as not to get caught.
“We redid the motion-capture so that the mime of an alarm clock and the ‘okay’ sign made sense in both audiences. You can actually see it if you switch between Japanese and English voice modes in the game. When we can’t change graphics or animations, we try our best to translate around it. For example, Japanese people sneeze when someone speaks about them behind their backs. In Final Fantasy XI we had a cutscene where an Elvaan prince sneezed while his men gossiped about him. We had to make this a quirk of the Elvaan people so it made sense for British and American audiences.” These challenges aren’t unique to Japanese to English translations as Keith Russell, sales director for independent British localisation company Babel explains: “We recently worked on Konami’s Wallace & Gromit game. Localising ‘Yorkshireisms’ into FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish) to keep the same regional style was a fair challenge!”
For Nintendo the key in making these changes is to make every audience around the world believe that the game was made just for them. “Our first goal is to make sure that we’re capturing the spirit of the original game,” says Swan, “so if there is a joke which has a certain meaning in Japanese we give that to our creative writing team, and they try to write a new joke which has the same effect as the original. Nintendo games are for the most part extremely well written in the Japanese: for example Intelligent Systems with Advance Wars and Paper Mario have wonderful writers, so they give us really great stories to start with. It’s then our job to recreate that seamlessly for English speakers.
“The aim for Nintendo is really to make the localisation unnoticeable. What we don’t want to happen, perhaps in contrast to other companies, is for players to realise that the game was made for Japan and say: ‘Wow! Somebody did a really great job in translating it for us’. The idea is to make the emotional experience identical for players globally; the key to which is making the translation imperceptible.”
This article originally appeared in Edge magazine in 2005. The version presented here is pre-subbed. Part 3 will be posted tomorrow.
The console hums to life; stars fade from black as the first discordant notes of an orchestral score rush their way first through space and into your head.
The camera pans slowly, purposefully around the cockpit. A thousand tiny blinking LED’s reflect in your retina, twinkling and dancing over the ominous rumble of a double bass.
Cut. You’re outside looking in; a futuristic spacecraft hangs in infinite blackness, planets for a backdrop. The go-faster curves excite childhood imaginings. You wonder how many Japanese slaved at how many supercomputers for this moment; how many pixellated atoms make up the scene? The horn section screams a staccato warning as a missile tears past, stars streaking behind, before rudely punching fire into the ship’s hull.
Cut. Inside violins rise, then fall, then rise a little higher as smoke billows around the terrified crew. A central monitor flickers to life and a tall, dark antagonist sneers into holographic existence. One side of his face spits wires through stretched cyborg skin. He turns his head, flashing a dark, fierce glare from eyes a hundred CGI artists worked a hundred hours on just for you to find fear in.
His thin lips curl into a half smile as they whisper: “All your base are belong to us.”
Localisation, the job of transporting and translating every shade and nuance of a videogame’s character, plot and dialogue from one language and culture into others, is the forgotten art in videogame creation. To the uninitiated it’s little more than a kind of simple post-script procedure, stapled on the end of a project long after the champagne and critical acclaim of the home territory release have trailed away; picking up the pieces long after the development team have cleared their desks and moved into pixel pastures new.
But anyone who has cringed at the awkward dialogue reproduced in Konami’s Suikoden 3 or roared with laughter at the witty, culturally inclusive humour of Nintendo’s Paper Mario or Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea will understand the importance of a razor sharp translation. For the rest of the world wanting to sample a Japanese videogame masterpiece or vice-versa, localisation is the bridge that suspends the disbelief: get one consonant wrong and the whole thing can come crashing down, taking the player with it.
At best, a good translation enables us to enthuse, emphasise and emote with the characters we’re interacting with, making the alien recognisable, comfortable and understandable. At worst it turns an otherwise brilliantly realised game world into a soulless, empty shell of confusion and lost potential.
Editor Bill Alexander and translator Yu Namba form the localisation department of Atlus, a company famed for its lovingly crafted Japanese to English translations.
They guide us through a game’s progression in its overseas metamorphosis: “Translators start by incessantly playing through the Japanese game release to familiarise themselves with the mechanics and characters. Commonly used terms such as weapon names and locations are compiled into a list so that they can be used consistently throughout the game.
“Translation of dialogue begins once we have received the text files for the game from the developer. Personality traits of the game’s characters are identified so that they may be consistently and accurately represented in English. After all the planning has been completed, the translators begin on the actual words, which are passed on to an overall editor as they are finished. The text is then re-worded where necessary, and finally, the files are sent back to Japan to be implemented into the game by the programmers”.
Essentially this is how most modern translation teams work. But it wasn’t always this way. Until the mid-nineties Japanese adventure and RPG games were hardly ever ported over to the West. In the main it was arcade titles (and their respective home conversions) that were released. The time and expense required to hire a professional translation team to simply reword a few katakana menu items wasn’t worth it. As a result many companies, in particular the arcade heavyweights such as Namco, Capcom, Konami and SNK, attempted their own in-house in-Japan translations with some extremely varied results (including the infamous Zerowing “All your base” effort).
In the case of RPG and adventure games, where simply pasting text files into the proverbial Babelfish was impossible, translators were hired, or more likely, any English speakers in the company, charged with translation duties, although their work was hardly high priority.
Richard Honeywood, now head of localisation at Square-Enix explains: “I originally started working as an arcade game programmer at Seibu Kaihatsu in 1994, working on Raiden II, Viper Phase I and Senkyu: A Battle with Balls. As I was also the only foreigner in the company, I also translated what little text that appeared in the game and manuals, as well as coordinating all the foreign production and distribution. When I later applied to Squaresoft’s HQ in Tokyo, they didn’t have a localisation department. Although I applied to be a programmer, during the interviews they decided to create a localisation team.”
Unbelievably, Ted Woolsey, the translator that worked on many of Squaresoft’s best-loved 16-bit titles, was given a scant five-week deadline to complete the translation of the seminal Secret of Mana. All while the Japanese version was being written simultaneously. “Most of the five weeks was spent in Tokyo,” he explains. “Everyday I would come into Square’s offices and get to work translating the text that had been written the day before. The time constraints made it an extremely frustrating project and, as I had no team to work with, I had to keep all the disparate content in my head, remembering snippets of conversation from the original files to add to the English version. It was easy to make mistakes but the game design was beautiful and in the end the English translation worked for me”.
This article originally appeared in Edge magazine in 2005. The version presented here is pre-subbed. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.
There are few things so irritating as the sneering bystander commenting that everyone should stop playing Guitar Hero or Rock band and instead spend their time learning a real instrument.
Because, you see, being white, middle-class gamers we all play guitar, bass and drums already, moron. And, even if we don’t, we’re playing the game for fun, not to service Ricky Gervais-in-the-Office dreams that one day we’ll break free from day job monotony and take to the imagined freedom of a Glastonbury stage.
And, even if we are playing for that unlikely, misguided reason, rhythm action games (once you’ve got to grips with their peculiar type of notation) help improve rhythm and timing better than any amount of going-nowhere rehearsals with a sucky garage band’s incompetent rhythm section.
Anyway, the backlash against the rhythm-action backlash is well-established with comics such as xkcd and CTRL-ALT-DEL, being the most succinct and incisive opponents of the anti-fun, amateur musician twit.
I’m a week into Nintendo’s masterful Wii Fit (Yahoo review here) and already I can foresee a similar strain of sneery derision that will be aimed at the game and its players from fitness fanatics.
If you really want to get fit do what I do, 100 situps every day after work and some weightlifting. Only takes 10 mins and gives you good results within 2 weeks.
Also, running for an hour or 2 or walking 20 to 40 kilometres in the weekend works like a treat.
To be fair, I was taken by surprise at how the game’s exercises feel like they’re actually working but, in reality, the way in which the game monitors your daily workouts, giving endless stats and graphs and advice, is an extremely effective tool in ensuring you return each day. It’s a level of attention and statistical service even the most cutting edge gym would be unable to match and it’s value in pulling you back to exercise daily is immeasurable.
Indeed, I’m watching what I’m eating and drinking much more closely than I otherwise would, for fear of admonition from the game when I get home in the evening. Add to this the fact that many of the exercises in the game are standard, tried and tested work-out routines and the idea that you won’t lose weight or tone up just because this is a videogame seems ludicrous.
Videogames have always been about abstraction. From Track and Field to SSX, gamers have an inherent understanding that the job of a successful videogame is to offer the opportunity to try out dangerous or unlikely real life activities by way of minimalist thumb movements.
It’s all role-play – from Call of Duty 4’s comic book warfare to Tetris’ obsessive-compulsive tidying – and, despite the incessant claims to realism made by modern gaming, the actual interactions we make are hugely abstracted from the output of these interactions displayed on the screen. Realism is generally a word only used by developers in relation to aesthetics.
However, Wii Fit represents another leap forward for developers who are choosing to approach videogames not as a virtual replication of real-life activities but as an actual platform for real-life activities. Eyetoy and the Wii’s obvious potential lies not in endless mini-game compilations, but in interactive realism whereby games monitor, test, measure and appraise non-abstracted tasks and movements.
It’s a subtle but very real paradigm shift that gamers, with years of indoctrination into the abstraction of games, seem to be picking up on far more slowly than the casual mainstream player who is new to the medium. And it’s herein that Nintendo’s newfound genius lies.
The subject of this weeks edition of This American Life is ‘apologies given without sincerity’.
The second act of the programme examines a famous unapologetic apology poem written by William Carlos Williams, ‘This is Just to Say’.
It’s a piece that he left on his fridge as a note to his wife in which he seeks forgiveness for eating all of her plums.
You can read an authorised version of the original here.
Mimicking the form and theme of the poem has become a favourite pursuit of many well-known poets and, in TAL, they read out some of the best ones, some of which have been written by their contributors, many of which are awesome.
Last May Square-Enix took me to Japan to play a number of their 2008 releases and meet and interview the teams behind them.
The most interesting title of the show was The World Ends With You, a curious DS game with simultaneous dual screen control and a memorable art style overseen by Tetsuya Nomura, he of Final Fantasy VII character design fame.
It’s interesting to review some of these titles which were mid-production at the time I first saw them. This is one of the ones that delivered on its potential.
Tatsuya Kando, director of The World Ends With You, has admitted that the development team decided on the game’s setting – Tokyo’s youthful and vibrant Shibuya district – before anything else.
While it might not be a case of style over substance, it’s clear right from the off that, like its closest reference point Viewtiful Joe, this is a game designed as style before substance.
From Tetsuya Nomura’s lithe, fashionista character designs to the graffito fonts, cute-dramatic- cute J-pop soundtrack and the self-conscious integration of mobile phones, MP3 players and pin badges into the game’s mechanics, this is a title precision-targeted at the young Japanese who populate Shibuya’s streets in both the game’s reality and ours.
The relentless styling hits the target, never feeling like the soulless result of corporate focus-testing, but it’s also overpowering and, coupled with the vogue petulance of teen protagonist Neku, ultimately distracts from the game’s underlying merits.
The story provides the framework into which the gameplay slots. Neku is drawn into an esoteric seven-day competition hosted by a mysterious group of hooded gamesmasters known as the ‘Reapers’. Every day he receives a task via text message, which must be completed before sundown if he is to avoid being ‘erased’.
Unable to leave Shibuya and with a timer etched onto the back of his hand, Neku has no option but to participate, rushing through the streets of Shibuya from target location to location aided by a single companion.
The game is stuffed with cutscenes and extended dialogue but when control is
wrested from the narrative, the action mechanics are deep and interesting, making unique use of both of the DS screens at once.
This review appears in this month’s edition of Edge magazine. The full piece can be read over at Next-Gen here.
Here’s a link to an short, sharp Iron Man Flash game that I’ve just finished producing for Paramount Pictures/ Sega.
The gameplay is super simple but the 3D work that’s gone into the game works as an impressive showcase of the kind of stuff you can do on this platform these days.
The project had a short turnaround otherwise we would have scaled up the game sections a bit more (especially the Battlezone homage at the end which, while fun in its current form, could have been a lot more complex for a bigger game delivery).
The original intent was to have lots of win/ failure clips from the movie to punctuate each section but Marvel has been (quite rightly) very protective of the footage and, due to specific clip embargoes, in the end we just went for an introductory montage to work as scene setting.
Anyway, from the 30 mins or so of footage I’ve seen from the film it looks to be big, not-so-dumb, fun and I’m super excited to catch the finished movie.
I dislike User Generated Content as much as the next sensible, non-New Media executive.
When it comes to videogames, it’s fine to pack in level-editing tools for would-be designers to play around with, or to include rudimentary replay editing functionality to allow players to share their lol-accidental-friendly-kill moments with the rest of Youtube.
But the main attraction should always be professionally designed levels. After all, it’s the in-house game designers who best know the intricacies of their engine and who can exploit it in the most interesting ways; at least until the super-nerd consumers get fully accustomed to what’s possible weeks and months after the game’s initial release.
UGC functionality in videogames should be there to extend the life of a product once everything else has been exhausted. If Halo 3’s Forge has demonstrated anything, it’s that for every gem of an idea there will always be ten thousand duffers to wade through, and there are scarce few people who have the time or inclination to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Every now and again a kid will hit the gameplay jackpot, toying and experimenting with the boundaries of a game editor in such a way as to open a unseen door to whole new caverns of fun, but always, always this should be a product of optional features.
In Treasure’s exquisite new DS game, Bangai-o Spirits there’s a level editor that allows players to upload their UGC levels to the publisher’s Japanese website and trade them via .mp3s played into the DS microphone. To introduce the feature, the bolshy in-game character states: “Urgh. Stage-editing is for losers”.
I like that. Treasure reveals one of the most innovative and interesting ways for people to swap UGC content with a line of dialogue pointing out how ridiculous and mostly pointless the whole thing is. This should be every developer’s attitude to UGC. Super cute characters and The Go Team on flutes will only take you so far, right Media Molecule?
Despite the growing popularity of UGC content in videogames, it’s in no way a new thing. The best examples of the console ‘create ‘em up’ are usually those which sell themselves as explicit genre editors, thus neatly defining their purpose as tools rather than games.
ASCII’s RPG Maker series has long been a popular way for genre fans to create their own Japanese-style role playing games, although the difficulty of sharing console save files has always prevented a community from really taking off. (Incidentally, in one of the PlayStation versions ASCII themselves packed in a sweet little RPG they’d designed with the tool in which you played as a stock 16-bit RPG enemy troll. Each day you’d have to go out to the fields and wait around for a hero to come along and challenge you to a fight to further his quest. In terms of the JRPG premise, this neat flip is effortlessly the most inventive idea I’ve seen before.)
Likewise, Japanese developer Athena has a series of ‘Make Your Own Shoot ‘Em Ups’ under the Dezaemon moniker. These ‘games’ are strictly tool-sets with maybe a couple of bundled-in examples from the dev team of what is possible with the building blocks therein.
The PlayStation version of Dezaemon recently became available on the PS3 Store along with the new functionality to share UGC levels across the network. With the right filters and peer review system in place the 1 in 10,000 good levels might just be worth the purchase but again, the difficulty is sorting the wheat from the chaff.
One way around this is for a tool-creator to initiate a competition in which the best level designs are highlighted and win prizes. Browsing Youtube for examples of Dezaemon levels, I came across the prize-winning effort above.
What’s interesting is the name of the creator: Daisuke Amaya, aka Pixel. Amaya-san created Japanese indie favourite, Cave Story (Dōkutsu Monogatari), a legendary freeware PC title released in 2004. It’s difficult to work out the dates of this but, as the prize-winning Dezaemon entry appeared on the Super Nintendo version of the game, it seems likely that this was a level he created in his younger developmental years.
If anything, this shows that UGC functionality in games certainly has value in providing a platform for young console players to cut their design teeth with rudimentary tools. But even with the most flexible console-based tool set, the number of possible games that can be made are necessarily few. Even if there are theoretically unlimited possiblites, all UGC levels and games from a tool like Dezaemon will be shades of one another in terms of style and core rules.
So, while I welcome UGC toolsets, I’d always take the narrow finesse of Radiant Silvergun or Ikaruga over the osentibly gigantic freedom of a UGC shoot ‘em up creator any day. Or, as Treasure themselves put it: “Urgh. Stage-editing is for losers”.
The original Crystal Chronicles might have been a lively attempt to encourage fans of multiplayer RPGs to meet around a single television screen, but it was also a failed one.
The high entry fee of a Game Boy Advance and link cable per player (the handheld acting as a controller linked to the GameCube) combined with some awkward mechanics effortlessly outshone by rival Four Swords ensured that the first Crystal Chronicles wasn’t worth the effort for any but the most ardent (and blinkered) Final Fantasy devotees.
Sequel Ring of Fates arrives without quite the same pioneering spirit, now confined to a single piece of hardware and boasting distinct singleplayer and multiplayer modes requiring separate characters. Despite the more traditional approach it’s a welcome addition to a Nintendo DS library inexplicably starved of such games, even if the multi-cart requirement and lack of online link-up ensure the barrier to multiplayer entry is higher than it should be.
The Final Fantasy moniker is misleading. This is an isometric 3D action game whose key-finding dungeon puzzles bring the game’s mechanics closer to Legend of Zelda territory than that of the mainline series from which it borrows a name. This liberation doesn’t extend to the game’s premise, which once again focuses on crystals – the weak and shallow thematic crutch that even the most devoted Square Enix fan must have tired of. Focusing on two young twins, Yuri and Chelinka, players are tasked with protecting their world by uncovering the secrets of a Great Crystal, a cookie-cutter story retold here for a young audience.
This review appears in this month’s edition of Edge magazine. You can read the rest over at Next-Gen.biz here.
For many companies the basic, no thrills approach to translation has been hard to shake. It generally takes a high-profile title to convince producers of the need to properly invest time and expense in bringing their game to a foreign world. 
With cartridge-based media, to actually increase the allowable text required expensively expanding the ROM. However, for Swan, these tight restrictions made her and her teams better writers. “I tell my teams that it takes a really good writer to translate a game like Wario Ware,” she explains. “Anyone can be a writer when you have ten lines to play with but when you have just three words you have to use wit, skill and precision.”
The console hums to life; stars fade from black as the first discordant notes of an orchestral score rush their way first through space and into your head. 
Editor Bill Alexander and translator Yu Namba form the localisation department of Atlus, a company famed for its lovingly crafted Japanese to English translations. 
The subject of this weeks edition of This American Life is ‘apologies given without sincerity’. 
Tatsuya Kando, director of The World Ends With You, has admitted that the development team decided on the game’s setting – Tokyo’s youthful and vibrant Shibuya district – before anything else. 
The original Crystal Chronicles might have been a lively attempt to encourage fans of multiplayer RPGs to meet around a single television screen, but it was also a failed one.
