Legends of Localization DEV BLOG

Fangamer’s Black Friday sale started early! Out today is press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game? and a swanky new bookmark!

press start to translate is better known as the Funky Fantasy IV book. You can get it at Fangamer for $22! The Legendary Bookmark is 8 buckaroonies and you can get that one right here. Also, a special promotion just for the Black Friday sale (Nov 21 – Dec 1) : buy 2 LoL books (over $10, so excluding the passports), and you’ll get the bookmark for free!

I also wanted to share this video of Fangamer’s mailroom getting ready for the upcoming tidal wave of BF orders:

The Fangamer office is in Black Friday mode, which means most of us are running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to finish up the last bit of prep before the BIG SALE. I grabbed some super last-minute photography this morning:

We’ve got 2 new products releasing soon (possibly tomorrow): press start to translate (Funky Fantasy IV book) and a custom-minted LoL bookmark! I’ve been using the prototype bookmark for months and I love it. I hope you’ll love it too!

okaynowbacktotyingupsomanylooseends !!!

Earlier this year, Mato & I played through the entirety of Tengai Makyo: The Apocalypse IV on the Sega Saturn. He live-translated it as we played, and boyyyyy it was an adventure. How can I describe it in only a few sentences? Well, it’s set in “America” in the late 1800s, and yet there are high-tech flying machines and a crazed sentient TV man. Oh, the Alamo is a combat tank and the town of Tombstone is a fantasy food land … until it gets blown up by a laser from space.

And that’s just a tiny part of the story! If you’ve never seen this game before, go on the journey of discovery with us:

If you don’t have the energy to watch hours of RPG confusion, Hardcore Gaming 101 wrote a really good article about the game here! Man, I really miss streaming.

Mato had a few drinks one night and then some packages showed up on our doorstep a week and a half later…

I’ve never seen such controllers before! And holy crap, a brand-new copy of Tengai Makyo Zero :O

The main Legends of Localization site is finally getting treated to a spiffy redesign! There will be broken links and plenty of weird coding issues for the next few weeks. Mato and I, along with Fangamer’s web dev wizard, are working hard to iron out the kinks. So if you see something that looks weird on the site, please ignore it for now!

AUGH! I guess it’s already time to start thinking about Christmas gifts. Polygon’s 2017 Holiday Gift Guide is out, and they feature quite a few Fangamer products! Two Legends of Localization books are on their list:

• I’m Stuck in a Video Game
• This be book bad translation, video games!

Those two LoL books were released this year, and we have another one coming in a week or two! press start to translate, our book about Funky Fantasy IV, should be releasing around Black Friday. DANG! We’ve released 3 books this year…

Anyway, big thanks to Polygon for featuring us!

Goody buddy Stephen of Fangamer Japan came across another oddball product in the shops recently:

Obvious childish jokes aside, I don’t think I’d jump at the chance to buy something called “Fragrance Toilet Roll”.

While doing some research, I came across a Super Famicom game called Yam Yam (or Yum Yum). It’s an adorable-looking game with interesting characters, cute towns, and Space Harrier shooting!!!

You ride around on platypus-looking thing during the shooting parts. I’m sad that this one never left Japan.

There’s a weird thing that happens with Tales of [fill in the blank] games. The main story is localized and voice-acted very well, but then you run into weird typos and strange wording in the “lesser text”. That’s what I call the stuff that NPCs might say to you, or the text in sidequests that aren’t necessary to complete the game. What you get is a game that seems like it was translated by two different companies – which is probably the case for Tales games.

I call it the Tales Curse.

Our buddy Ian Burch collected a bunch of examples of weird problems found in the sidequests near the end (or postgame?) of Tales of Berseria. I’ll be putting together a gallery of them all sometime, but here’s a look at one of my favorites from the bunch:

Ah, hmmmm. …. hmmm【・ヘ・?】

Wander, one of our lovely kitties, has a new habit – watching us play games, and then trying to play with the characters on the screen. She did this while I was playing Ys VIII recently:

Maybe you could call her a Wanderer from Ys?! No, sorry, that was a bad joke. Perhaps she just wanted some of that rolled cabbage.