Legends of Localization DEV BLOG

Work on our Funky Fantasy IV book is starting to wrap up and hopefully it’ll be sent off to the printers early next week. I spent some time recently getting some last-minute images, one of which was an example of tiny kanji in a Japanese video game. My hunt led me to Dragon Quest X for the 3DS, which had some text size issues from day 1.

Luckily I have a Japanese 3DS and a capture card installed, so I just had to find where to get this tiny text to appear… and hope that updates since the last few years didn’t fix the problem. After many surprises and frustrations, I managed to get exactly what I wanted: a screen full of teeny tiny kanji!

On an actual, normal 3DS it’s quite a bit harder to read than these photos make it seem. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s because these pics are so hi-resolution. In any case, as soon as I got my screenshots I stopped playing the game even though I was like 10 hours in and spent a chunk of money buying the time to play that far. It was a neat little game but I would never ever recommend playing it on 3DS! The streaming graphics look horrible a lot of the time, and it sounds like they’re gonna drop 3DS support in a few months anyway.

Mato & I finished Yakuza 0 over the weekend. It’s hands-down one of our favorite games of all time. A few weeks ago, two of the main localizers played through the first 2 hours of the game and streamed it live. They gave lots of commentary and behind-the-scenes info on why certain localization choices were picked. They also answered questions from viewers. Watch the archive, it’s fascinating!

They did a second stream this past Friday, but the archive isn’t up on Youtube yet. UGH! This game is so good ;_;

Kickstarter recently launched in Japan, and my favorite little game company Poisoft started a campaign! They want to release their game Order Land! in NA and Europe for Switch, Xbox One, and Steam. To do that, it needs to be translated.

Poisoft made a Switch game that I’m completely in love with – Vroom in the night sky! You can see from this gallery we made that their translation skills aren’t … good. And so this Kickstarter for Order Land! will allow them to hire professionals to localize it!

Their cute Kickstarter video explains both their plan and the game in more detail (turn on closed captions):

If you want to support Poisoft in their quest to hire professional translators, please donate to their Kickstarter campaign!

We had a very productive LoL meeting yesterday! Here’s a little peek of us reviewing the book before it’s given to the editors:

And a bonus pic of Zuuly wanting me to get up and give her dinner:

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana’s English localization is apparently so bad that Japanese game sites are talking about it. People made such a stink that the President and CEO of NIS America issued a statement apologizing for the lack of localization quality and promised to have it re-edited and patched by late November.

So I wonder, is it really all that bad? I’m about to find out!

We gotta beat this game before they release the patch next month. Wish us luck! And don’t worry, we’re taking screenshots along the way.

The post title isn’t a question. Dan, Tony, and I were guests on the interview show “Sup, Holmes?” last year. We talked about Legends of Localization, Starmen.net, Fangamer, EarthBound, old Rev3 Games shows, and tons of other stuff that I forgot I even said, haha.

Got 2 hours to spare? Give it a watch!

We’re still struggling to come up with a title for the Funky Fantasy IV book. Mato got desperate and tried a random title generator…

1. Machine Translation Is Your Worst Enemy. 6 Ways To Defeat It
2. Machine Translation On A Budget: 6 Tips From The Great Depression
3. 6 Things You Can Learn From Buddhist Monks About Machine Translation
4. Marriage And Machine Translation Have More In Common Than You Think
5. The Lesbian Secret Revealed: Machine Translation For Great Sex
6. What Oprah Can Teach You About Machine Translation
7. Create A Machine Translation A High School Bully Would Be Afraid Of
8. Never Changing Machine Translation Will Eventually Destroy You
9. One Word: Machine Translation
10. Warning: Machine Translation
11. Machine Translation May Not Exist!

You can mess around with this goofy title generator here.

About a year or two before I started working with Fangamer to make Legends of Localization books, I considered making books on my own. Anyone who knows me knows that my design senses are poop though, as this mega alpha first test prototype experiment PDF shows:

• Mega early prototype test thing PDF download

I think I was just seeing how the current LoL site would look if converted straight into book format. I’m glad I decided it was a bad idea. I think I also calculated it out and a Final Fantasy IV LoL book in this sort of format would’ve been around a thousand pages or more anyway 😯

Fangamer’s at New York Comic-Con this weekend and our entire lineup of Legends of Localization books is there too! Pick up one/some/all of them if you’re there 😉

A couple people have asked, so: Mato & I are not there in person. It’s crunch time for basically all of Fangamer right now, so only a small crew is at NYCC this year.

A new book from Prima Games gives a special shoutout to Legends of Localization! It’s called Playing with Super Power: Nintendo Super NES Classics, and Fangamer got a copy of the super cool collector’s edition:

It goes in-depth on some of the most popular SNES games, including Zelda, the Marios, the Star Foxes (yeah, Star Fox 2!), aaaaand EarthBound. It’s full of facts, little-known trivia, development stories, tips from speedrunners, and even some amazing fan art! This is an incredible labor of love.

And hey, look look!

That 400-page book is us! 😀 And I can tell from reading the section on EarthBound that they got some of the information from the EB LoL book. That’s a major goal for our books, to be used as a reliable resource for stuff like this. Hooray! 😀

If you want this dang cool book, I definitely recommend the collector’s edition. Pick one up here!