localization Archive

A Puzzle’s Difficulty Changes in Localization

So, Breath of the Wild is a great frickin’ game. I’ve been playing the English version, and Mato recently beat the Japanese version. The writing is superb, but I ran into a shrine puzzle at the beginning of the game that stumped me big time:

I found the shrine on Dueling Peaks. Since I was at the beginning of the game, I thought, “Cool, there must be another tall mountain on the other side of the world that looks like this one’s twin. I guess I’ll find it later.” Then I took a picture of the puzzle and left. It didn’t occur to me to check the other peak of Dueling Peaks. I had the shrine locator turned off, so I never got any beeping hints that one was nearby.

After Mato beat the game, I asked if he solved this shrine, and he said, “Yeah, it was easy. The other shrine is on the other peak.” “On Dueling Peaks?” I asked. Mato was confused. “Is that what they call it in English? It’s called Twin Peaks in Japanese.”

Twin Memories. Twin Peaks. Ohhhhhhhhh…..! Oh. It makes sense now! Perhaps I’m just a dum-dum, but I have a feeling that if they’d kept the Twin Peaks name, I would have made the Twin Memories connection a lot sooner (or at all!).

Did you run into trouble with any hints while you were playing the game?

Localization Advice from Taiwanese Indie Devs

Mato showed me an article on Gamasutra about how a small indie game studio based in Taiwan localized their first game from Chinese to English. The game is called Detention and it looks like something that’s right up my alley:

It’s a point-and-click horror game set in 1960s Taiwan during the time of martial law. The indie studio, called RedCandleGames, knew from the beginning that they wanted to localize their game for English-speaking players. Because the game is filled with so many culturally specific things, this turned out to be harder than they thought at first. They had to change the level design, teach the players about religious rituals for solving puzzles without an info dump, and decide whether to transliterate a creature’s name or coin a new term entirely.

The entire article is fascinating, since they constantly kept the player in mind when they were making the game. Read the full article here!

Detention is available on Steam. Here’s the official site for more info.

UNDERTALE Getting an Official Japanese Localization!

Whoaaaaa UNDERTALE is officially headed to Japan! It’s been professionally translated and localized by 8-4, and the announcement was tucked in the middle of the UNDERTALE on PS4 and Vita trailer at E3 last night:

Toby Fox did a short interview about the release on the PlayStation blog here.

Fun fact: I’m Mettaton’s hands/arms in that trailer. We filmed my hand gestures backwards to give it a weird, ethereal quality.

I’m really looking forward to playing UNDERTALE in Japanese with Mato. I can’t wait to see the localization decisions 8-4 made!