Archive

Another Ys VIII Localization Goof Discovered

I’ve been having a good ol’ time playing through Ys VIII on the PS4, getting screenshots of the localization mistakes before the game gets patched next month. Then other day, @DigitalEmelas pointed out that the French on the back of the North American Vita version of Ys VIII has nothing to do with the game and doesn’t make sense:

The French text in the black bar in the middle says these two lines twice:

Je suis desolé de vous quitter, mais je dois acheter un chapeau.
I am sorry I have to leave you, but I must buy a hat.

Je vais demander à ces paysans qui viennent au-devant de nous, si le chemin par où ils ont passé est mauvais.
I shall ask these peasants who are coming towards us, if the road by which they have come is bad.

Mike Fahey over at Kotaku did some research and found these two phrases on Omniglot’s list of “assorted ‘useful’ foreign phrases”. He asked NIS America what the heck happened, and they admitted that the weird French text up there is placeholder text that never got fixed before going to print. The box also claims the game has cross-platform play, which it doesn’t.

Somebody at NIS America goofed up pretty hard on this one! Every reprint of Ys VIII on the Vita will have the correct French on the back, so I rushed out and bought one of the last copies of the first printing in my town to preserve a bit of gaming history.

Despite all these weird problems, Ys VIII is really fun.

Yo-ho-ho, he took a bite of Gum-Gum!

The other day I suddenly remembered the old 4Kids version of One Piece and felt like it’d be something useful to have someday. So I picked this up from Amazon for surprisingly cheap! For some reason, Volume 8 or 9 or something sells for hundreds of dollars though. I dunno why.

I’m always on the lookout for things that could be useful in future projects, articles, and books, so if you see anything cool or have anything to share let me know!

Ah Yes, a “Realistic Price” Indeed

I’ve seen a handful of people flip our Legends of Localization books for stupid high prices on second-hand markets like ebay and amazon. Nothin’ we can do about it, so I try to find amusement from it. The worst is someone asking $2,000 for the Zelda book in “used, acceptable” condition, hah. But I saw this today and couldn’t stop laughing:

“Realistic price”, lmao. Dude. We sell it new for $29. I hope nobody falls for this!

Funky Fantasy IV Book FINISHED!

It’s done! It’s done! After working through the weekend, we submitted the Funky Fantasy IV book on Monday! We waited until the very last second to decide on the title:

press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game?

 

That question mark at the end was a mistake, but we decided to keep it there. I know LoL fans were very adamant about keeping “Funky Fantasy IV” as the title, but we wanted people to be able to glance at the title and get an idea of what the book is about. We also don’t want people to assume that they have to be a Final Fantasy fan to enjoy the book.

Maybe it’ll be released soon? Haha I have no idea at this point. It’ll be this year, though. GOSH! October is almost over.

Teeny Tiny Dragon Fonts

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.

Let’s Play Yakuza 0 with the Localizers!

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 ;_;

Help Poisoft Get Their Game Translated!

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!