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The First Official LoL GameCats Meeting

Camp Fangamer 2018 was this past weekend. It was a fun and weird celebration of Fangamer’s 10th anniversary, complete with multiple Reids and VR chats. Mato & I had a business lunch meeting with the Legends of Localization GameCats (game catalogers) at a local 50s-themed diner. Witness Danny McElvis:

Mato described the meeting as “surreal” because he was discussing some in-depth Final Fantasy VI stuff and everybody knew what he was talking about. Lucklight, Dominator, DannyMcGee, and Luck’s friend Doge were there~

A Mighty Ant

Poe’s away on vacation for a long time, so I’ll post stuff here from time to time. Here’s a pic that spartonberry showed off the other day, from a generic Japanese Game Boy JRPG called “Legend”:

The enemy’s name is “Muhammad-Ari”, and “ari” is the Japanese word for “ant”.

This is the sort of naming sense that I usually see in J-to-E translations rather than in Japanese games themselves. So this is a cool, rare treat, especially coming from what’s apparently a super bland generic JRPG!

The Evolution of a Thumbnail

The latest project on LoL is Final Fantasy VI: Five Script Blitz, a video/article series where Mato compares five FF6 scripts all at once. We needed a name and logo for ~branding~, so I set to work.

At first, it was called “Five Script Mix”. I’m still learning the basics of design, so here’s the first process:

Mato wasn’t a fan of the gradient, and we also tweaked the name a bit, so this was the next one:

Perfect! Forever done. It’s the template we’ll use for all of them. Here’s day 2:

Buuuuut, wow Day 2 looks way too same-y when compared to Day 1. We gotta make a change. I tried to incorporate a screenshot that would best sum up each day, and it was messy at first:

Looking better, but the text on the bottom felt too busy and out of place. So I did another tweak:

Yeah!!! We got it!! … except …. There’s a typo in “comparison”. Well, gotta fix that:

Yessss, now we finally got it! This is the style we’ll use for the rest of the project.

Results of the Pokemon “Localize Me” Challenge #2

Round 2 of the Pokemon Gold/Silver Beta Localization Challenge featured this steel shark thing:

This was a tough one to localize, since I asked people to forget anything they learned about the Gold/Silver Beta before suggesting a new localized name. As pointed out to me by someone on Twitter, The Cutting Room Floor lists this Pokemon’s name asイカリ (ikari). Two kanji are listed next to the name in the notes: 錨 and 怒リ. Both of those characters are pronounced “ikari”, but one character means “anchor” and the other is “rage”. So Anchorage is the perfect name for this guy in English.

Can anyone beat that localization? Here are the top suggestions from Twitter and Instagram!

  • Shankor / Shanchor
  • Sharchor
  • Fangchor
  • Shankery
  • Megaloadin
  • Hainker (from German Hai (shark) and Anker (anchor))
  • Anchorbiter
  • Hookjaw
  • Ankor
  • Chain Chomp

Most people suggested some variation of Shanchor, so next time I gotta pick a harder one >:]

Games Done Quick is a Very Fun Thing

Taking a moment away from LoL discussion to mention Games Done Quick. Their summer marathon was all last week, and there was rarely a waking hour when I didn’t have it on in the background. This year they raised over two million dollars for Doctors Without Borders.

Besides Legends of Localization, being the GDQ representative is my other main job at Fangamer. It started a mere 2 years ago, when Kari Fry introduced me to GDQ’s prize guy so that I could donate some LoL books as prizes. Then Fangamer was asked to be a sponsor. Now we make official GDQ merchandise! And most of it is available year-round, which is a fact that’s hard to promote when there’s not an event happening.

But hey, now you know. Check out Fangamer’s GDQ lineup! 20% of all sales still go to GDQ.