LoL News Archive

LoL Books at NYCC!

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 ๐Ÿ˜‰

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.

Special Mention in a New Book

A new book from Prima Games gives a special shoutout to Legends of Localization! It’s calledย 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! ๐Ÿ˜€ 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! ๐Ÿ˜€

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

Legends of Localization Stream-iversary

One year ago today, Poemato CX went professional and Mato & I began a daily Legends of Localization stream. We kicked things off with Breath of Fire II, playing through the whole thing and getting screenshots of all the text in the game. We went on to play Zelda: A Link to the Past, Funky Fantasy IV, Tengai Makyo: The Apocalypse 4, Tomato Adventure, Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, Super Mario RPG, and many many more.

We also did non-game streams, like asking God Jesus Robot questions, looking through old Japanese gaming magazines, and unboxing some of the merchandise we’re always buying for books and projects.

We were gonna stream something for the anniversary, but we’re unfortunately too busy. I’m helping to assemble and ship out the Undertale Collector’s Edition, and Mato’s in crunch-time for the Funky Fantasy IV book. I hope we’re able to get back to a regular streaming schedule sometime, though. I miss it.

Legends of Localization in Schools

A handful of schools around the world use our Legends of Localization books as textbooks in their classes. Today I got an order for 24 Zelda passports going to Digital Hollywood University in Tokyo, Japan. An instructor there uses our passports for the game localization portion of his course. His students are from all over the world, so it’s pretty cool to think about the different sorts of people who are using the Zelda passports for learning!

PS – if you’re an instructor who wants to use our Legends of Localization books as textbooks, please email me! We offer educational discounts. heidi@fangamer.com

New LoL Book! I’m Stuck in a Video Game

Well, sort of an LoL book. It’s a localization of a Japanese children’s book! It was written by the producer and narrator of Game Center CX (Producer Kan!), and illustrated and translated by the multi-talented Nina Matsumoto.

Not only that, the Legends of Localization team added tons of bonus content. We interviewed the author, the illustrator/translator, and the designer of the English book. AND! The original Japanese edition of the book is also there in the back, so you can check out the changes that were made.

Also free stickers B-)

Here’s the commercial that was a huge group effort and tons of fun to make!

Buy the book heeeeeeere! And if you happen to find yourself at Tokyo Game Show this week, the book will also be available there! Producer Kan himself will be selling it ๐Ÿ˜€

At the Movies

Yesterday was a busy day! I spent a lot of it at the Fangamer office, doing some heavy duty meetings for upcoming projects and upcoming prospects. Legends of Localization is doing super well and I think everyone involved is excited for all the things coming up.

Then Poe and I had to rush home, eat, and then rush back to the movie theater – my latest movie translation premiered yesterday! It’s always a treat to be able to watch my stuff on the big screen and see how audiences react to my writing, the jokes I struggle to translate, lines that are meant to be emotional, etc. Although I’m obviously not the creator of the things I translate, it’s a great feeling when people enjoy something I translated, even if they don’t even think about the translator or the translation process. It’s a weird side effect of trying to translate as transparently as possible ๐Ÿ˜›

Also, super secret translator tip: I’ve learned from these movie releases that the way you watch/play something can greatly enhance your creativity when translating, so if you feel like something you’re working could be improved a bit, try looking at it differently. If you’re working on a text document, try changing the font and font size to something crazy. If you’re working on a show or movie or whatever, try watching it on screens of different sizes. Of course, time plays a big factor too, so if you can manage it, try setting aside a translation and then come back to it after a good amount of time has passed.

Anyway, some more cool stuff happened yesterday but that’s a story for another time!

Site Design & Funky Fantasy IV Book Progress

I’ve been working on a lot of stuff this week even though it barely feels like it.

One good piece of news is that a Fangamer pal helped make the HTML of the new site design for the main LoL site. I’ve still got a lot of internal work to do to make it work with my custom WordPress coding so I don’t think the design will be up for a few months, but it’s good to see it coming together finally. The best thing is that it’s mobile-friendly and can resize automatically to fit different screen types / dimensions. Besides being super helpful for mobile readers, it’ll help with search engine ranking too, since mobile friendly plays a part in those crazy algorithms too.

The last few days Tony and I have been working on the base layout for the upcoming Funky Fantasy IV book. It’s coming along well but it’s still very early and will change a lot I’m sure. At the moment it looks like it’ll be in the area of 250-300 pages long. Here are some example layouts we experimented with earlier this week that are now outdated.

We’re already working on something different from those two samples. We’ve decided what kind of info we’ll continue to use, what kind of info we’ll drop (mostly the uninformative ones that sound like they’re from a bad TruTV show), and how we’ll arrange things. In the end it looks like it’s going to be a mix between our This be book bad translations, video games! book and our main Legends of Localization books.

It doesn’t look like much now but I can tell this is gonna be one of my favorite books I ever work on!

New LoL Book Takes You on a Tour of Bad Translation

Last week, we released our latest Legends of Localization book!

It’s the debut of our new line of ย bite-sized LoL books that focus on a single subject instead of a single game. This one takes a look at bad video game translations from the 1970s to today, AND we go much deeper than the well-known “All Your Base” mistakes (although “All Your Base” is definitely featured). There are games in there that I’ve never heard of, like a Gundam text adventure and a bunch of obscure arcade games.

Buy it over at Fangamer!