Interview with Yakuza 0’s Localizer

Mato & I have been playing Yakuza 0 recently and it’s quickly become one of my favorite games ever. It’s our first Yakuza game and now I want to play the entire series. Good thing Yakuza 1 just got a remake and Yakuza 6 is coming next year!

I found an interview with Scott Strichart over on michibiku.com. He’s currently heading up the localization for the new Yakuza games, and he previously worked on favorites like Persona 4, 3D Dot Game Heroes, Ni no Kuni, and some Final Fantasies. He covers interesting topics in the interview like:

  • How he and his coworker took Yakuza 0‘s localization to the next level
  • Walking the fine line between a gritty crime drama and over-the-top humor
  • Why he recommends new players start with Yakuza 0 instead of Yakuza 1
  • How he became a walking Yakuza bible
  • The challenge of rewriting stuff like the Mahjong tutorial so that western players could understand how the heck to play Mahjong

It’s a great read, so check out the whole interview here!

Fangamer Localized into a Japanese Company!

This is something that’s been happening in the background for a few months – Fangamer will soon open a Japanese branch of the company! Our hard-working Japan staff is busy getting the warehouse ready for the official launch. You can sign up for the Fangamer Japan newsletter right now.

We’ll be selling only UNDERTALE merchandise from the JP branch at first, but we’ll probably expand to other things once things settle down. We’ll definitely have Legends of Localization books available from there in the future!

Cat-Filled Meetings

Progress on the Funky Fantasy 4 book is chuggin’ along. Here are some pics from today’s meeting:

Tony always prints and staples together the latest version of whatever book we’re working on. It really helps to envision the final product.

Zuuly butted in several times today seeking attention. She wanted to sleep in my chair, but I wasn’t budging.

We also ordered some gorp.

 

Very Early Funky Fantasy 4 Book Sample

Mato & Tony have been hard at work writing and designing the Funky Fantasy 4 book these past few weeks. Here’s a peek at a page printed on our weird office printer that will definitely change by the time the book is finished:

We also need to figure out what to call this book. “Funky Fantasy IV” doesn’t get the point across very easily! D:

LaserDiscs are Cool

The LoL team is always juggling at least 5 projects at once; here’s a peek at one of them. We began collecting a bunch of Japanese-subtitled movies, and this led to Mato & me becoming LaserDisc owners. I… kinda want to buy my movies exclusively on LaserDisc from now on…

The Original Funky Fantasy

Working on the Funky Fantasy book got me thinking about this old video.

Three years ago, Mato drew pictures of the entire plot of Final Fantasy 4. And then he had me watch this video and narrate what was happening. And I barely remembered the plot of Final Fantasy 4 back then.

Please enjoy.

Typing in Japanese

English keyboards are used to type non-English languages all the time. I remember when I knew nothing about how people typed Japanese stuff into computers. The topic could probably get its own full LoL article sometime but basically it’s crazy and you can type words in a bunch of different ways to reach the same spelling. For example, here’s how you can type Pikachu’s Japanese name with some English keyboards depending on your setup:

I actually only came across that when I decided “maybe I should see if other names like Yoshi have weird alternate spellings in Japanese” and then found Pikatyu being used on rare occasion. I’d love to make a gallery of alternate spellings of beloved characters someday.

Guess Boy Advance

The November 1999 issue of N64 Magazine got their hands on the technical specs of the Game Boy Advance. They included a picture of an artist’s guess at what the new Game Boy would look like:

Hey, they weren’t too far off!

Special Book Signing

Back when the EarthBound LoL book was first released, we offered to sign books if people asked. I liked to do personalized messages and one person used that to dare me into signing a piece of toilet paper rather than the book itself. Well I managed to sign the toilet paper after some trial and error learning.

Unfortunately it’s not as feasible to do personalized messages anymore. You can still get a signed copy of our books but they probably won’t have anything more than just our autographs and tiny drawings of things.

Funky Fantasy 6 Test

Ever since Mato & I streamed Funky Fantasy 4, people have been asking for a Funky Fantasy 6. Because Final Fantasy 6 uses kanji in its script, machine translations are pretty competent and a lot less entertaining. AI is still pretty far behind the skills of human translators, though.

As a test, Mato ran Final Fantasy 6’s script through Google Translate and I’m combing through it now trying to see if it would be worth streaming. I’m only a fifth of the way done (god it’s huge), but here are some funny lines I’ve found so far:

  • “Okay, the thinking should be stopped [NEWLINE] with the power of the head brain. [NEWLINE]
  • Actually, I met an example girl.
  • Kefuka “Hey, shoes of sand!
  • Tina “Oh … my brother? [NEWLINE] Wow, I … I guess it’s a big bear ….
  • [NEWLINE] I do not have ears to hear …
  • Kefuka “Hey Cuts!” [NEWLINE] I will definitely return this mulberry!
  • Cayenne “Somebody does not exist [NEWLINE] It’s been a while!
  • Rock “ぐ [PAUSE_60] ぐ ぐ ひ ひ ~
  • Let me tell you how to chocobo!
  • Cayenne “As I thought [NEWLINE] I was a credible woman!
  • Even if the world got fucked up [NEWLINE], even with such a stone [NEWLINE] ginger noodle …

The funny lines are few and far between, unfortunately! Not sure if we’ll stream this, but I’ll continue to post more funny goofs as I scrub through the script.