We received some weird snacks from Japan this week. These Pocky boxes were a special Valentine’s Day promotion. The names are really weird:
I see what they were going for with “Papa” and “Mama” in there, but what is “Sukky” ?? Maybe 好き (suki)?
Here’s a candy with an unusual name:
I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks delicious!
And we found some funny English on a bag of garlic butter-flavored Cheetos:
Oh no, Japan discovered comic sans…
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.
Heyyyyyyy, the EarthBound book is back in stock! This second printing fixes a few typos from the first printing, and I thiiiiink that’s it? I dunno, we reviewed the fixes back in June and that already feels like a hundred years ago, haha. Get you a copy right here at Fangamer!
Mato swears there’s a good reason for this — “Army of Darkness” is known as “Captain Supermarket” in Japan. And the poster is the best thing in the world:
While putting the upcoming Funky Fantasy IV book together I keep discovering or rediscovering great lines. I’m almost tempted to do another stream of the game in the near future with cheats on so we can blast through the game in like two days. That way I can get screenshots of all this stuff I missed – it turns out when we streamed it last year I only took a few screenshots once in a while since I had no idea it would turn into a serious book project down the road. The book schedule is pretty tight as it is though so I dunno how doable a few stream days would be though.
Found this cute little comic strip at the bottom of a Super Mario Kart review in the October 9, 1992 issue of Marukatsu Super Famicom:
Splatoon 2 released worldwide recently. I’ve been digging through new Japanese gaming magazines for an upcoming project, and I found this cool ad for the game. It also highlights a 320-page art book.
Some of the best translation mistakes are ones that aren’t spelling or grammar errors and make you stop and think 😆
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!
I’ve been reading a lot of current Japanese gaming magazines for research purposes and I’ll probably share things here and there from them, but for today I wanted to share this new list of the top 20 RPGs of all time as ranked by Famitsu’s readers.
20. Witcher 3
19. Final Fantasy VIII
18. Final Fantasy IX
17. MOTHER 2
16. Final Fantasy VI
15. Dragon Quest IV
14. Persona 4 Golden
13. Xenogears
12. Final Fantasy X
11. Xenoblade
10. Final Fantasy XV
9. Persona 3
8. NieR Replicant
7. Suikoden II
6. Dragon Quest V
5. Final Fantasy VII
4. NieR: Automata
3. Chrono Trigger
2. Dragon Quest III
1. Persona 5
With “all time ever” polls I’ve always wondered if the recentness of a popular game has some sort of sway on its ranking. It looks like I’m terrible at keeping up though, I still got 12 of these to play someday 😯