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!
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
We recently picked up a copy of the January 1998 issue of the French gaming magazine called Consoles. It covers Space World 1997, and boyyyyyy there’s a lot of neat stuff in it! First I want to share this spread on Ocarina of Time, where you can see some beta screenshots of the game:
That house-looking building in the market town was later changed to the Happy Mask Shop, and I’m pretty sure that blonde Kokiri in the corner didn’t look like that in the finished game.
These screenshots are probably old news to hardcore Zelda fans, but it’s always really cool to find beta stuff in a tangible thing rather than on the internet. Can you spot any other differences in the screenshots above to the finished game?
So, Breath of the Wild is a great frickin’ game. I’ve been playing the English version, and Mato recently beat the Japanese version. The writing is superb, but I ran into a shrine puzzle at the beginning of the game that stumped me big time:
I found the shrine on Dueling Peaks. Since I was at the beginning of the game, I thought, “Cool, there must be another tall mountain on the other side of the world that looks like this one’s twin. I guess I’ll find it later.” Then I took a picture of the puzzle and left. It didn’t occur to me to check the other peak of Dueling Peaks. I had the shrine locator turned off, so I never got any beeping hints that one was nearby.
After Mato beat the game, I asked if he solved this shrine, and he said, “Yeah, it was easy. The other shrine is on the other peak.” “On Dueling Peaks?” I asked. Mato was confused. “Is that what they call it in English? It’s called Twin Peaks in Japanese.”
Twin Memories. Twin Peaks. Ohhhhhhhhh…..! Oh. It makes sense now! Perhaps I’m just a dum-dum, but I have a feeling that if they’d kept the Twin Peaks name, I would have made the Twin Memories connection a lot sooner (or at all!).
Did you run into trouble with any hints while you were playing the game?
It’s no secret that I work on a million things at all times, so lately I’ve been trying to slow down a bit so my old bones can catch up to my brain. In particular I started playing the new Zelda game in Japanese… but even then I wound up taking screenshots of every piece of text I came across. I probably wouldn’t have bothered with taking screenshots, but boy is that screenshot button on the Switch controller the handiest thing I’ve ever come across. I do wish it saved in png format though…
Anyway, I’ve been playing the game super weirdly and spent about 200 hours before I finally went and continued the story/talked to Impa after leaving the plateau. During that time I explored everywhere, usually by taking the totally wrong way on accident, and talking to everyone/fighting everything. It’s been a ton of fun, and I made it a personal rule right from the start to NOT use the Shrine Sensor thingy. I think that alone made it twice as fun for me.
Poe’s been playing the English version as well, taking screenshots here and there. I don’t have any specific projects for this game in mind, but screenshots are the lifeblood of Legends of Localization. I’m sure they’ll come in handy at some point!
Here’s the latest in our quest to acquire all versions of Zelda games: the Asian version of Zelda 2~
I don’t know why we have a Nintendo cereal ad next to a signed portrait of Geordi La Forge. Whatever, they’re both cool.
Summer Games Done Quick is live riiiiight now! Legends of Localization’s entire anthology is up for grabs as prizes throughout the event:
Watch the stream here and keep an eye out for the LoL prizes. And speaking of SGDQ, Fangamer has a fun new crop of GDQ products available to buy right now!
All profits from the sales of GDQ merchandise goes straight to Doctors Without Boarders. So not only will you be getting some cool stuff, you’ll also be helping people in need. So, buy somethin’ will ya? It’s for charity!
We had to buy a lot of Zelda merchandise when we were working on the first book (we didn’t want to steal any photos from the internet, so we took our own). Now that the book is published, all that merchandise is displayed around the Fangamer office. Here’s a portion:
Legends of Localization has its own little spot in the Fangamer office to store the various bits and bobs relating to each project. Today we found a forgotten box of bonuses that were include with the first 500 copies of the deluxe edition of the Zelda book. We kept some in case we needed them for customer service, but maybe we’ll give them out with random orders now.
(Note: Zelda II was not a bonus, lol)