I give up... NISA is making me sick of localizations....

[Eusis]

(probably because it was on a Nintendo playform)

Less to do with that and more that Nintendo themselves published it. They probably don't care about third parties pulling that so long as they don't get an AO rating (I can't think of an particular examples that prove this though - look in a Castlevania?), but they themselves aren't going to want to needlessly provoke anyone overly sensitive to that. Similarly there was a scene in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga that was edited in the US, you can see the before and after on Wikipedia, but that may actually be one of the smarter cases of changing a crucifixion; it might even be the more logical way to deal with it.

[Akira]

Holy damn, I remember the giant CHU CHU scene. I fucking died. So amazing.

[Silverwolf X]

I bought to support the companies that bother to localize, if more people buy then you'll see better games.

That's flawed thinking though.  From a company's perspective, if sales go down, then the company must determine what went wrong and try to fix the problem.  If sales are up, then the consumer base is assumed to be happy with the product.

Your money speaks volumes. Buying more copies of lousy products is just incentive for a company to keep shoveling out lousy products.

Thats a generalized thinking. If a company keeps having bad sales, they won't have the money left to bring any more games.

Oh and about Aksys and XSEED, didn't include them since they haven't been doing much recently?

[Eusis]

Thats a generalized thinking. If a company keeps having bad sales, they won't have the money left to bring any more games.

Then maybe a company that won't fuck up the localization will grab the games instead. It's win/win!

[Aeolus]

While I don't mind shoddy translations or censorships since I find them to be more hilarious than anything, I will mind if they remove one or more entire sections of a game out of censorship.

Also From the Abyss wasn't mediocre. It was crap.

Also also the Chu Chu scene was indeed epic (especially with the villain giving his mandatory monologue).

[Silverwolf X]

Now is just a waiting game though for any US unique glitches. Not that you can't patch them up or anything. Seriously though, patches are making game developers lazy. :/

[Eusis]

While I don't mind shoddy translations or censorships since I find them to be more hilarious than anything, I will mind if they remove one or more entire sections of a game out of censorship.

There was something I wanted to mention about translation issues in an earlier post, but decided against it. This provides a better reason to bring it up.

There's a book called The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It's pretty great, but apparently two chapters had to be removed from the final third of the book and some significant scenes were lost as a result, such as

Code:

the main character, Toru burning his wife's belongings.

I've heard the author was involved to make sure they didn't screw it up too much, but even if the book is long as it is I'd rather have received the full thing. It's not surprising really, but it shows that even in cases like literature this crap will happen.

[seaechiowai]

Regarding the op post, I'm sure this is influence of a game tester at NISA, "Miyuki." I used to be in her college class and while I didn't get to see these alledgedly bad translation, the dialogue style sounds very, very similar to me. That's exactly how she talks in IM programs, with really annoying overuse of periods and capitals.

[magusgs]

I completely forgot about XSEED.  I was relieved to hear someone picked up Shadow Hearts Covenant.  I've never heard of Aksys.  What have they localized?

PS: To those American speakers that know enough Jap to navigate through imports, where did you learn it and how long did it take?  Not the whole language.  Just what's necesarry to make it through most games.  Thanks.  

While I've learned some Japanese, mostly I just rely on a machine translation with text hacked from the game's text strings (the hooking program is called AGTH and is freely available; there's various translators available, including some such as Babelfish which can be accessed for free).  This process probably only works with simple ADV-style PC RPG's like Eien no Aseliahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9HKtQmUPfk.  AGTH usually hooks dialogue from the main text box, and occasionally it'll get the menus.  As others have said though, a basic knowledge of hiragana and katakana is very useful for understanding menus--you can probably achieve that with a few days of intense study.  Myself, I took a 3-quarter course that focused mostly on the spoken language, so I find myself in the awkward position of understanding more spoken Japanese than written.

If you're willing to sift through the garbage a machine translator spits out, you can actually get a pretty good understanding of what's going on with no knowledge at all of the Japanese language.

[Ramza]

Regarding the op post, I'm sure this is influence of a game tester at NISA, "Miyuki." I used to be in her college class and while I didn't get to see these alledgedly bad translation, the dialogue style sounds very, very similar to me. That's exactly how she talks in IM programs, with really annoying overuse of periods and capitals.

I know it's hearsay, and it's clear your joined the boards to comment on this point (being your first post and all), but I'd still be interested in hearing more about this development.

[seaechiowai]

Not much to say really. I joined because I like RPGs and folks here seem thoughtful and fair. NISA's testing team has tremendous influence on localization as well, because they run out of wits often and it's in the team's focus "to have players relate to the game." So being the heavy, heavy(snicker) anime lovers and hip IM-sters they are, the higher-ups tend to order to change perfectly fine dialogues at times, to "give it[sic] more personalities."

[Eusis]

The more I hear of NISA, the more I'm convinced they're pretty terrible. Not that taking suggestions from the playtesters is bad, but that's the thing: they should just be suggestions. They're not editors or proofreaders or anything, they might be able to notice mess ups or see a sentence may be improved, but just throwing whatever jokes they can in just sounds dumb.

[cj_iwakura]

Aksys have released some pretty awful games, but they brought us Castle Shikigami 3, which gives them a lifetime reprieve in my book.


Anyway, not sure what's up with NISA as of late, but they're hit and miss. Prinny had a wonderful localization.

Maybe they just have  B-list teams doing all these screwed up projects while their A-listers get the stuff like Prinny and Disgaea(and Sakura Taisen V, I hope).

[Mym]

PS: To those American speakers that know enough Jap to navigate through imports, where did you learn it and how long did it take? ?Not the whole language. ?Just what's necesarry to make it through most games. ?Thanks. ?

I'm not American, but I am an esteemed graduate of the college of 'we studied Japanese because Japanese pop culture is fun'. It took me about three months to get to the point where I could follow JRPG conversations enough to not get lost, about two years to get to the point where I could understand most things with a lot of dictionary work, and about three years 'til I could play imports pretty comfortably. Adjust according to how committed you are (I was pretty lazy), and subtract a bit if you read Chinese, as you'll have a fairly big headstart on kanji. Obviously it can vary wildly according to the game, though. I was pretty comfortable with something quite gentle like Grandia after not very long at all, but would probably be reluctant to take on Xenosaga without my dictionaries even now.

As for how, I took a couple of months of classes because I find the first few months of studying a language to be especially brutal, and needed classes to keep me motivated and to stop me from just giving up. Beyond that, I basically just read a couple of grammar textbooks and threw myself at JRPGs with a dictionary until stuff started making sense. It's not really a method I'd recommend, especially if you want to achieve any degree of fluency in speaking. And I doubt I love JRPGs enough now to go through it again if I had to. But when I eventually began to study the language in a formal environment, I found that I had little left to do besides expand my vocabulary and get used to speaking it. I guess all rivers run to the sea?

Oh, and I think comparing Working Designs to NIA is more than a little harsh. And that's coming from someone who isn't really a big fan of WD. Sure they weren't exactly faithful to the original material, but it was pretty obvious that they put a whole lot of love into every game they did, and they set standards in quality control and proofreading that were largely absent from JRPGs 'til late into the PSX's lifespan. I wasn't really big on their style of humour, and I think Atlus does all that they did and more nowadays, but comparing their work to a hackjob like the English Ar Tonelico 2 seems a bit much.

Anyway, yeah, NIA's situation seems to be getting kinda desperate. Name changes don't necessarily mean a bad script, but it's certainly not promising. I hope they get their act together for Sakura Taisen V. A poor script would kill such a text-heavy game, which would be a shame since the series has remained unavailable in English for so long. And while I've not played the fifth game, the first couple weren't exactly the easiest games to tackle from a localisation perspective. Lots of cultural notes, Japanese puns, and the like. Could be ugly. I guess the fifth one is set in America, though. Maybe the script's a bit gentler in that regard?

[Dincrest]

So what now?  Are you folks now going to boycott NISA and refuse to buy any of their games?  Or do you still hold a glimmer of hope for them? 

For me, the only upcoming NISA game I have remotely any interest in is A Witch's Tale.  So far, it seems more playful than developer Hitmaker's prior releases (Blade Dancer, Dragoneer's Aria) which were both horribly generic. 

As for "hip IM script" oddities, I still remember when I saw smileys in the Wild Arms: 2nd Ignition text and went "WTF?"  (That was SCEA, but whatever.)

EDIT:  Still, it says something to me that even the most ardent NISA advocates who remained loyal through the nonsense are now just completely fed up with them.