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Final Fantasy 7....by a non gamer
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Join Date:Posts: 50006
ONE mistranslation.
OMG IT'S ALL RUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINED!!!!!
There's a hell of a lot more than one mistranslation. There's tonnes of typos and just terrible grammar, it was obviously translated by people that aren't native english speakers. There's also plenty of confusion in the story because a lot of the story isn't brough across by they terrible localisation. It's a very poor localisation, that's a fact and there's no way to defend it. Considering Ted Woolseys stellar localisation of Sqaures SNES RPGs like Super Mario RPG, FF6, and Chrono Trigger it was a big step backwards for Square.I see people going on about Persona in this thread. Is it a good series? Never played it. Should I play all of them through or just the good ones? (is the story continued on from the last game is what I mean). Which ones are the best ones?
Persona 3 and 4 are must plays and the best two RPGs since Mother 3. Amazing games. Persona 1 and 2 are an acquired taste. They take after the SMT series a lot closer and therefore are quite difficult, grindy and feature lots of nonlinear dungeon crawling. If you like those types of games they are great but compared to something like FF or most JRPGs they are quite complex and closer to western dungeon crawlers like Wizardry. Persona 3 and 4 are a bit more accessible to someone used to traditional JRPG's.
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Join Date:Posts: 50006
Yeah I did about 10 years ago when I was young and stupid. It was the hip thing to do if you were a FF fan
Now that I've matured and read some interviews with him and played the games again it's actually remarkable what he did and how he managed to get the stories feel and mean across in English which took up a lot more of the cartridges ROM than japanese does. I think at the time when emulation was new we thought the FF games were a lot deeper and intellectual in japanese and were shortchanged by the goofy english translations but the japanese versions are just as goofy. It got so bad that some people made fan translations that tried to make the games edgier by adding in swearing, now they were embarassing.
I made the mistake of also thinking he was responsible for all of Squares SNEs translations such as the god awful FF4/2 one. However he only came on board with Secret of Mana, not the best translation in the world but he also managed to knock that one out in 4 weeks, which is quite an amazing achievement considering. So I take back everything I said about Ted Woolsey, he was a great localiser.
However I'll never forgive him for Shadow Madness, a game up there with Legend of Dragoon for crappiness.
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Join Date:Posts: 50006
Tell that to the Metal Gear fans trying to blame MGS2's crapiness on Audrey Kakou.
It was Mana he did in a month. He had a lot more time on FFVI which turned out great.
As for Shadow Madness, it wasn't a crap translation, Ted formed a development team and tried to make a japanese style JRPG. If you have played the result you'd understand It was western so didn't need a translation, the game was just crap!
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Retr0gamer wrote: »Tell that to the Metal Gear fans trying to blame MGS2's crapiness on Audrey Kakou.
It was Mana he did in a month. He had a lot more time on FFVI which turned out great.
As for Shadow Madness, it wasn't a crap translation, Ted formed a development team and tried to make a japanese style JRPG. If you have played the result you'd understand It was western so didn't need a translation, the game was just crap!
Can't blame him for trying. I had no idea he actually tried to make one himself.We sat again for an hour and a half discussing maps and figures and always getting back to that most damnable creation of the perverted ingenuity of man - the County of Tyrone.
H. H. Asquith
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Join Date:Posts: 50006
Mindkiller wrote: »Like FFXII, or (playing atm) Vagrant Story. Sure, the original intention or whatever may get corrupted and lost in the localisation process, but you have to love that pseudo-Shakespearian thing they bring to the 'Ivalice' games (I've heard that VS is set in Ivalice though I'm not sure if that's just a retcon).
Ah, Alexander O. Smith's work. By far the best localiser out there. As for Vagrant Story being in Ivalice, apparently it is but anyone that's played it can see it was a total retcon.Mindkiller wrote: »I've heard it argued now that Metal Gears Solid 2 is being revalued as some ambitious attempt at postmodern expression in video games or something. I don't really see it tbh. Maybe in a really superficial way.. maybe.
As Audrey herself said, it was one of the worst scripts she has ever read in her life. MGS2 does have quite a few clever ideas and it you could call 'post modern' if you are pretentious enough. It even succeeds at them to tell the truth. Doesn't help that the surrounding script is awful.
Anyway some thoughts on FFVII's story. It's not awful. I do agree totally that it's full of some excellent moments as well. However I think these moments are far better than the overall story. Not a bad thing before people give out, a lot of the Dragon Quests do a similar thing.
I think the characters in the game are excellently fleshed out with the exception of Vincent, he seemed a bit rushed. Each character gets their moment in the in the spotlight and they are some of the highlights of the games, the small vignettes that show what type of character they are. The characters backstories are all wonderful and the highlight narratively speaking.
The main narrative holding it all together is a bit weak in parts and mostly you can tell the game was very rushed. I'd say they had the characters backstories all nicely fleshed out in a design document and I remember reading that they were making up the story that tied it all together right up to the last minute. It starts off great, Midgar is just wonderful but once you leave midgar it loses a bit of steam. The areas outside midgar are all a bit disjointed and the world doesn't really mesh, not really helped by wildly fluctuating art styles, another by product of the crazy development process. Some plot points are nicely fleshed out while others like the sephiroth clones seem to get forgotten about. Some of it also gets washed over by the localisation, I'm guessing most of use never realised what the sephiroth we were chasing really was on our first time through the game.
It's an interesting one though, there's a book ready to be written on the development of this game and the influences that kept creeping in during the production of the game. It's unfortunate we might not find out about it.
Anyway the plot might get lost a bit towards the end but the pace never lets up which is very good thing. I found myself always wanting to see what was next and being rewarded all the time with great personal vignettes between the characters.
I think Square could to well to look at FFVII to see what went wrong with the series. It's all gone a bit Michael Bay. The best parts of FFVII weren't the contrived cutscenes with the Weapons, although they were entertaining. Mine were the date in Golden Saucer, Red XIII finding out about his father. the Zack and Cloud subquests. No action, just some great character drama. It's that character drama that holds the story together towards the end when it starts to fall apart a bit and starts becoming a weird Chrono Trigger knock off.
FFVII's best parts for me weren't the over the top summons or CG. Nor was it the delusions of pretention, after all the message of the over arching story didn't go beyond the average episode of Captain Planet. It's just some good character drama which carries the game. Even the story itself for all the nitpicking I could do on it is still excellently paced which in a PS1 is a rare and very good thing. There's not a boring moment, you just have to look at something like Xenogears to see how badly paced a JRPG story can get.
And before the moaning starts I'll try say something to calm people down, Persona 3 and 4 are kind of the same. The overarching narrative isn't what matters but the character interaction does.
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Outside Midgar the game just feels a little too rustic. It's quite juxtaposed to the steampunk world of Midgar. A few places like Wutai stick out like a sore thumb. It's just a theory but I think the artists had created these places and they were then slotted into the story. It's not like they've done that before either, FFXIII was pretty much the same.
As for Sephiroth, I thought he turned a bit too quickly, it's kind of my only problem. As for Crisis Core I thought narratively that game was god awful other than letting us see sephiroth in happier days. Maybe being controlled by Jenova quite early on but still it's just too convenient.
He's no Kefka that's for sure :P I love that crazy clown.
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OK so last night we started again with the shinra massacre. More than once were there comments made about the atmosphere and its spookiness. Unfortunately she didn't quite make the connection with the blood trail on the floor and as such, couldn't get out of the specimen room for ages because from where she was looking, it looked the like hall leading out was on the upper level rather than the lower one. Looking at it with her, its a reasonable mistake to make but there was a "ah balls" moment when she finally got it.
She is also taking to the story well and starting to learn a bit more about Sephiroth. We've gone through pronouncing his name as well a few times but she really enjoyed (and completely nailed) the elevator boss and Rufus. She's really starting to understand the materia system now, for example, identifying that Enemy Skill materia is useless to her at the moment, cover is useless in a one man battle etc. This may not sound like a big deal to most people in here but for her this is well worth recognising as an achievement.
Rather comically, the motorbike mini game was a fun distraction but a lot harder than realised. She thought X was to speed up which is forgivable and the rather simple AI of the red bikers trying to draw you away working well on her, leaving her with Tifa on 10HP and Barret on 80HP at the start of the rollerball boss at the end. She took this well though, and set up everyone to be cured and tore through the boss. Like everyone I know who played the game the first time through, was thoroughly disgusted with Barret's MindBlow limit break
After leaving the city of Midgar, she's quite intrigued by the fact she's on a world map. And after a small bit of confusion about directions (walking northeast on the screen doesn't = walking northeast on the map) she got to Kalm.
I know alot of you were looking forward to this but I'm afraid to tell you, she's not that fond of the level of narrative here. We have stopped in the caves of Mt. Nibel with Sephiroth as a team member mainly because of gamers thumb and boredom. An interesting take on boredom though as she wants to play more but she wants to get back into the adventure. Although she is disgusted with the thought of Sephiroth killing Cloud's mother (as he reveals at the start of the flashback).
Other than that, not a lot was talked about. She said Cloud was her favourite character until this flashback and now he's boring her. She's gotten into the habit now of checking the shops for everything that might be of use and through all the leveling up she's been doing while lost, she's at a nice level to deal with just about anything. Hopefully the flashback won't put her off it too much and we'll get the rest of the game completed also.
P.S. we have also passed the 10 hour mark as set down in the original constraints and show no sign of stopping! Huzzah for the addictive nature of games!0 -
Join Date:Posts: 50006
OK so last night we started again with the shinra massacre. More than once were there comments made about the atmosphere and its spookiness. Unfortunately she didn't quite make the connection with the blood trail on the floor and as such, couldn't get out of the specimen room for ages because from where she was looking, it looked the like hall leading out was on the upper level rather than the lower one. Looking at it with her, its a reasonable mistake to make but there was a "ah balls" moment when she finally got it.
Tell her to turn on the indicators in the field, the ones that show entrances and exits. Those old PS1 RPGs with the prerendered backdrops can be confusing, especially for a newbie so it's always good to keep it on. FFVII isn't too confusing, it's no legend of dragoon, but I remember a few facepalm moments when I couldn't advance the plot because I couldn't find an entrance to the next area.
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