Son Of General Retro Discussion

Something about the look of Xenoblade puts me off. MMORPG / FF12/13 and monster hunter, none of which Im too fond of.

But that may just because i cant find it anywhere. Do really want to try it!

It always disappoints me that original voice tracks aren't treated with the same respect as film or anime. It seems only low budget releases (Murasama, Yakuza) and Nippon Ichi games are the ones that retain Japaneselanguage. The bigger the release, the less likely it is you'll get anything other than always inferior translations.

It particularly surprises that the otherwise fanboy friendly Atlus don't include the option to change. Storage space excuses only get you so far!

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Atlus though do fantastic jobs of localisation though. It only annoys me when the localistion is terrible and there's no option to change the voices. A friend of mine once sent me a youtube video to show that it's a bit snobby looking for japanese voices in games. It was of Street Fighter 4 with M. Bison asking for ice cream and talking about how much he liked puppies. It seemed cool because it was in japanese.

Anyway the only games I can think of where Atlus could have included a japanese voice track and didn't were Persona 3 and 4 and those two games really were full to the brim with data going by the install size on my hard disk.

There is certainly limits (especially text heavy RPGs), but when something like Sin & Punishment 2 can fit two voice tracks, or Disgaea PSP the same, on smaller format discs I always wonder if a bit of compressing ingenuity could do the job. Surely there's no reason not to have both voice tracks on Catherine, especially the PS3? The English voice acting is good, no doubt, but its still weirdly rigid and ill-fitting with the characters the way all dubbing is. Anytime I see a distinctly Japanese character talking in an American accent it just seems very wrong. Wouldn't stand for it in film, no reason to stand for it in games!

I think the basic concept of localisation bothers me to be perfectly honest. In a perfect world, everything would be translated rather than localised. Obviously you have to adapt a little bit, but the closer to the original vision as possible the better. Atlus are good at this - little things like having characters say 'senpai' or 'sensei' at the end of the sentence (to which there is no English equivalent) shows they're being loyal to the original script. Leaving them out entirely would be a far worse solution But the second something is changed to a more Westernised alternative, something important is lost. I want to play the game as close to the creator's vision as possible. Any change is significant! Sure, I'm pretty snobby when it comes to this, but I feel its justified snobbery :P (an aside: Phoenix Wright still stands out as the best localisation of all, although its telling that features no significant voice acting!)

Also, Chrono Trigger is still fantastic.