L’art de Traducteur

I’ve worked as a writer at NCsoft for nearly two years now. Being part of the GPS (Global Production Studio) means I’m in the team responsible for turning Korean game text, and game worlds, into western-friendly game text and game worlds. Compared to other writing jobs in the games industry this might seem a little restrictive, however there are two games that have recently been in the games industry spotlight which perfectly highlight the importance of the localiser’s/rewriter’s role. The games I want to talk about (before going off on a slightly related tangent, not that I’m writing this note during my proofing run or anything) are XSEED Games’ Half-Minute Hero, and From Software’s 3D Dot Game Heroes.

As I’ve already said, my role at NCsoft is essentially to take foreign text and make it palatable and interesting to “western” (NA and EU) audiences. This requires more than simple translation; it requires adapting the text into something genuinely interesting, and intertwining the world with the strong characters, relevant themes and characterisations that are presumably lost in the translation process and culturally significant elements that don’t exist in the original text. There are a couple of fairly famous examples in Aion where we had to edit whole quests because the subject matter, presumably fine and dandy in its native Korea, just wouldn’t sit well with us or our audiences. That brings us fairly neatly to a fairly important question: how large a role should localisation staff have in adapting a foreign game to an entirely different group of customers? Should we treat Korean or Japanese gamers as a fundamentally different demographic, not just because of the differences in gameplay that they’ve come to expect, but also because of the different ways that story is treated in various territories?

I mentioned Half-Minute Hero and 3D Dot Game Heroes not because I think the localisation staff really had and have a great deal of say in the style of the final translated text, but because I like to think that they did, and will. I’m sure the Japanese text in Half-Minute Hero was equally brilliant, and that the Japanese text in 3D Dot Game Heroes (which is now being copied to my clipboard) is as uninspired as its game play. I’m fairly sure of that, but I still like to think that the localisation staff XSEED turned to had this brilliant idea, that the text had been all serious and standard and that this magical, inspired localisation team had decided to take that text, bin it, and create something brilliantly witty and self-referential instead. See, that way this post actually has some form of purpose. That way I can sit here and bang on about how localisation staff have a duty to speak to the development staff and advise them on what could and should be changed in their game for the secondary (i.e. not native) markets. Half-Minute Hero, for those not in the know, is a pseudo 8-bit RPG for the PSP. It takes a fantastically satirical look at the RPGs of the early 90s, and rips them to pieces with knowing comments and casual observations. Bosses that refer to themselves as crap because the developers were clearly running out of time, NPCs that berate you for refusing to help (I think the actual in-game line was “When did anyone get anywhere in an RPG by saying no anyway?”), deliberately bad English, and credits that run after every thirty secondish rampage before the game introduced the next level as the previous game’s sequel. The game has its flaws and is far from perfect, but as an exercise in writing it works brilliantly; it’s self-aware, satirical perfection.

Then there’s 3D Dot Game Heroes. 3D Dot Game Heroes shares many similarities with Half-Minute Hero: they’re both stylised, retro RPGs and both draw from similar source material (3DDGH is basically pure Zelda, which HMH is a bit Zelda, a bit Final Fantasy). However, the English text for 3D Dot Game Heroes hasn’t yet been seen. Half-Minute Hero is a fantastic homage to old-school role-playing games, 3D Dot Game Heroes essentially IS an old-school role-playing game just with incredible graphics. As Eurogamer’s Keza MacDonald puts it “When you open your first chest in your first dungeon and find a boomerang, it’s difficult to suppress a smile, but by the time you get to the third or fourth dungeon and find bombs, a hookshot and a fire wand, the joke starts to wear a little thin”. Now, the review was based on an imported, Japanese version of 3D Dot Game Heroes, so there is still some chance of the title being edited into something special. As MacDonald himself commented, “Atlus’ interpretation of the tone for translation is going to be crucial”. They could simply go through a word for word translation, or they could try something a bit special with the text.

So then, how comprehensively can a localisation team change the feel of a game anyway? Now let’s first assume that every gamer ever reads every line of text, listens to every second of audio and watches every single cutscene. Based on that (not entirely reasonable) assumption, I’d say that a rewrite localisation effort can substantially change the nature of a game. After all, without text and audio, all that’s left of a story is a series of isolated events, a bit like a join-the-dot picture without any lines drawn in. Without text, a quest might involve you talking to an old man, killing a monster, then returning to the old man. Now, given free scope, that quest could be given a number of raisons d’être; perhaps the monster had ruined his crops or killed his son, perhaps his star boar had fallen sick and had started rampaging through the forests, or perhaps his wife had been cursed to live the rest of her life as the monster and the heartbroken old man had no choice other than to deliver her to the afterlife. In MMORPGs this is actually easier than other genres due to its actual nature: there’s an overarching story, sure, but you’re never really taken through any tightly scripted missions. Indeed, it’s in the interests of MMORPG developers to employ a kind of hands-off approach to players, give them a world (sandbox is the term bandied about at the moment) to play in rather than a finite path to walk down. Compare something like the scripted, linear world of Uncharted 2 to the open universe of Eve Online. Both are excellent titles, wonderful achievements and shining examples of the various genres present in today’s industry, but are entirely different in nature to suit the environments the players have grown to expect from their respective genres.

Aion’s text was changed in a fairly substantial way, I feel. We spent a great deal of establishing tone for the two main races, establishing a sense of empathy towards the Asmodians who had, up until then, been dark-winged, red-eyed demons. Conversely, the Elyos were pure and uncorrupted, the angels of Atreia. I had no interest in writing a good versus evil game, so we set about giving both sides shades of grey instead. A key change was giving the Asmodians a sense of esprit de corps, colouring them as the downtrodden victims of an earth shattering disaster. We created new lore for them in which their circumstances forced them to rely on each other for support. They became a family because the only alternative was to die alone. They became tough and resilient, and we eventually worked out a mantra for them - “blood for blood” - that would perfectly embody everything that they had become. We also brought the Elyos down a few notches, made them arrogant and haughty; our first design documents even referred to them as fascists. They were the all-powerful, all-conquering chosen few, delivered to paradise by their god and tasked with cleansing Atreia of the few stragglers that had survived the (then Epic) Cataclysm. It all ended up a little bit too close to a certain movement of the mid-20th Century, but even after scaling back a little, they were still much more interesting to write for (and hopefully read) than they would have had we done little more than a simple polish of the Engrish.

I suppose we were lucky to be given free reigns in regard to our rewrite process. I’m sure that if I ever create a game in my career, seeing it being changed and edited because a localisation team felt the original content wouldn’t appeal would sting more than a little. It is clear that different markets expect and demand different things though; just look at the sales of the Monster Hunter franchise in Japan compared to the rest of the world, and the sales of Uncharted 2 in the west compared to Japan. Occasionally you do get games which appeal to western gamers because of its Japanese nature, the Final Fantasy series being a fairly clear example. Actually, perhaps that helps explain why, as Square-Enix works to make the game more “Western friendly” they actually just end up alienating the fans who had grown to love its quirks. Hmm.

Regardless, localisation has come forward in leaps and bounds in recent years. The days of translations such as “This guy are sick”, “A winner is you” and (of course) “All your base are belong to us” are long gone, to the extent where we can now have legitimate blogs posts discussing the role a localisation team has in getting the secondary languages to be as relevant and interesting as the original language. Which is handy.