Those of us that remember my very brief trip into deadliest warrior do not remember that as a good time… on the other hand.. this is just amazing..

http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/09/rainbow-dash-vs-starscream-at.html#more

Localization. It’s just a word, not even that scary a word. But that one thing has doomed more games than I can to think about, brought about some of the more enduring internet fads. Localization is important when ever you move one media from one nation to another, some times you don’t need to do much at all. An opera DVD for instance basicly needs to make sure it’s on the right DVD region and the menus are readable. Some things require quite a bit more effort in that department. This being a games forum obviously I’m doing a very long winded introduction to my piece about game localization.

This is a conundrum that has haunted the industry since someone realized that you can make a lot of money selling games to people in America instead of just selling in Japan. This was pretty simple for many games. Super Mario Bros did not exactly need a massive amount of translation. Action games could get away with minimal work in that department since shifting around numbers and icons didn’t take that much and were pretty static. The trick came when you tried to shoe horn in story. This is where the great falling downs have occurred historically. Sometimes localizations have waited till the last moment and stunk of someone with a Japanese/English dictionary just typing out word for word. Thusly “All your base are belong to us” and other such hilariously awkward turns of phrase. It’s entirely possible some of those early localization teams could not speak the languages that they were localizing games for.

Sometimes localization teams have had to alter content to fit up with the demands of the culture it was going into. Sometimes looking back this can seem pretty laughable as they went out of their way to cover half an inch of pixalted ass, when today you’ve got boobies popping out all over the place.

All this is dancing around the issues of today. Yes game translations used to be terrible at times, but we’ve gotten over that so what’s the big deal. The big deal is alienating fan bases and doing twists of creative works to fit into sensibilities of other nations.

A warning now, much of this has to do with JRPGs, or Role playing games out of Japan something I spent an unwholesome amount of time on as a smaller me. I’ve spent a lot of time in the modern era pining over the “loss” of the JRPG. Personally I lay this at least partially at the foot of localization teams. The biggest complaint I now have at the treatment of stuff coming over from Japan at this time is how poorly the localization is treated these days. I’ll break it down in a couple of places here.

Firstly the modern prevalence of voice acting in games. I’m not sure how most Japanese voice actors sound as most games coming over to the states have exclusively English voice acting. Even when it’s good it’s frustrating when ever you hear an awkward turn of phrase due to a slightly poor translation, or even worse my blood boils when ever I hear an awkward cadence of rushed speech whenever they force a phrase to match the rendered mouth movements with translations that were never intended to match those graphics.

Some may complain that having original language with subtitle tracks is immersion breaking, between hearing unfamiliar language and just being forced to watch subtitles instead of whatever pretty scene is playing out. This is a fair response and one wonders why in the era of blue ray discs, ability to turn on subtitles even for English voice tracks why we don’t include native language tracks. This has occurred in some few games, Heavy Rain comes to mind, and has not destroyed the game or caused it to become a costly unplayable mess.

Also upsetting is when we lose chances to become educated through our games. Some of my favorite games have been pretty deeply immersed in culture and imagery of japan. Sometimes they have been well presented, sometimes poorly presented, but I adore when a game lets me see a window into some place I’ve never been. It’s at least as cool to learn about life in rural japan as it is to learn about life in the kingdom of Farelden. I’ve not played to many games from other places in the world, OK, I can think of exactly one off the top of my head, the previously mentioned Heavy Rain, and it was set in America anyway. I’d like to think that a game from France that took place in the streets of Paris would be just as enlightening and interesting as the Japanese games that I have loved.

Less of an issue today is the Whitewashing of game content. Removing either language or content that some localization team feels may upset the broader local audience. Games used to have large sections of their content either written over to make a better connection to an American audience or because something could be seen as remotely controversial. This has been less of an issue in post PlayStation world, but even then some games when being localized are held to different standards than native games.

So why do I care. There are lots of fantastic American games to be had. While this is true it is limiting. I still love my Nintendo games, Metroid other M broke my heart when it committed several localization sins. Between poor translations seen in the form of unbelievably awkward dialog to having that dialog delivered by voice actors who clearly were in this just to collect a pay check and move on with their lives was most distrusting. Until such a time as we start to take our localizations seriously enough to hire and require excellence in our voice actors we would honestly be better off spending the money printing a slightly more data full disk and including something shiny in the box.

Just to reference, it’s me nerding out about games. There will be spoilers below so consider yourself warned.

I came to the Dragon Age party late. I didn’t play Origins until after Two was already out. So full disclosure: I got the Ultimate Edition and played it on My PS3. That out of the way lets go.

I was first exposed to Origins when I was hanging at a friends place and he had it on his PS3 and I was bored. Don’t ask me what he was doing, but I fired it up and played through the human noble starter and onward through battle of Ostegar. I rather enjoyed my few moments of the game, started loving Alistair and pondering Morigan, and then put it down without too much thought.

Fast forward to me getting my own copy, putting it in and playing through the starters just to get a feel for the back ground of the game. I’ll say this, the game was good about drawing me in. From the moment I stepped out of my starter into the wider world I found myself eager to see what was next and how the dance would play out. For that matter even the starters had an oddly compelling factor to them each dealing with a tale of betrayal or loss that leads one to join up with the crazy suicide squad known as the Gray Wardens.

So story wise DA:O hit it out of the park. The game was not without it’s flaws. I felt perpetually punished for not playing a rogue and maxing out my lock-picking at the earliest opportunity. The combat was gummy, the difficulty curve was weird with extreme jumps in difficulty between game modes. Only having six hot slots made juggling ability and items interesting to say the least.

However all of these things did not lead me to putting it down. In fact I spent better than one hundred-twenty hours on it counting replays, and extra down loadable content. I wandered around town just hoping to hear more conversation between my teammates listening to dwarf/elf banter or listening to the bard joke at the Qunari war leader. Those were the great moments of the game.

Basically DA:O is all about the writing trumping every other kinda weak aspect of the game. In subsequent play-throughs I gleefully stomped through the game on casual mode simply to see one character or an-others commentary during conversations with various other NPCs or each other.

Dragon Age 2 on the other hand, mechanically cleaned up the game very nicely. Combat was smooth with my Double knifing rogue happily slicing away. The leveling system was better and did not leave me feeling compelled to put all of my early points into skills and talents that would be necessary if I wanted to talk to anyone or get more than half of the presented loot. Talent trees were better thought out with more play styles represented.

On the other hand, what the mechanics give the writing staff takes away. Hawke with voice acting and everything manages to come off as completely unlikeable no matter how I picked my dialogue choices. My companions were similarly unlikeable. The most likeable one being a highly abrasive escaped slave who tries to get me to murder my party healer on a regular basis.

I’ll have to confess. I only played the game for about 7 hours, but could not bring myself to care about the fates of anyone involved. The story had absolutely no pickup, all of the references to DA:O felt entirely forced, and all of the characters were either uninteresting or just plain unlikeable.

Comparing the two could be informing on my own issues where I’m willing to overlook mechanical flaws for better writing, or it could be a case of no matter how clean the mechanical aspects of the game are you won’t do well if the writing sucks.

A journey into nerdity starts with a single step. That step was a while ago this is the next step. I’m Ben and I’m a nerd, have been one since I was able to form opinions on things. I’m the scion of nerds moving back from the beginning of time… Or at least since my grandfather was a huge camera geek. My earliest entertainment memories have to do with stealing my fathers comic books heedless of the collectors value, and my mothers collection of science fiction novels.

I discovered the world of video games right around the time of the Atari 2600, not that I owned one of these wondrous machines, but a friend of mine did and I played the heck out of pole position. My family did especially prosperous one year and I received a Nintendo Entertainment System as a gift for Christmas and it was glorious. Being a youngling without funds at the time I didn’t get a lot of games at the time but damn. Love affair with video games ensued.

I was later introduced to the glory that is table top gaming in the period of the universe known as Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons. If my love of Nintendo wasn’t enough, my love of table top role-playing definitely put me into firmly into nerd-land. Then came Magic the Gather and holy shit that was bad. Every spare dime I got a hold of during high school went into that, a drug habit probably wouldn’t have been as bad.

As an adult I haven’t exactly gotten away from the nerd life. I still love my video games throwing in MMOs on top of the other games, still play the occasional game of Magic when I can’t get the card monkey off my back, and I’m still an active Table Top role-player. I also have a great love of Anime, science fiction novels, and the occasional television show or movie.

My video game preferences are wide and varied. I used to be all about JRPs, currently grooving on American RPGs. Then again I’ve been known to go crazy on the occasional fighting game, platformer, even first person shooter. Basically any game you hand me is a crapshoot if I’m gonna love, hate it, or just put it down bored.

Now I’m going to become an internet person who talks about nerd stuff. My hope of a normal life is over.

Pretty much just what the title says, may be yanked down later when I have real content.