What's your favorite video game localization?
What's your favorite video game localization?
Often overlooked and underappreciated people working in the localization biz make games playable to native English speakers. I've often seen them get flak for JP to ENG translations not being literal enough and that's not fair. Translators have to take liberties to translate things that wouldn't have meaning otherwise in English and people wouldn't be able to follow along.
Anyway Alexander O. Smith is my favorite guy doing the work and two games that stand out that he worked on are Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XI.
VS has a fantastic translation that's entirely in medieval English while FFXI is pretty fun and lighthearted.
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape Torment. Back in the days when publishers actually feared piracy and had to sell physical copies the Polish localisations were sometimes quite impressive (even more impressive because Polish movie dubbings are notorious for being fucking bad).
Now when there is basically no Polish publisher and everything is just digital there's hardly even any Polish localisations (at least in the games i'm interested in) and the ones that do exist are solely bad to averagely translated texts and no voices.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is set mostly in late-Victorian-era-London, and the English localization really nailed the dialogue style they were going for. There's an interesting article about it here: https://www.ace-attorney.com/great1-2/us/blog/blog2.html
It does a really good job at incorporating dialects that couldn't have been represented in any other language, too
Call of Pripyat
COME ON OVER BRO, I GOT ALLLLLL THE SHIT YOU'LL EVEEEEEERRRR NEED!
So good.
Get out of here Stalker!
Hello, hello [meanwhile outside the science compound there's a gunfight between 500 zombies]
You can't go there!
STALKERS join duty and protect the planet from the zone!
The guy who made an English translation of Mother 3
Is it good? Usually to me fan translations try and go for the literal translation and feel jilted.
It's one of the best translations I have ever played. It goes for a translation that matches Earthbounds tone. It's so well done I forgot I was playing a fan translation because it feels like an official release.
Here's the official site https://mother3.fobby.net/blog/