OR: What process did you go through when you developed the songs for the original Lunar game? Because I know that you wrote them.
VI: Yeah, I do all the songs. All the English versions.
That’s another case too, where Lunar 2 and Lunar [1] were the most pure versions of assimilating the Japanese song, understanding it, and spitting out an English song without paying attention to the structure of the order of the Japanese song. It’s like, the lines didn’t have a one-to-one match of ‘okay, you’re feeling this here, you’re feeling this here’. The whole song holistically had a certain feel. Whereas, Class Of Heroes 2, and to a lesser extent too, Summon Night [5], because they wanted the localization to be closer to the Japanese song – if you look at the lines, the areas of each line or pair of lines of the English matches up with approximate feelings [and] areas of each line of the Japanese [song].
So it’s a much tighter correlation. It’s still localized, because I’m still saying ‘okay, what’s it trying to say’ and [then] saying it in a more natural way in English. But the Lunar songs were more of a feel of the whole song rather than line by line. So I went though, sort of assimilated the feel, and just spit it out.
” The original plan for…Arc The Lad Collection was to do the collection and then for the demo of the game, give everybody Arc The Lad 1. That was going to be the demo. “
OR: What, out of all the games you’ve translated for Working Designs and GAJINWORKS, what is your favorite line?
VI: Oh my god. That’s a lot of lines. *laughs* It’s kind of crude, but the one that sticks out in my head is where the bad guy is raping and pillaging in Arc The Lad 2 and they talk about his ‘Johnny Appleseed deed’. *laughs* That line just cracks me up, it still cracks me up just thinking about it. But it’s really crass and probably not a good one to point out – ‘I really like that line!’ But it was just like to have the bad guy raping and everything else, and then you talk about his ‘Johnny Appleseed deed’. It just strikes me as funny, but that might be my dark humor.
OR: Arc The Lad had multiple games that came out in one collector’s edition. What was the basis behind doing that? It [was] rather unusual to do.
VI: Yeah, I was crazy, I was out of my mind. That’s what it amounted to. Basically, we had been behind Japan [in releasing the series]. All of them had come out in Japan. I wanted to make a big splash, like ‘hey, we’re going to do something no one else has done.’ And then, I realized there’s a reason no one else has done it, because this is crazy. And it took a long time and there was problems with Arc The Lad 2’s code where it wouldn’t compile properly. And it changed – okay, usually, when you compile, you can get the same results every time. And you change something, compile it. Change one little thing, and everything else is okay.
With Arc The Lad [2], with the way the code was, it was unstable so [that] every time you compiled it, something else changed that you didn’t know what it was. It was almost like [some] spooky action at a distance, [some] quantum theory thing. So you touch this, it might effect that. But you didn’t know what ‘that’ was. You had to play the whole game to find it. So like, I think in the shipped game, when you finish the pyramid, if you go back to the town next to it – the first time you walk in the town, the people will be there but they’re invisible. You can talk to people that aren’t there. And that was the case of one of those weird things that happened and nobody happened to check that before we shipped it. Because there was so many possibilities and that one got through.
So yeah, Arc The Lad 2 was just a disaster to check. We [got] stuck in Arc The Lad 2 and I was like ‘You know what?’ – because the original plan for that, for Arc The Lad Collection was to do the collection and then for the demo of the game, give everybody Arc The Lad 1. That was going to be the demo. That didn’t happen because Sony was like ‘Well, you can’t give away a whole game for a demo.’ I was like: ‘Why not? It’s a collection. It’s a great intro to the game. You’re going to get a whole game for your demo.’ But, by the time we got stuck in Arc The Lad 2, it was like ‘You know, can we just break this back up and release these separately?’ *laughs* ‘Because, we gotta get this out and we’re getting hung up trying to get this Arc The Lad 2 compiling correct.’
So yeah. It was insanity, basically. And then, also, the only reason I signed up for that [was because] ‘I can do this with Zach’ – who was working there at the time – ‘And we can share the writing because its huge, one person can’t do it.’ And then a few months after I signed on to do it, [after] we signed the contracts, I had to fire Zach. And it was like, ‘Oh crap, now I have to do [this] whole thing myself. So, yeah, it was a very rough period. *laughs*
” … GAIJINWORKS is basically the newer incarnation of Working Designs. “
OR: How long was the full development cycle for [the] Arc The Lad [Collection]?
VI: Eighteen months, a couple of years? It was a long time.
It was a ton of writing, it was a huge amount of text. And testing, like I said – Arc [The Lad] 1 and 3 weren’t bad. Arc [The Lad] 1 was easy. Arc [The Lad] 3 was consistent. You compile it, you get the same thing every time. That random compiling error-thing with Arc The Lad 2 really screwed things up. Took us forever to straighten it out. We haven’t really straightened it out. All we really did – we got a version that we tested the crap out of and we’re pretty sure that we had everything right. And even then we still missed [the invisible people in the town].
OR: Now we’ve covered quite a bit of history for Working Designs in the past, and in the present with GAIJINWORKS. What can we look forward to in the future with you and your company?
VI: Basically, just more of the same hopefully. You know, the awareness campaigns – we’re going to keep trying to do the retweet thing, try to get awareness up so more people know GAIJINWORKS is basically the newer incarnation of Working Designs. And then continue releasing Japanese RPGs on newer platforms. I would say [that] Class Of Heroes 3 will probably be the last PSP title. There might be another one, but it’s now an issue of ‘can we beat the factory closing.’ Because there’s only one factory in the world making PSP discs anymore. And once that closes, there’s no more discs.
No more discs, no more physical copies. That’s the end of the line. There might be one more after Class Of Heroes 3, but I’m like ‘Mmmgh…if it happens, let it be a surprise.’
So right now, we’re either working or looking at PS3 titles, PS4 titles, [and] PS Vita titles. Pretty much all the current gen platforms.
OR: Any of those titles [that] you would care to share with us that you’re looking at?
VI: No, not yet. *laughs* Let’s get the ones I’ve got out first. People are like ‘Don’t talk about new ones, you haven’t got the ones you’re talking about now out!’
OR: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
VI: No, just, tell everybody you can about Summon Night 5.
We really would like to do Summon Night 6, but we need – I’m sure Bandai Namco would understand that the PSP is a dead platform to get- even twenty-thousand would be amazing, but that’s the kind of numbers we’re shooting for and I think we can hit it between digital and physical. It seems like digital is at least as much as physical shipments, so I think we’ll do that. But we need to get the word out and get people to support it so we can get Summon Night 6 out, because Summon Night 6 is amazing.
OR: Can you tell us more about what you would do with Summon Night 6?
VI: Well, if we were doing it, we would absolutely want to add dual screen support. That’s the one thing.
But I don’t want to get too crazy until it happens, because we want to get the awareness up for Summon Night 5 so Summon Night 6 can happen. But if we do [Summon Night] 6, I would absolutely want to add dual screen support to it because I think all RPGs should have it. It’s just such a cool feature to see additional information in front of you while you’re playing.
OR: Alright, thank you.
Update 3/5/16: Since this article was previously published, some minor spelling and grammatical corrections have been corrected.
This concludes part three of three. I would like to thank Victor Ireland for taking the time to talk with me.
All images (except of the Ghaleon and Alex Punching Puppets) were provided courtesy of, and are the property of, GAIJINWORKS. They are used here with permission. The Ghaleon Punching Puppet image was taken by the interviewer. The Alex Punching Puppet images were used with permission.
So, what do you think? Have any of you run into problems while playing Arc The Lad 2? Sound off in the comments below!
