OR: Looking at Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, ever since the PSX version, there has been a Gameboy Advance, a PSP version, an iOS platform version. Setting all those aside, if you were to re-localize the Lunar series, would the GaijinWorks version be the same as when Working Designs did it back then or what would be different [from the Sega CD version] and why?
VI: The Sega CD version would definitely be different because, even comparing to the PlayStation version, there is definitely an evolution of the localization philosophy. The Sega CD version would definitely be different now. Not different, but the pop culture references were actual actors and TV shows and what not were called out in the text. That would be toned down a lot. *laughter* I mean, there’s a Shannen Doherty [OR Note: She was a star on the 1990-2000 TV series, Beverly Hills, 90210] joke in there, come on. That’s a little crazy. But the thing is people [who were] really upset about a lot of those pop culture references at the time, I said ‘look, Lunar is an alternate Earth essentially. It’s an alternate time line, or just a future/past thing. So they are relevant if they were sort of encoded in the culture of that time.’ So it wasn’t that big of a deal.
But nowadays, if I did the Sega CD one again, I would definitely tone [it] down. Especially calling out specific actor names, specific show names, that just wouldn’t happen. It would be reference or catch phrase or something. For example, in Summon Night 5, the one we’re doing now, there’s a line in that demo I put up on YouTube where the bad guy, who’s kind of like [a] creepy pedophile guy, he makes a reference to the Catch A Predator thing: “Next thing you know, you’ll ask me to have a seat.” And then Calis says something like ‘There’s no pitcher of lemonade here.’ Well, its obviously a reference to Dateline’s To Catch A Predator but I’m not calling out the show specifically. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t, and it still makes sense. And that’s kind of the philosophy that I’ve gravitated towards.
” Even if people haven’t played the game, if they have downloaded and patched it, they are like ‘I don’t like that game, I don’t want to buy it’ or whatever.
It maybe turns them off to buying it, or if they like the game, they have played it and they don’t need to buy it. So with numbers that low, it absolutely affects the sales potential of the game. “
OR: Okay, [now] shifting gears a bit, fansubbing. The Mother 3 Fan Translation Project had dedicated themselves to creating an English ROM patch for Mother 3, which they did in 2008, and they put it out for anyone to access. XSEED, when they released Ys: The Oath In Felghana and Ys I&II Chronicles, they licensed and used a PC fan translation. And a recent Kickstarter campaign to bring the first two games of the Muv-Luv series said that they were going to use a mixture of dedicated fan translators and professional translators from Japan.
When games are often being fan translated months or even years before they are licensed and published in the States, and these fan translations are put online, does this have an impact on what games GaijinWorks will localize or how these games are localized? Are they taken into account?
VI: They are only taken into account [in] that if there is a fan translation and a ROM patch, [then] it usually isn’t done. You just don’t do the game because the people that are really hardcore wanting it, and granted that there are enough people out that would still support a retail release just to get more of them, but it definitely takes the edge off of the market. If you’re talking about a niche title like a PSP or even a PS Vita game, it kills enough of the market to make it not worth doing.
OR: I know that with some of your games for GaijinWorks, you talk about trying to reach the low ten-thousand or less to make the game profitable.
VI: That’s for Class Of Heroes, yeah.
OR: Yes. And so you say that with fan translations, you wouldn’t be able to make those numbers?
VI: Well, for sure. Those numbers and you have a ROM patch and a fan translation that is sent out to thousands of people. Even if people haven’t played the game, if they have downloaded and patched it, they are like ‘I don’t like that game, I don’t want to buy it’ or whatever.
It maybe turns them off to buying it, or if they like the game, they have played it and they don’t need to buy it. So with numbers that low, it absolutely affects the sales potential of the game.
The low ten-thousands are Class Of Heroes numbers and Summon Nights 5 has to be more than that. And moving forward, we need to get into the twenty-thirty-forty-fifty thousand range so that we can get back to doing the full localization, where we have the voice acting and everything. Cutting the voices of Summon Night 5 killed me.
OR: In your opinion, are there any benefits to having a fan sub out in the wild before a game is localized?
VI: When there is this small of a market, I don’t think so. I think a bigger market, like the Snatcher [series] or something like that, that is a much larger potential market. I don’t think the fansub would hurt as much if it was ever released. I think it might actually benefit it for awareness. But when you’re talking a niche title that is so niche that it’s in the sub-ten thousand figures, a ROM patch hurts it.
” The only time we’ve ever had an issue where we had to take something out that we did [add was] with double entendres in Alundra. “
OR: Going back to Lunar, in Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete, Hiro was voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa (the voice of Heero [Yuy] from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing and Tamahome in Fushigi Yugi) and Lemina Ausa was voiced by Megumi Hayashibara (who’s known as the voice of Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop). Those are some seriously legendary Japanese voice actors.
When you’re localizing a game and you’re using English voices, how much does the original Japanese performance [influence] who you look for to fulfill the role or how the voice is performed?
VI: It depends. It’s really situational. Sometimes there’s Japanese voices that fit the ‘look’ of the character really well. It’s like ‘Well, that was cast amazing, I need to do the same thing.’ Other times, its like, it must be a cultural thing because it doesn’t match at all, it doesn’t match what he or she looks [like]. And [in] those cases, I do something else. But it really is trying to match the voice to the look of the character. I don’t want to have a really deep voice coming out of a really thin character. It has to match the way the character looks. In Japan, they kind of threw some of those rules out of the window, you’ll have somebody doing a voice that’s like ‘Holy crap, that doesn’t sound like what I imagined that character sounds [like] at all.’
OR: Can you not get away with that here in the States?
VI: Well, you could, but I think the whole idea of casting the voice well so that it sounds like it looks is to help with the suspension of disbelief. Because, if it’s too dissonant, too different, then that’s one more thing to not get attached to that character. I want you to love every character, or if you don’t love [him/her], I want it to be on purpose. Like they’re grating, they’re annoying, I want them to be awful. But if the characters by and large are ones that I want you to identify with and enjoy and be sad when the game’s over because you won’t be able to be around them anymore unless you play it again, casting the voice to sound like [how] the character looks is really an important part of that.
OR: Do you have an example of where a character was originally portrayed in Japanese that you then moved completely away from when you localized it to an American market?
VI: No. Not off hand, no. It doesn’t really stick out that much.
