Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest, any SEGA CD title by Working Designs), this approach to localization may very well have been the norm for many years, not the exception. Being aware of other localization efforts before this time (i.e. Bush jokes in Skies of Arcadia (none that I recall, anyway).
I mean, at least there weren’t any ham-fisted political lectures or George W. While it may be frustrating to read these admissions, I personally find it difficult to be retroactively angry with Vorlick or his localization team. Vorlick also discusses removing tobacco and alcohol references, censoring violence and female costumes, and deliberately trying to “emulate style of nonchalant humor.” The “Vorlik Blade” in the Japanese version of the game was called the “Ryuukan Kizanken” (roughly translating to “Ryuukan’s Demon-Killing Blade”) and the Lucich was actually called a “Puranina”.Ĭertainly some game creators and developers have taken liberties over the years to include personal references in their games ( Goldeneye’s Klobb gun being named after Ken Lobb and a lead NBA Jam arcade developer including his son in the game as Air Dog come to mind), but in terms of translation, this begs the question of whether the localization team has sufficient “ownership” of a game to make these kinds of changes. Yeah, we asked the team and they said go for it. Timmus the Gunner was named after my friend Tim, who was the guy who got me my first industry job Haha Mabel the Raider was an assistant lead (Mabel Chung)… He recommended Vorlik Blade… and he wanted a creature named after him (Lucich slimes) and then he went around telling everyone I chose the most powerful weapon and gave him the weak monster haha (as a joke, of course)…Ī lot of the characters were named after various QA people, etc. He said we should name stuff after ourselves. Haha there’s a story behind that! I had a cowriter named Chris Lucich (he did the English version of Panzer Dragoon Saga) Skies of Arcadia is my favorite game of all time… I know the Vorlik Blade is named after you after all and you don’t have a particularly common name. Vorlick also discussed how the team took liberties naming things in the game, including naming weapons and enemies after themselves: We thought it might be a little creepy for US audiences. We mapped out the big story beats in each scene, and then just watched the cutscenes and ad-libbed what we imagined each character would say, and then rewrote a lot of the dialog completely. we basically sat down, I did a rough translation of the text, and then threw away the Japanese text. I mean, he’s still obsessed, but he was saying like Galcian’s name like every other sentence in the Japanese version… I played the game in Japanese too and it’s interesting what you guys changed, but it was the meaning that was more important than what’s being translated sometimes after all.Īlthough, there were some interesting changes, like how Ramirez’s obsession with Galcian was downtoned near the end… Here is an excerpt from the interview (via Sankaku Complex): To put it simply, Vorlick admits that the localizers took a skeletal outline of the major story beats in each scene, “threw away the Japanese text” and then “ad-libbed what… each character would say, and then rewrote a lot of the dialog completely.” The interview is from a now defunct fan site titled ESOArcadia (archived here), in which Klayton Vorlick, a translator who worked on Skies of Arcadia (aka Eternal Arcadia, SEGA Dreamcast 2000), discusses how the team approached the localization process. A 2015 interview with a Skies of Arcadia translator has recently started to gain new life online via social media.
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