OMG RPG

The "yelling out moves" thing annoyed me pretty bad when I played it for about 20 minutes at E3. The localization voice work is below the standard I usually expect from a modern Square-Enix title. I'm kind of hoping it makes like Lost Odyssey or Eternal Sonata and offers a Japanese track, since that sort of thing usually sounds less grating in its original language.

(That said, the best language to play Lost Odyssey in is German, so you never know with these things.)

"passed" should be "past." That's kind of a pet peeve of mine.

Hehe thanks. ;) Wrote it last night before hitting the sack. I am lucky that was the only error.

Keeping the readers on their toes, one topic at a time.

Good to know Lynx. I definitely want to go to E3 next year. It is obviously very educational. ;)

I dunno, I kinda like the "Street Fighter" calling-out-move-names thing. It adds a bit of energy and audible impact to the constantly flashing stream of combos, and helps pull the truly special moves out from the rest of the attacks.

Of course, this is judging completely from video clips, when I actually get a chance to *play* the game I may end up with a few choice shouts of my own as I throw the console out the window. We shall see ^_^

@Arturis: Calling out move names is fine with me. It's a classic anime stylization for letting the audience both know what's going on and adding dramatic flair to an action. The problem with localizing it is that English voice actors don't grow up listening to attack calls the way their Japanese counterparts do (since the stylization cropped up in the 70's over there). So, even with a good ADR director, it's often clear the English actors aren't sure what an attack call "should" sound like-- and don't know how often the audience is going to hear that particular clip in a given video game.

It's interesting that you bring up the cultural challenges with localization. I often wonder that more games don't change mechanics based on the region they are localizing for. I know Blizzard had to retexture an entire race when they released World of Warcraft in China because the chinese, so referential to their ancestors, were offended by the fleshless Undead. Is it enough to say "you're American, you wouldn't understand," or should the developers be thinking of the audience, and adapt accordingly?

I'm not sure if it'd be the same thing exactly. When it comes to China, you know what their government is like. You *have* to appease them if you want to release stuff there. As well as considering that they're so steeped in their culture and history it makes sense that something like that might come up.

In America the government just sometimes gets indignant about violence. :V It's kind of a tricky thing but at the same time pretty easy to just have stuff swing over here I feel. Now whether it's done well is the trickier question.

@Mandifesto: That's one hell of an interesting anecdote. A lot of Asian cultures tend toward ancestor-worship, but Korea and Japan don't seem to have issues with zombies in games. Of course, IIRC, China has really different standards for what's okay to depict in fiction than Japan does. (Korea I know a lot less about than I should.)

In practice, most companies that localize games for the US change things a lot as a matter of standard practice. I know NIS alters the scripts of their games extensively, usually totally omitting jokes that reference things unfamiliar to Americans, and then altering other in-game text to contain jokes that weren't originally there.

I've gotten to where I play all of their games on the Japanese track, just so I can pick out where all these little differences are. I don't think NIS America really damages the games like this (though they need to refrain from inserting jokes into scenes meant to be sad). Without these alternations, these games wouldn't be comprehensible at all to the American teenagers who tend to enjoy the gameplay the most.

Ritualized ancestor worship isn't really a part of Japanese culture at all. It is in Korean culture, but as JB suggested, there are differences in institutionalized religion in China and S. Korea just based on their governments.

But Korea also has the strange thing going where the Chinese-influenced ancestor worship is in conflict with the occupation-influenced Christianity. S. Korea in general is just way more Westernized than the Chinese.