Xanadu II Translation Development Blog

[Black Tiger]

If people like 1 pixel text overlapping, I'll try add a THE to the English logo when I have a chance to work at my computer.

Adding a horizontal THE which doesn't overlap would rrquire as much extra space on the opposite end to be centered.

A Zelda style logo could be dobe, with tony text above Xanadu, but it would look like it's a Xabadu game.

[elmer]

Also, that should probably be changed to something like "The Last Dragon Slayer" or "The Final Dragon Slayer". I think what they want to say is that this is going to be the final game in the Dragon Slayer series.

I thought that "The Last of Dragon Slayer" sounded hokey until it was explained to me that "Dragon Slayer" is the name of the sword, and that the continuity in the rather-disjointed series is proved by the sword itself.

As such ... "The Last of Dragon Slayer" actually seems quite appropriate to me, now.

If I'm understanding it right, the series of games is named after the sword itself, and "Xanadu" is the name of the planet/world where Falcom set this series of games.

I could definitely live with this. Maybe it's because the Japanese is easy on my eyes anyway, but this looks like a very tasteful compromise.

As Vimtoman said "Maybe lose the II on the English text.".

But still ... something doesn't seem right.

If we were just doing subtitles on the voice-overs and leaving other Japanese text in the game, then I could understand going with the subtitled logo.

But if we're going to the trouble of trying to do an English dub, and we're doing a lot of work to replace every other piece of Japanese text within the game, then leaving this one seems ... a little lazy of us.

IMHO, it's definitely not what would have happened if the game had been professionally localized back-in-the-day.

**************

Moving forward, I've figured out how all the character's names in the Xanadu 2 Opening Visual actually work, and they can now be replaced.




They're all stored in a black-and-white (1bpp) image that should be easy to change into English (but there are some size restrictions).

[SamIAm]

I thought that "The Last of Dragon Slayer" sounded hokey until it was explained to me that "Dragon Slayer" is the name of the sword, and that the continuity in the rather-disjointed series is proved by the sword itself.

As such ... "The Last of Dragon Slayer" actually seems quite appropriate to me, now.

If I'm understanding it right, the series of games is named after the sword itself, and "Xanadu" is the name of the planet/world where Falcom set this series of games.

If the meaning is more along the lines of "the sword's last outing" than "the final game in the series", then there is certainly no problem story-wise. However...and I'm open to discussion on this...I think you would need to say "The Last of the Dragon Slayer". If you leave out "the", then Dragon Slayer becomes a more directly addressed entity like Peter or Mark, and I have to leave out "the" everywhere just as I would never say "The Peter" or "The Mark".

"Hand over Dragon Slayer!"

"We better find Dragon Slayer."

"Only Dragon Slayer can defeat him."

It kind of reminds me of the way Tolkien had weapons with real names in The Lord of the Rings, like Glamdring, and treated them almost like living beings. Here, though, I have to say that I still prefer the sound of the Dragon Slayer. Like I said, I'm open to discussion on this.

However, do we have the space to insert a "the" there?

Japanese people have a terrible time grasping the proper use of "a" and "the" since they don't exist in the Japanese language, by the way.

Also, for what it's worth, I've never read any explanation for why "Xanadu" is in the title. It might be out there somewhere. I assume it's the name of the world, but I wouldn't say I'm confident about that.

As Vimtoman said "Maybe lose the II on the English text.".

But still ... something doesn't seem right.

If we were just doing subtitles on the voice-overs and leaving other Japanese text in the game, then I could understand going with the subtitled logo.

But if we're going to the trouble of trying to do an English dub, and we're doing a lot of work to replace every other piece of Japanese text within the game, then leaving this one seems ... lazy.

IMHO, it's definitely not what would have happened if the game had been professionally localized back-in-the-day.

I agree.

I'm really curious to see what it looks like when "The" gets put in there and the letters get squished some more or done in a different style entirely.

Moving forward, I've figured out how all the character's names in the Xanadu 2 Opening Visual actually work, and they can now be replaced.

They're all stored in a black-and-white (1bpp) image that should be easy to change into English (but there are some size restrictions).

Nice work. 

I'll PM you. Those are the names of each character with the name of the actor who provided the voice.

If people like 1 pixel text overlapping, I'll try add a THE to the English logo when I have a chance to work at my computer.

Adding a horizontal THE which doesn't overlap would rrquire as much extra space on the opposite end to be centered.

A Zelda style logo could be dobe, with tony text above Xanadu, but it would look like it's a Xabadu game.

I'm thinking a vertical "The" probably wouldn't look so hot, so let's stick with horizontal

I'm no artist, but for these longer titles, I would be fine with basically tossing the style of the original altogether. It's all right if it doesn't look as much like a proper logo, per se, as long as it looks pretty and appropriate as a title.

I'd start experimenting with thin cursive if I knew where to begin.

[ccovell]

By the way, "The Last of..." is often (from my experience) a poor Japanese mistranslation for what really should be "The End of..."  (...末 / ...の最後 / ...の終わり)

It does sound hokey because it's unnatural.

The Last of... usually means the final one in a series of the same things.  The End of... means the last period in a single one's life.

[SamIAm]

Yeah, that's the feeling I had, too. My gut tells me that "The Last of Dragon Slayer" is still referring to the series, but for all I know, they might have meant it to mean both the series and the sword.

[NightWolve]

Apart from the Credits Roll, I think that's all of the text-in-graphics for Xanadu 1 ... and the credits can wait for a while.

Yeah, we never did get the Ys IV credits roll translated actually. No motivation as nobody cared and it would be the most difficult task remaining as compressed graphics blocks never needed to be dealt with for anything else.

[spenoza]

The Final Dragon Slayer would take up a little less space, and convey the same meaning without the confusion over naming.

[elmer]

Yeah, we never did get the Ys IV credits roll translated actually. No motivation as nobody cared and it would be the most difficult task remaining as compressed graphics blocks never needed to be dealt with for anything else.

Hahaha ... that makes so much sense! 

But in this case, the Xanadu 1 Credits are already in English ... but there are some spelling mistakes, and we're changing a couple of Falcom's Engrish names.

My terrible programmer-OCD is going to make me figure it out and fix it, and nobody, absolutely nobody, is going to notice or care.

I've had to keep the lunacy in check for years of commercial development ... but this is where I get to do things to my (totally excessive) standards of "right".

That's why I love working with SamIAm ... he's wonderfully obsessed with all of the little (absolutely crucial) details that make something "AAA". That's a rare find.

[NightWolve]

My terrible programmer-OCD is going to make me figure it out and fix it, and nobody, absolutely nobody, is going to notice or care. I've had to keep the lunacy in check for years of commercial development ... but this is where I get to do things to my (totally excessive) standards of "right".

That's cool, the projects are very lucky to have found you. If I was as good as you, I would too.

[Black Tiger]

Here is a version of the logo with THE that is 1 pixel narrower than the original.










Here's a version with the darker outline coloring all of the THE (no longer faithful to the overall coloring scheme):

[elmer]

Here is a version of the logo with THE that is 1 pixel narrower than the original.

That looks great, thanks! 

That'll work fine on the title screen, but as I pointed out here ...

http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=19674.msg457215#msg457215

We've only got 240-pixels maximum width for the logo on the Opening Visual.

I guess that one option would be to just chop off the leading "The" on that Opening Visual, that would make it fit.

Would that bother anyone?

[Vimtoman]

I prefer it without the "The"

[SamIAm]

We've only got 240-pixels maximum width for the logo on the Opening Visual.

I guess that one option would be to just chop off the leading "The" on that Opening Visual, that would make it fit.

Would that bother anyone?

Surely we can come up with a more elegant solution.

Black Tiger, I know you spent a long time on that original graphic, but in all honesty, both the "of" and the "the" are a bit too small now, and the "the" especially looks a bit on the tacked-on side.

I'm a lousy artist, and this might sound totally naive, but based on a little goofing around with Gimp over the original background, it looks to me like 240x32 is enough to fit "The Legend of Xanadu II" comfortably enough, even with all the letters of a uniform size, as long one is willing to go with a different style. We have a few colors available for shading or outlining...elmer could probably tell us if it's an option to change the palette, too...and we can keep it simple.

Here's a quick-n-dirty mock-up. It's just Palatino Linotype Bold Italic with an outline and no shading. Let me emphasize that I don't think think this is beautiful or stylistically ideal so much as I just think it demonstrates what's possible within our size limitations. Although I see now that I accidentally made it 33 pixels tall, the important thing is that it's only 232 pixels wide.



A prettier font and some hand shading/touching up, and I think we can do this. It's fine to make the "The" and "of" smaller, too, as long as it's in moderation.

EDIT - Rebalanced the sizes just a bit. This is 239x32:

[elmer]

Here are Black Tiger's logos with taller letters for "THE" and "OF", and with a little bit of rounding on the "A" in Xanadu, and straightening of the stems on the "X" and "A" ...






The Xanadu 1 logo now fits within the space that it needs to.

The Xanadu 2 logo is still a couple of pixels too wide ... but here's the interesting thing ... the interior of the Xanadu 2 logo just fits within the 240-pixel limit that's needed in order to make the "highlight-in-the-dark" effect work.

The means that if I can screw around with the display code in a pretty major way ... then I just might (if I'm very, very lucky) be able to get it to work.

Unfortunately, there's no free space in the code that can be used to abuse it in that way, which would mean changing the location of the code file on the CD (i.e. it's going to be a lot of work).

It would also require doing lots of extra moving around of data in VRAM that the code does not do now ... which could easily break things, or just plain not work.

<EDIT 3RD TIME> (to fix a couple of outline pixels)

A small mod to the bottom of the "II" in Xanadu 2 to make it a little more balanced, and different sizes for the "THE" and the "OF".

I think that I prefer the bottom one, but I'm not sure.

[Black Tiger]

That updated logo for The Legend of Xanadu looks much better than I expected and after having some time away to gain perspective, the The Legend of Xanadu II logo looks much better than I thought. The smaller OF isn't just to save space. Having it match the THE makes the THE feel less tacked on and balances out the logo overall.

If the latest logo was accepted more or less (I'd like to try improving the smaller "II", THE and OF and misc can be adjusted), I planned to make an alternate for the cinema which needs to be 240 pixels wide. I was going to re-sculpt the "II" to remove a couple more pixels. Basically giving it edged corners instead of pointy ones would make everything 240 wide. If it looked good enough, the same could be used for the title screen.

But Sam really doesn't want the logo and a faithful style isn't a priority for him. I don't want to spend much time on something that is going to be tossed in favor of generic font text. That last mockup of his and comment really shows how radically different we view aesthetics. I think that a smaller version of the same font like that looks ridiculous. Like something out of a photoshop disaster.

I'm not just desperate to have something I worked on appear in a game. LoXII has been important to me for almost 20 years now, which is why I put so much work into my guide back then and have been telling everone about the game ever since. I want a faithful logo because I care about the game and want it to be a step above generic localizations. If I had enough free time, I could post lots of examples of game logos with similar small text paired with stylized text.

If you guys can agree that you want to make this logo work, I'll continue working on it.




EDIT: Here is a good example off the top of my head: