Anearth Fantasy Stories - Translation Development Blog

[SmokeMonster]

Incredible work, Elmer. This is extremely exciting to see unfolding.

[Gypsy]

This is awesome, I hope it's still happening.

[Sarumaru]

This makes my nipplz SO erect, I can't even...

[cccmar]

Nice! It's looking really good thus far. As to dubbing vs. subs - I personally am not a huge fan of dubbing, but it's of course up to you. You can always decide to do two versions of the patch, with and without dubbing. Still, it's all up to you. Either way, wish you luck with this project.

[Purple1308]

This looks very interesting hopes it goes well


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[spenoza]

They already indicated subbing might be impossible due to memory constraints.

[SignOfZeta]

Subbing PCE games is probably hard or impossible much of the time. Most of these games had no title feature to put translated text into and there is no FMV to super impose it onto so you’d have to alter the very code of the game to print subs, which considering memory restraints probably is impossible in many cases. Keep in mind that a PCE can draw an entire map with less data than I typed into this post. We now think of text as a lightweight feature in a game but back then it wasn’t as trivial.

[spenoza]

I mean, we know there's a whole FOUR giant pages of posts, here, but if you're genuinely interested in the project you should read those 4 pages before posting. That way we don't get a bunch of posts saying, "I'd prefer subs over dubs, please!" when it's been made clear subs are too daunting a technical challenge and don't align with the goals of the project.

[SignOfZeta]

To be clear: dubs are for morons so if it weren’t a technical issue I would for sure be respectfully attempting to persuade the project to alter its chosen directions but we aren’t in a scenario like that. That’s more of a PS2/DC kind thing. As amazing as these guys are at many things it’s really their organizational skills that impress me the most and if people with their shit that well put together are explaining it to me as the best way to do the project then I know I don’t have any better ideas because I can barely translate the manual and I can’t do anything with hacking and I don’t know where my socks are right now.

[esteban]

I can’t find any matching socks, either. Damn.

We weren’t always this inept, were we?

[Necromancer]

To be clear: dubs are for morons...

So are subs.  Real men watch/play in the pure original language only.

[spenoza]

Good dubs are as good or better than good subs. Bad dubs will always be the worst thing ever.

[Black Tiger]

Good dubs are as good or better than good subs. Bad dubs will always be the worst thing ever.

I don't think that a good dub could ever be better than a good sub for something like Tengai Makyou. Unless in Kabukiden the game switches to a dub when you arrive in London and Zeami casts the translation spell.

Even in The Apocalypse IV, being in America doesn't mean that English speaking would be appropriate, because of the nature of the series. Although there is supposed to be a lot of language play which would be difficult or impossible to translate, that's going to be lost in translation either way.

[spenoza]

I am speaking in the abstract, not of any specific case. A good dub makes the game’s content available in the most accessible, natural form, and can provide a lot of nuance and meaning via performance that subtitles cannot. Unless you have a lot of personal experience with the source culture, having the original language and delivery will do little to nothing for you. So for many of us with experience with Japan, it’s great to have the subs and the original speech, but if you’re going for localization that extra info would be better replaced with good quality, content-rich English language lines.

[cccmar]

According to elmer though: "Every scene that is voiced also has a message box with the text of the speech inside it.", meaning there's no need for dubbing in this particular case, unless they really want to do it additionally for the sake of completion, which is what I was referring to (assuming the space limitations don't prove to be overwhelming). There are a few other PCE-CD games like that from what I recall (Dragon Knight 1 & 2 come to mind right now, we wanted to work on them at some point).

Black Tiger mentioned The Apocalypse IV for Saturn/PSP; that one had some voiced cutscenes without subtitles, as far as I recall, so it probably would be more of a pain to work with. And yeah, there are lots of songs and puns in that game, so that would likely be an interesting localization effort, but a rather difficult one nonetheless.