A good while back a reader asked about a strange line in Suikoden for the PlayStation. I haven’t played the game myself but I hear it’s full of interesting translation choices, so this is my chance to dig a little deeper into the game! First, the question was about a line in the English version. Basically, a short cutscene begins with a party member named Kirkis saying: After returning from Dwarves’ Village That’s it, there’s no punctuation and none of the other characters respond to his strange outburst at all.
Fans seem to be curious about this line, why it cuts off, and why it sounds like Kirkis is suddenly narrating the game. The answer is pretty simple: this strange line was intended as a developer note for the localization team, but some sort of formatting or technical mistake caused it to be included as standard text in the game.
The result is that the first line of the scene has the developer note, which pushes every line in the scene down one “slot”: Genso Suikoden (PlayStation) Suikoden (PlayStation) Japanese Version (basic translation) English Version Kirkis: W-what’s that? Kirkis: After returning from Dwarves’ village Gremio: I’m not really sure. Gremio: W-what’s that? Valeria: Isn’t that in the direction of Valeria: I don’t know.
Gremio: N-no! It couldn’t be! Gremio: That direction is Valeria: We were too late Valeria: It couldn’t be Kirkis: No! This isn’t possible! Let’s hurry, [Main Character]!
Kirkis: Too late! From this it’s clear how all of the English lines gets pushed down, which causes each character to say a line that’s not intended for them. This ultimately leads to the final line getting cut from the scene entirely! Off the top of my head I don’t know how common this problem is in other games, although I do know it sort of happened in EarthBound’s localization too – some internal developer text wound up being included with the main script.
It’s been “skipped over” in the final release, but the text is right there and accessible if you’re technically-minded: EarthBound (Super NES). No, it was even worse.
A couple minor NPCs talk in garbage text because their Japanese dialogue wasn’t translated. Some characters randomly start speaking in the third-person. One cat says “Sonya” because they misinterpreted the Japanese meow sound. There are lots of odd-sounding phrases (“The State are a bunch of creeps!”). It will sometimes use five or more exclamation points in a row!!!!!
It’s not a great name in English, obviously, which is a shame—I’ve long believed that with a catchier title and some better marketing, the Suikoden games could have been huge hits outside of.
The NA version somehow removed at least two songs, leaving complete silence. Bosch esi download. Great game, but it’s brought down by the translation.
To be fair, apparently the translator was given less than a month. Under such conditions, no one would be able to do a good job. They must have thought, “Well North Americans probably don’t read the text in JRPGs anyway, so let’s go ahead and give them a crap translation done in under a month.
No one will ever know the difference!” They must have thought people in the States are too stupid to read or don’t want to bore themselves with reading text in a game (completely untrue of course). At least the translation was much better after Suikoden II, which is also the point where the series diverged from its stellar roots and ended up being mediocre (Suikoden III), poor (Suikoden IV) to just plain stupid (Tierkreis), until everything was set right again with Suikoden Vat least until they made that horrid Thousand Year Tapestry and fucked the series into nonexistence. 2020 design v11 crack. Actually, I don’t agree at all that it’s worse. Suikoden 1 is clearly the worse translation all throughout, while Suikoden II’s translation is overall far better, but just contains a few notable mistakes that are REALLY bad.
Essentially, it has less instances of problematic dialogue and text-related glitches. But those few instances are generally hideous and more glaring when they do occur, even if they occur far less. SK1’s translation is terrible with almost every other line. SK2’s translation only has 6 or so notable mistakes, but those mistakes are really bad ones, so much that they stick out more. The original English PS3 release of Ar Nosurge had a similar problem (fixed in patch 1.1, and for the Vita version) that resulted in all the gossip text being wrong. The main script and important dialogue was all fine, but any random NPC you talked to would say utterly random things.
The problem was made even worse by the fact that most of the game’s gossip text spans multiple text boxes. Often enough, you’d talk to somebody and get the last part of one dialogue, followed by the first part of an entirely different dialogue. It was just a complete mess. Your mouse-over text reminded me of MySims Agents for the Wii. Part of MySims Agents, intended to be done partially in parallel with the main game, is having recruits go on Dispatch Missions. You don’t directly control what they do, or even see it, but you get in-game texts from them. (Sometimes, your animal recruits will send what are implied to be pictures, but what you see is text in parentheses giving a quick description.