Unless you count most of the pre-existing demon designs, nope. Dude's gone incognito for a while.
Regardless, excited to see what you come up with next!
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Persona Community Thread |OT4| The Golden Number
- Thread starter Dantis
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Regardless, excited to see what you come up with next!
Green Mamba
Member
Kaneko didn't even do SMTIV, what's up with that. That seems wrong.
Back to Persona 3: I have taken to calling Yukari "Peninsula" ("Yuka-tan"). I should write for Ikutsuki.
Back to Persona 3: I have taken to calling Yukari "Peninsula" ("Yuka-tan"). I should write for Ikutsuki.
Makoto Yuki
Banned
Agreed, it's actually kinda funny if you think about it. We are so eager for these games we know so little about.
The less you know about something, the more you can project onto something, the more it's going to match what you want out of it.
Makoto Yuki
Banned
I dunno about that. There haven't been many games that actually match what I want out of them, so I try to keep my expectations at a reasonable level. Usually I just accept the game for what it is, hopefully the experience was enjoyable overall. It's fun being excited for things though.
Green Mamba
Member
Oh--in Persona 3, what defines if a party member gets sick or not? Seems random.
SloaneRisette
Member
If I'm correct it's just how long you're in Tartarus.
Lord Scrambles
Member
If they die in Tartarus and aren't revived they'll be sick for a few days afterwards, I'm pretty sure. What I have no idea about, even after playing the game twice, is what determines if they feel great or not.
Makoto Yuki
Banned
That makes 3 of us, that's enough for a club right.
CrazyTank940
Member
KI (always seemed to me a game more fun to play than watch. I do want to play the game for myself one day though, and I'll probably watch it anyway) and Injustice (was never too fond on the game. Idea good, I just wasn't so hot on the end product. Also watching it last evo was a snoozefest)
snow in jamaica
Member
it happens on certain days i think
Today's PQ videos are totally going to be about Fuuka and Rise this time.
Tried to make a connection between these two Hashino statements earlier:
But I remembered that we had reached a consensus that the August 2013 quote could be interpreted in different ways and that it was probably just referring to November 24 since that happened. So... yeah. Pointless.
Tried to make a connection between these two Hashino statements earlier:
August 2013 said:
December 2013 said:
But I remembered that we had reached a consensus that the August 2013 quote could be interpreted in different ways and that it was probably just referring to November 24 since that happened. So... yeah. Pointless.
Can the great Flux be wrong again?! Lets find out on PersonaFridays!
Oh, right...There's a reason why even now Google auto-completes her name to "Amanda Winn Lee alcohol," more than a decade later.
Upupupupu~
I played that certain game in Japanese for the first time a few months ago and I'm very curious to see how NISA went about translating one of the references in particular. While I wasn't all that keen on how the fan patch translated much of the game from what I saw after I beat that original version, there was one very brazen late game reference to that certain series that I thought they handled quite beautifully. Would love to see what they "official" take on that dialog turned out to be; easily one of my favorite comedy bits in a thoroughly morbidly funny game.
Ha, I tend to try to account for alternate possibilities, but the new PQ characters had totally escaped my mind. If there are a couple of new PQ character videos today, then it has to be Fuuka and Rise.
Kinda interesting that they don't post them at set times each Friday.
Upupupupu~
I played that certain game in Japanese for the first time a few months ago and I'm very curious to see how NISA went about translating one of the references in particular. While I wasn't all that keen on how the fan patch translated much of the game from what I saw after I beat that original version, there was one very brazen late game reference to that certain series that I thought they handled quite beautifully. Would love to see what they "official" take on that dialog turned out to be; easily one of my favorite comedy bits in a thoroughly morbidly funny game.
If you don't mind, could you explain what you didn't like about the fan translation, at least from a linguistic perspective? It seems like quite a few people liked it, though obviously most of them wouldn't have a prior frame of reference. I'm super-fascinated with localization processes in general, and though I've managed to stay spoiler-free in terms of plot details, I couldn't help but look at some comparison screenshots between the interfaces and typeface choices. I think I prefer what Poject Zetsubou did with its design changes better, though that's obviously secondary to the actual substance.
Upupupupu~
I played that certain game in Japanese for the first time a few months ago and I'm very curious to see how NISA went about translating one of the references in particular. While I wasn't all that keen on how the fan patch translated much of the game from what I saw after I beat that original version, there was one very brazen late game reference to that certain series that I thought they handled quite beautifully. Would love to see what they "official" take on that dialog turned out to be; easily one of my favorite comedy bits in a thoroughly morbidly funny game.
It's quite something, I just played it for about 4 hours straight. haha
TurnipFritters
Member
*content in source link has not been vetted, please click at own risk
Makoto Yuki
Banned
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It must be the protein.
I'm not a fan of Knuckle's new design at all.
SO GOOD. Stooooooooooooooooked for this game.
Makoto Yuki
Banned
I just realized something. What's up with the Q in Persona Q?
Qross over?
Right there with you buddy. Can't wait to try it.
Qross over?
Right there with you buddy. Can't wait to try it.
It's a play off the Japanese name for Etrian Odyssey (Sekaiju no Meikyuu or SQ shortened) as well as a play off the word "Cute"
I wonder if they'll localize it as Persona Odyssey, since that's kind of the equivalent title. Although I guess not since they already are using an English title.
Red The Hunter
Member
*content in source link has not been vetted, please click at own risk
I guess were figured out that Akihiko and Knuckles were training buddies in secret over those three years since Persona 3.
We should have a new spin off called Sega Fit, staring Akihiko and Knuckles.
Really excited about it because of the P3 characters, that story is definitely getting played first.
Red The Hunter
Member
I think they'll keep the name, and plus the Q can stand for Quest in this situation.
Just so we're clear, I'm probably not going to bother proofreading this since those Persona Q trailers aren't going to subtitle themselves, so if it seems like I've written anything wacky, that's not probably not intentional! Anyway...
Sure, I'm always happy to talk shop about translation and localization philosophies and whatnot. So I think a lot of my gripes deep down just boil down to different translators having different philosophies. Dangan Ronpa's obviously a super verbose and tonally pretty literary-sounding game, so it's only natural that what I get out of it as a translator and think is worth conveying in English is going to be different from how other people will handle that same source material. That's doubly the case when you're dealing with translators that work in pretty conflicting schools of thought about how they work to turn Japanese into English. I'm of the Agness Kaku school, essentially; she's responsible for translating most of the Katamari Damacy games and other miscellaneous stuff like Metal Gear Solid on the GBC, including the unlockable radio drama for the latter. Anyway, she's natively billingual in both languages and her approach is about the least technical way you can go about video game localization, which is to essentially not worry so much about the specific semantics of the original Japanese text and instead just focus the core sentimentality of each and every sentence. Basically this amounts to just outright rewriting stuff in English to sound most natural without obviously losing the critical details that make up a game's narrative. I can't say I'm as good as her, but I feel I'm similarly liberal in how I approach most documents that aren't technical projects and therefore don't need strict semantic consistency; I want any prose or dialogue or whatever it is I'm working on to be true to the spirit of the original work, but not necessarily true to every word per se. Basically I want to produce as smooth of a translated product as possible so it can stand on its own and be enjoyed for reasons similar to how the original version was, too, without being beholden necessarily to certain linguistic quirks. That goes for the Hashino interview as much as the trailers and fiction I work on elsewhere; I want Japanese thought and philosophy to be accessible to an English-speaking audience on their own terms and since so much of the language is abstract I think a thorough reconstruction, rather than a more robotic copy-paste job is the only way to get things done most of the time. There are exceptions where I'd be a lot more literal, of course, but it's mostly for technical documents and the like where you don't really want or need something for text to have personality.
Anyway, both of the Dangan Ronpa games are enormously difficult games to translate well and much of that has to do with how very, very aware the original Japanese writing is that it's a Japanese video game being made in Japan. It's playful with its status not only in terms of what it references like what was being discussed earlier, but also in terms of its raw language; Dangan Ronpa's prose is brilliant about manipulating player reactions in Japanese, doing everything from playing up different sorts of slang and linguistic quirks to define character personalities to outright breaking grammatical rules to better set the tone in the narration. Here's a brief list of what I think are the most aggressively Japanese parts and therefore the ones bound to prove the most troublesome to make work in English:
- The voice actors in the game are all pretty famous in Japan and were basically directed to just play characters using their most iconic voices without changing them at all. The protagonist and Monokuma are the most prominent of this bunch, with their voice actresses having played Shinji on Evangelion and Doraemon, respectively. This is all very much so by design; when Japanese players hear these voices, they often start to think that the characters they're playing in Dangan Ronpa have similar tropes and personalities characterizing them, only to routinely have that be upended when they show their true colors. Dangan Ronpa is very aware of who's likely in Japan to pick up a PSP adventure game in 2010 and they prey upon the players' memories of those voice actors to mess with their expectations to no end. Those voice actors help define the characters' Japanese identities in ways that would be logistically very difficult to reproduce in a localization.
- A lot of characters either speak very specific regional dialects or otherwise deliberately speak in an obtuse way so as to compel players to associate them with specific stereotypes. These stereotypes are used in large part to throw people off those characters' trails during investigation scenes and whatnot where appearances are everything. You want to doubt them, but you feel you have them figured out to a t because of the way they carry themselves and, when they have voice acting, how they articulate their lines. That tends to not really be the case more often than not the further you get into the game.
- The raw prose of the narration and whatnot often isn't particularly straightforward. Characters will regularly say one thing, but possibly mean another thing entirely based on how it's visually represented in the text, something that's only doable in Japanese because of its three separate writing systems. And if it's not doing that, then it's breaking linguistic rules of all sorts of emphasize a point. Maybe a character is feeling so overwhelmed that they can't even render the text correctly or they repeat a specific word over and over again to emphasize their thoughts. Rules are broken in a lot of ways that you can't readily replicate in other languages, essentially, with a lot of the specifics beyond what I've mentioned only being readily apparent to other Japanese speakers with access to that script.
- References abound to Japanese media, much of it never translated for overseas audience. This is a significantly bigger issue in Super Dangan Ronpa 2, where an entire case is irrevocably tied to such a reference, but it's present in Dangan Ronpa 1 and they're rarely as recognizable as something like the Persona references it occasionally doles out.
Basically the only easy thing Dangan Ronpa has going for it is that its basic plot beats are readily conveyable across languages. The murders themselves are complicated, naturally, but none of them in this first game are overtly Japanese in terms of customs or anything and, that one case aside, that more or less remains the case in the sequel, too. You will not miss out on super critical plot developments as long as somebody isn't outright mistranslating something and mixing up words. Dangan Ronpa's biggest localization hurdle, then, is how to go about conveying its delightfully weird personality in an accessible way when so much of it relies heavily on how it's a Japanese game specifically. Things about how that game look and feel are inherently going to have to change when another language enters the picture, so it's ultimately an argument about what aspects are conveyable in the new language, which need to be changed, and how can both work together to make a cohesive whole.
I'm basically not keen on Project Zetsubou's translation style because I think they obsessed too much over making sure the overtly Japanese aspects remained visibly in the game to an aggressive extent, rather than working within the confines of English language and "culture," to put it broadly, to make Dangan Ronpa shine on its terms with a new audience. Like I said, I didn't play the translation patch and I've only seen bits and pieces of that final material, but from what I've seen and read on their blog from their translators, it's almost like they made this mish-mash that tries to be as true to how the Japanese language quirks functioned specifically in that version while still forcing it all to function in English, giving the game an identity crisis of sorts. I would rather those translators and writers have focused on making the dialog and whatnot toy with players' expectations and whatnot in ways on English can, essentially subscribing to the core methodology of how Dangan Ronpa was written, but not the actual output specifically. Basically, less worrying about how, say, Mondo's title as a student references a very specific sort of biker gang so much as just making him sound like he comes out of a biker movie. The characters and prose in an English translation for Dangan Ronpa need to speak and evoke feelings from English-only players in terms that they understand; it's critical to still understand how it all functions in Japanese, but it should only at best inform the basic tone and flow of the things and not the final output. And if something is so irrevocably Japanese that it shouldn't be removed from the English language, then the translation should still be worked around in such a way that English readers are naturally able to enter that mentality, instead of just translating it as straightforward as possible and throwing as many translation notes as possible at the game as has seemingly been the case with Project Zetsubou's approach.
I guess in a way it all actually does boil down to my having issues with semantics, but it's how Japanese semantics have been transplanted into English, rather than playing with English semantics to make the script feel unique and fun and wonderful in English, if that makes sense. You need the original Japanese as a basic compass to point you towards where and how things should be heading overall, but you lose a lot of soul when translating if you treat it as too much of an infallible bible of sorts. Dangan Ronpa deserves better than that, but it's a really hard thing to pull off well. It's an intimidating game to translate and I'm not trying to diminish the accomplishments of all of these different people that have worked on it officially and unofficially. I wouldn't even dare to presume I would do any better of a job inherently; I'd love to work on one of them, but I see a lot of lines that even my inner translator is stumped on how I'd make them work well in English. They're one of those games where, frustrating for players overseas though it may be, it'd probably be best to just hand it off to one or a handful of really top notch translators at most, tell them they have a few years to hash it Trails in the Sky-style, and just take it bit by bit until that English script is as great as it can be. Dangan Ronpa was written by Japanese writers with very serious chops and it deserves that same amount of attention and skill in a localized form.
But at the same time I'm glad that these translated versions do exist in any capacity and that people are getting enjoyment out of them. Spike Chunsoft puts out great work and it's gratifying to see it getting attention overseas. Given the choice between not having a translated version at all and having one I'd personally not be entirely satisfied with personally, I'll happily take the latter since I know not everyone is like me and has that choice to play it in the original language. I actually intend to start doing translation work on promotional material Spike Chunsoft puts out for their games like I do with Atlus stuff and that definitely includes Dangan Ronpa, so I may just yet see soon for myself how I end up tackling a lot of these fun problems I've been seeing the past couple of months. It should be interesting times ahead!
I can provide some spoiler free examples from both games if you're curious about how some of the things I've pointed out actually pan out since I've pretty liberally screencapped both of them and tell you how I'd approach translating them, if you're curious. But I've written a lot already, so I'm fine either way! ;D
Makoto Yuki
Banned
Ahh thank you, everything makes sense now.
Edit: So will the localized game be a play off the Etrian Odyssey title? Will NA receive a localized title like, Persona O, Persona Odyssey, Persona Odd-yssey, Shadows of the long subtitle.
My man!
I think you know which campaign I'm gonna be playing first as well.
Lollipop Dave
Member
What a meaty response, very interesting read!
Just going to add my thanks to Pepsiman for the translations. Really appreciated!
Well... at least somebody liked it?
This laughter is fake. Smedwicks is actually crying inside because it isn't Rise.
I'll draw you Rise in a catsuit, buddy. Don't you worry.
Well... at least somebody liked it?
I maintain that it's actually not really lewd at all.
This laughter is fake. Smedwicks is actually crying inside because it isn't Rise.
I'll draw you Rise in a catsuit, buddy. Don't you worry.
Lollipop Dave
Member
Sure it's not tits-out lewd, but how can you say that when it's clearly a provocative pose.
---------------------------------
My subtitles for the Yukari trailer are up. I'll leave it up to one of you to disseminate it in wherever the trailer thread for this week is while I get to work on Junpei!
Makoto Yuki
Banned
Awesome thanks. Also your previous post was filled with a plethora of interesting insights into the Japanese to English translations process. Sounds tough, especially when you want to be faithful to the spirit of the source material. Great read as usual!
Listening to the P4 soundtrack, it's interesting how different it is to the later P4 stuff (Even the stuff Meguro has done). I really like how Hirata sings the tracks. Pursuing My True Self is a good example, when she sings the "Loading, loading, loading, quickly reaching maximum capacity; warning, warning, warning, gonna short-circuit my identity" lines. Sounds really laid back and disinterested, which really fits the tone of the game. Backside of The TV (The most underrated track ever) and Signs of Love are good examples of it too.
In the later stuff, she sings in a more normal, poppy way.
Maybe!
In the later stuff, she sings in a more normal, poppy way.
Maybe!
Lollipop Dave
Member
.
One of my favourite tracks on the soundtrack, for sure.
I must have listened to it hundreds of times by now.
Lollipop Dave
Member
I never understood why that song title got a separate translation for the western version.
A lot of tracks did, I think.
Like The Battle for Everyone's Souls is called Battle Hymn of The Soul in the US version.
Lollipop Dave
Member
Yep, looking at the song titles now it seems it goes both ways quite a fair bit, like a ton of songs keep the original Japanese English title but then say Theater becomes Striptease in the west version. Be nice to know if there is a reason for it, or they just thought the 'new' titles would come across better to a western audience.
Koro cute as fuck...