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The story behind MGS2's localization
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Interesting, though maybe a little more "inside baseball" than I care to read. I totally buy Kojima as temperamental auteur who blames translators for the Americans "not getting it."
But in the end, even if Kojima's writing and plotting suck, I don't really care a whole lot what some other writer I've never heard of thinks. Her perspectives on Konami's writing I don't doubt. But there's an astonishing lack of perspective to say that Kojima's silly commando opera playing cops and robbers with other people's militaries is disrespectful, and then saying this:AK: "I saw that some people did Katamari photoshops, after hurricane Katrina. There was just this huge mess, and people standing there looking devastated at the ruin of their home, and someone drew a Katamari with the little Prince. And I thought, you know, that's actually pretty cool. Our world IS a damn mess, and so I had a series of ideas: the Prince comes in and cleans up these lonely people's minds. Basically people who are possibly descending into, you know, this madness, and he cleans it up.
Letting first world video gamers solve the ruined lives of poor people and citizens of war-torn countries via Katamari minigames isn't the exact same thing? I don't think people who have lost all of their worldly possessions are in a position to play your patronizing videogame intended as catharsis.
Also, I guess Ryan whatshisname, the MGS4 Konami rep sort of threw her under the bus re: the translation or something? I've played the game in both, and at the end of the day, no localizations have ever actually stopped people from enjoying a good game, or even deciphering a good plot-- gamers are diligent in digging to get to that stuff. My personal favorite is whoever did the subtitles for the MGS3 trailers. The translations for the speeches The Boss gives were great. Also, hearing Revolver Ocelot pull a knife on Big Boss and growl: "Kuso... Amerikajin me!" get translated as "Filthy American dog!" put a smile on my face because it was just so perfect. Translators may disagree, but they have reasons for making their decisions. Almost all fans have no idea what the fuck they're talking about, and thus the fanboy mob's opinions on localizations are irrelevant to me. -
I don't even think about localisation when it comes to foreign games, and I sure as hell payed it no mind in MGS2, whose plot would be absurd no matter how you sliced it. But MGS2 is a pretty great game regardless.
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Neat article, thanks for the link.
It actually sounds like a story from a game tester; like'"we found this problem but they said we didn't have time to fix it" or "we said this was a problem but they said it was supposed to be like that". -
Having worked as a production assistant, game tester, and creative writer for various video games, I can tell you, especially when dealing with Japanese devs, they will tell you to go fuck yourself if they don't feel like fixing something. Everything is fucking as designed, even really poor English.
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It's my understanding that American devs will take the "go fuck yourself" route pretty often too. Though I don't know if there's some additional "don't visibly question the guy above you" stuff at play when working for the Japanese.
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It's true that American devs say "as designed" as well, but not nearly as much as the Japanese ones in my experience. Furthermore, the Japanese ones don't give two shits if the dialogue makes sense in English and even the American producers putting pressure on them fixed nothing. Which is why Armored Core 2 has the word, "Connection" spelled wrong even though I made a million bugs on it. Grr.
The thing that's unique to the Japanese developers is the weird lies they make up when they just want to say no. A good example is that the American company I was working for was interested in releasing Frame Gride (sort of Armored Core meets Escaflowne) in the US. From Soft didn't want to do it. They insisted they "lost the source code" of a game that had just come out in Japan a month or two ago. Yeah. Right.
They never just say no, they have to make up some elaborate crap. -
Saying "no" implies that you considered the request, and considered the person, and intentionally decided that the proper response was "go fuck yourself." But if there's a reason then, well, everyone can pretend that you'd totally do it if you could but, well, there's just this thing, you see...
ps: TRANSFARRING -
That's definitely consistent with what I've heard people say about Japan in general - that they're culturally acclimated to never say "no." At best, they might describe something as "impossible," implying again that it's for reasons outside of their control.
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I say this article linked on /m/, and was then kinda amazed by the amount of misogyny and anger that ensued.
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>surprised by misogyny and anger
>on 4chan
I would wonder why that was even on /m/ in the first place, but I guess the Metal Gears are mechs after all. -
You're really surprised by rotten behavior on 4chan?
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I think he was greedy and found more than he expected to find.
