"...Muahahahaha..." When Localization Blows The Mood

I feel for those tasked with the job of localizing video games. I really do. I know their job is hard. They're afforded a miniscule part of their game's budget and very limited tools, talent and resources. They're saddled with so many limations it's a miracle that their dubs and translations come off as well as they do. It doesn't help that the source material they're working from is frequently trite, overwrought and not all that well told. Thing is, we know their job isn't impossible. The writers and translators behind many Nintendo games excel at writing smart, funny onscreen dialogue. And Capcom's Phoenix Wright games are spectacularly penned, maybe even the best in games. So some folks are getting it more than right -- they're shining.

I'm working on reviews for both Star Ocean II and Valkyria Chronicles this week, both to see print in the near future. I'm not going to name names, but one has a fantastic story. The other is less than hot. 

But both games fall prey to the same pitfalls that foul most games imported to our shores from Japan. 

• Elipsis abuse: I absolutely hate the way JRPGS use "'..." to communicate the fact that a character isn't saying anything. The practice has become so commonplace that its ingrained, nearly impossible to excise from contemporary JRPG story-telling. Even though its usefulness is all but gone. Now characters are rendered in enough detail that we can tell that they're staring wistfully off into space, or looking longingly into their lovers' eyes. Even worse, though, is the excessive use of the elipsis at the ends of sentances. Read a conversation in a JRPG and every other spoken line trails off. Can't these people complete a single thought? Are they actually communicating or just blurting out duelling soliloquies?

• The literal spelling of interjections: Grh. Gah. Urg. Muahahahahahahhahha! heh Waugh! When was the last time you read a novel and saw a grunt, laughter or scream described this way? Those who write the onscreen text for video games should look to closed captioning for the ideal way to handle these moments. On television they handle such actions fairly tastefully, with a parenthetcial or italic "cries" or "screams" and allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. One of the two JRPGs I'm playing now undermined severally well-executed dramatic moments with distracting literal spelling of anguished tears. Whatever pathos the storytelling had managed to mine was immedately lost -- a real fumble.
• Irregular punctuation: This probably only bothers bothers writers like myself, but I found myself disappointed by irregular application of commas in one of the JRPGs I'm playing. And that's because the game was, for the most part, grammatically correct. The other game was so busy throwing an elipsis between every breath that there was no opportunity to actually use a comma, or God forbid, a boring full-stop period. I harp on this point because we're always going on about how video games are a burgeoning art form. But if we want even a little respect we have to earn it. And a good way to do so would be to adhere to even the most basic rules of punctuation. Besides, I've met more than a couple kids my junior who claim to have learned to read play old Final Fantasy games. We owe it to future gamers to get the basics right.

I'm picking these particular nits here because the two reviews I'm working on will likely gloss over these details. One of the aformentioned games will likely be a rave. It's one of the better written Japanese games I've played in ages -- with interpersonal conflict and storytelling chops that put the turgid self indulgence of Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core to shame. The other falls prey to all of the typical genre vices. One is weakend only slightly by localization, the other further debased. More on both soon.

Chicks Don't Skate?

Skate 2 lets you create a female avatar, but man does the game make assumptions about who is playing. Your character is a dude by default. And all the game's dialogue skews towards the masculine. So characters will call you "dude" and "man" right to your face. Even your best bud uses "he" and "him" when talking about you.

Interestingly there's in-game lore to back up these irregularites. If you watch the opening for the game you'll see that the player character has just been released from prison (it doesn't appear to be co-ed). When you jump into the game and customize your character you're getting plastic surgery. That's how they solved the problem of character customization in the first game as well. Your body gets smashed in a horrible traffic accident. The Gonz, moonlighting as a surgeon, fixes you up (to the tune of Slayer's "Raining Blood") and thats when the game lets you tweak your own looks.

So, technically, if you chose to play with a female avatar in Skate 2, you're not playing a natural-born woman, so much as a post-operative transsexual. I guess it makes sense, now that I think on it, that the achievement/trophy around switching to female avatars is called "Gender Bender."

Still, I imagine female skaters (there's got to more than 14 notable pros) or female fans of skateboarding games might feel funny about the way all this all plays out -- especially when they get labeled a gender bender for switching to the sex that god gave them.

Pictured: Legendary Z-boy Peggy Oki.

Animal Crossing: The Third Go-Round

I grabbed a copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk for Alexis over the holidays, figuring she'd pick it up once or twice, realize it was the same damn game we've already played twice and move on. I couldn't have been more wrong. Firstly, she's totally engrossed with the game's core busy work. She's fishing, working to pay off Tom Nook and playing the turnip market. And she's rapidly detecting all the minor differences between this game and the previous incarnations. 

For example: there's a shoe shine guy who changes the color of your kicks. Alexis told me tonight before dinner that shoe color was a big sticking point for her before. She could never get outfits to look the way she wanted. Some of the difference are purely cosmetic -- like the way the villagers dance when they're psyched about something. There's a real fluidity to the way they bop their bodies and strut around whistling multi-colored notes into the air. 

I've only played once or twice, doing some chores and arranging the meager furnishings in my house. But Alexis has already logged hours upon hours. She's obviously quite pleased with the game. And when the copy I sent to my three-year-old niece finally makes it to the West Coast there will probably be more fun to be had.

The only disappointed one in the formula is me. And I'm starting to think that's because I sit around all day thinking about ways to make Animal Crossing better. What if the city was a persistant, shared space where everybody had to go to work? Tom Nook could be the CEO of a massive corporation. Or maybe that rival that was hinted at in Wide World could be one of the executives that Nook charges you with toppling? What if there were forests outside your village that you could explore? Colonize? What if they brought the island back? And how about Nintendo DS connectivity? The character transfer was alright, but how cheap is it that none of your loot comes with you?

I could go on forever.

What kind of crazy person has two thumbs and would expect Nintendo to ever bother going so overboard when they've already got a game that is so obviously not broke? This sad guy right here.

I'm a Terrible Blogger

I've allowed this page to go fallow way too long. So here's a link to an interview I did with Will Wright while writing a Complicated Games column for Paste called "Life, The Universe and Everything." I kinda enjoyed the talk, because rather than grilling him solely about games, it's kinda like me and Wright met randomly in the dorm TV room and got embroiled in a discussion on religion, science and whatnot until all hours of the morning.

Wondrous

Lots of folks are linking to Junot Diaz's examination of Grand Theft Auto IV at The Wall Street Journal. The one thing I'm noticing in among all the bloggers is the distinct lack of praise for Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Read this book, people. Diaz is one of us. He's an unrepentant geek. His book is full of references to science fiction, fantasy and role-playing.

This excerpt from The New Yorker is quite different from the finished work in the novel, but it's good enough to help you get the idea.

So That's How It Happened!

One of rocks music's tragedies was re-imagined for me while playing Urban Dead the other evening. If you're not playing this free, lo-fi, massively-multiplayer survival sim we probably shouldn't be friends. My zombie Nick Pazuzu is busy wrecking barricades in Rolt Heights. Cameron VonDoom, the power-metal singer turned army grunt, is bunkered down in a South Monroeville warehouse on the special Dawn of the Dead tie-in map. Cheers to great indie games and smart cross marketing. Now where are those zeds?

I Want To Make Games

There's been lots of post-GDC blogging, but there's one issue I want to touch on stemming from N'Gai Croal's well-attended panel "Up Against the Wall: Game Makers Take On the Press." The panel allowed developers (many anonymous) to take pot-shots and ask serious questions of the gaming press on issues of journalism, review scores and the differences between game critics and game reporters. As ever, the discussion at GDC was a stimulating mix of great ideas, cogent criticism and healthy rants.

But one point (that I've already seen echoed quite a few places) concerned me a little. During the Q&A session one dev stepped up to the mic and expressed disappointment that many game critics/reviewers were crossing over into game development. He said (paraphrased): "This causes me to take every review they've ever written into question."

I guess what concerns me is this church and state idea between writing about games and making them. The analogy I'm making isn't quite right, because nobody really cares if a game designer decides to start writing about games. So long as they don't cross back. They're concerned that, somehow, game reviewers are softballing their criticism in order to get gigs. And I'm not terribly comfortable with this idea that critics must forever remain monkish devotees to fair and balanced review scores.

Here's the thing: I want to make games. I want to write movies, cartoons, comic books. I want to make music and art and anything else that tickles my fancy. I also really, really like thinking and writing about games, movies, cartoons, comic books, music and art. And, honestly, I'm more suspicious of people who don't have these urges than folks who do. So, yeah. Maybe some may think that my writing about games is worthless now, because someday I might actually stop talking about doing all these things and actually do them.

I don't think this ought to be the case.

There's a long tradition of people who think about and critique a medium before moving on to become a part of it. My favorite example (and the one most likely to peg me as some kind of fancy-pants beard-stroker) is François Truffaut. Before he was an influential part of the French New Wave, he was a contributor to Cashier du Cinema -- a revolutionary publication that championed the auteur theory and changed the way people thought about cinema. Many other contributors to the publication, most notably Jean-Luc Goddard, became part of the medium they studied. There may have been a hue and cry back in the '60s among the cinema set when this all went down, too. But I'd say the creative world is richer for it. Criticism may have lost a few perspectives, but the net gain is worth it. This process gave the world new ways of looking at movies and bodies of work from a handful of directors who were obviously enriched by starting their careers as critics. I honestly don't think that the fact that these wannabe filmmakers eventually got jobs makes their writing any less valid.

There are quite a few more notable film critics who have seen their work onscreen. To me the most interesting was the example of Jay Cocks, a former Time writer who Martin Scorsese invited to write Gangs of New York and Age of Innocence. Heck, even the oft referenced Pauline Kael saw one of her second-stringers go on to write Sunday Bloody Sunday. Just a guess, but I'm betting that The New Yorker was more proud to see one of their scribes earn an Ocsar nod than concerned that she may have used her position to get meetings in Hollywood.

Many are familiar with the fact that Roger Ebert dabbled in screenwriting. He is, perhaps, the best known movie critic on the planet and, so far, the fact that he wrote three jiggle pictures for Russ Meyer (duo pictured above) hasn't destroyed his career. Maybe if the guy gave a glowing review to Transformers, then got a gig writing Tranformers 2, we'd be more suspicious.

It's a question of selling out, I suppose. But who would sell out their opinion in exchange for a paycheck? I guess after the whole Gerstmann thing that's becoming a bigger and bigger concern. Honestly, I'm way too in love with my own ideas to rent them out to the highest bidder. Maybe some people aren't and that's something to worry about. But, I'd say they're the exception rather than the rule.

Later this year we'll test just how comfortable gamers are with their taste-makers making games. Penny Arcade have long been a trusted source for honest opinions regarding games. They've been assailed, a little, for their work doing ads and illustrations for game companies, but I don't think the vast majority of folks really call Gabe and Tycho's taste into question. I suppose there's an outside chance that Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness will cause suddenly cause readers to call every pick and pan into question. I kinda doubt it. Here's why:

If you ask any game critic out there why they do what they do they'll say 1) "I love video games" and 2) "I love my soapbox."

A soapbox is kinda pointless when you're shilling somebody else's ideas.