1 Month in impressions/criticisms...

[Bishop81]

I didn't think it deserves its own thread, so here are my short impressions.

Heavensward is the best FF game I have played in a heck of a long time.

Pretty much spot on with the storytelling and gameplay - which traditionally have been relatively easy.

[Core1019]

A.
"Pray naught why to not for be it to ask..."

I'm sorry WHAT? Why do you go through the effort of garbling up the English language so hard just to create some kind of immersion for English speakers? This stuff is more often than not forcing me to raise my eyebrow and reread things multiple times to even understand what you were going for, and I find myself ignoring the text altogether and just skipping the cut scene unless it has voiced dialogue. If the dialogue wasn't bad enough, the name localizations also deserve mention.

I agree completely with this. It's so annoying and un-immersive to me, the way that they speak. Personal pet hate of it: "must needs", I swear they say that as much as they put "pray" at the beginning of a sentence.[/QUOTE]

[Attarik]

Seems like most of the posts griping about the translations are all just fundamentally flawed since they're all based on a lack of understanding of world languages. Pray and Must needs are both completely valid and frequently used ways to start sentences.

[zipzo]

Seems like most of the posts griping about the translations are all just fundamentally flawed since they're all based on a lack of understanding of world languages. Pray and Must needs are both completely valid and frequently used ways to start sentences.

I wasn't aware that on box it said that knowledge of foreign languages not localized in the game was necessary to understand everything properly on the first go.

You cherry picked two examples but there a heck of a lot more where it came from. People do NOT talk like the English localized characters often do, otherwise it wouldnt irritate me in the first place chief.

I also am in a country where the English I hear can be from any odd country around the world. Its not just Americans that visit Japan.

[Colt47]

Could you elaborate?

Once the story ends it's more daily grinding using the daily quest system popularized by World of Warcraft, minimal number of true end game dungeons to run using roulette, a job incentive system that pretty much always points to tanks and rarely healers for bonuses on the roulette, and ridiculous currency grind and boss difficulty set up so that we spend forever and a day on flat bread thin content.

Essentially, they built an MMO that is as disposable as a single player title, then strapped a bunch of systems to try and keep people playing the game well past the point it was interesting. There's minimal procedural generation and tons of static set pieces that are required to get run over and over, and the game has zero problem solving to keep players engaged: we just run and gun everything via pattern memorization.

This has been the biggest gripe of the theme park MMO design for ages, and it seems like other companies are at least trying to address it with their own titles. I'm not sure what Square Enix is trying to do to address it in their already established game.

[Kallera]

It seems the localization is hit or miss. In that regard, i think i'd welcome something more faithful instead of "making up lore"in one language that is not present in another. This is English Emo Middie all over again.

If koji fox is indeed making lore in tandem with the japanese team, then why are his tidbits not showing up with the japanese script? Laguages may be hard, but these are translatable points in the story that are being missed. The fear of dying is not some unique concept that can only be conveyed in japanese.

[Intaki]

People do NOT talk like the English localized characters often do, otherwise it wouldnt irritate me in the first place chief.

People don't talk like some of the Japanese characters do either. The Japanese text is full of archaic terminology and keigo that you simply do not hear from a normal speaker.

[OlyverW]

the game is actually localized in English first then it is relocalized in Japanese. This is from one of the devs words himself while talking about titles in game

Greetings.

I wanted to pop in to clear up some confusion about how a lot of in-game terminology is conceived. It is often (understandably) believed that localization has little to do with the game beyond translating what the development team creates for the Japanese version. While translation is a large part of our job, what is not known by many is that the EN localization team plays a large role in the creation of a lot of in-game terminology and lore which is then localized back into Japanese (with liberties often taken by the Japanese team so that the text might appear more appealing to their target Japanese audience).

The case with player titles is one of many aspects of this game where the localization team is called in to create content, with the Japanese then going off the English. In this case, the dev team has taken it one step further (or maybe it's actually closer?) by not translating the titles into Japanese and using English in the the Japanese version.

BUT WAIT! Why are the player titles in the Japanese version English in the first place?

There are a couple reasons behind this--one possibly being Japan's quirky fixation with the English language. English is taught in all levels of school, signs everywhere are in English, company names/restaurant names/hemorrhoid cream names are in English, fish & chips are wrapped in English newspapers, song lyrics are peppered with grammatically questionable English. Why is this game even called Final Fantasy and not 最終幻想 (saishu genso)? Because in some cases, it seems, English is the cooler option. In my two decades here in Japan (and 12 years at SQEX) I've asked many people (including creators of the FF series) this question, and it really does often come down to simply 'English is cool.' I don't know if I can ever fully understand this, EN being my native language, but I suppose I can liken it to how when I started studying Japanese, kanji seemed like the best thing since a McDLT with a side of 7up Gold. I didn't care what it meant, as long as it was kanji, it was going on my wall/my PC/my shirts. I remember having to do some calligraphy in my high school Japanese class and ended up choosing to write 水虫 (mizumushi) because really I liked how it looked...and could care less that it meant Athlete's Foot.

Ugh, but enough about me.

The other (and probably main) reason why the Japanese version has chosen to use EN titles is because in the JP version, the player names are all in English (or at least Roman characters). Aesthetically speaking, the dev team thought that having Japanese (whether katakana, hiragana, or kanji) titles coupled with Romanized player names would not look good. The solution that the dev team came up with was to use English titles (rather than Romanized spellings of Japanese words, which I was told also did not look very cool to a Japanese person). To implement this solution, it was decided that the EN Loc team would help come up with the titles.

So the next question becomes, if the JP version is using the EN titles, why the discrepancies between the two? It turns out there are a couple of answers to this one, as well...

The first is, the level of EN vocabulary an average Japanese user has. For the EN version, the Loc team pulls words from a large portion of the massive English lexicon. The problem for the average Japanese user, however, is that their knowledge of English is mostly secondary. They know the words that their textbooks have deemed important for them to know, but a lot of times, are unaware of the rest (as is the case with any second language acquisition). This ultimately translates into a smaller pool from which to select EN words if the aim is to choose an EN title that is understandable by the JP user.

One retort to this might be, why not come up with titles that sound good in BOTH English and Japanese? For the most part, that's what we try to do. However, there are times that the small pool severely limits what we can do on the EN side.

Think of it like making a pancake. Anyone can make a pancake with merely eggs, milk, baking powder, sugar, salt, flour, and oil. It will probably be a good pancake if you are a decent cook. But what happens when you and your guests have been eating pancakes for five days straight? You start thinking about adding some blueberries, or substituting applesauce for the oil, or swapping out milk for some rich, creamy buttermilk. However, one of your guests steps up and says you are not allowed to use any of those fancy ingredients because he thinks blue is the color of evil djinns, applesauce may have cyanide from stray seeds, and the calories from buttermilk are just too much for his shapely thighs. He tells you that you can use the original ingredients in any way you want, but no fanciness, fancy-pants! And...there are you and your guests back at pancake one.

There is a reason why a lot of Japanese games have attacks like "Fire Smash" and "Power Crush" and "Brave Light." They are informative, and get the point across, and to someone who only has had limited exposure to the EN language over the course of their lives may appear to be exotic; however, I (personally) believe that without an occasional 'pummel' or 'annihilate' in there every now and again, some people might start longing for a little blueberry & buttermilk.

The second answer to the question comes down to how some terms have already been translated in each version. The Serpent/Flame/Storm vs Gridanian/Ul'dahn/Lominsan example is a good one. Way back in 1.0, localization decided (with the blessings of the JP lore team) that we were going to use the Serpent/Flame/Storm prefixes for the Grand Companies. The JP decided it wasn't. This mainly had to do with the fact that the JP names for the GCs could all be compacted into 3-kanji terms with 1-kanji abbreviations. The EN needed something that was compact as well (or we'd have "Order of the Twin Adder private second class" showing up in dialogue boxes everywhere). SO, LONG STORY SHORT(er), this meant when we suggested "Stormlord" for a title, the dev team was afraid that the JP players would not understand what 'storm' was doing in the title as the word 'storm' is not used in the Japanese version's abbreviation of the Maelstrom. Hence the change to "Lominsan." "Lominsan Lord" then became problematic for the JP version because it might imply a Lominsan noble, hence the change to "hero" (an English word common enough in Japan to be understandable by most users). Basically, the Japanese devs localized the EN term into something that they felt would be better received by their target audience. It is the same thing that happened with the 'caster' series you also mentioned. In EN, 'caster' can mean a caster of spells, as well as a 'caster' of (fishing)lines. We came up with the title Meadowcaster to represent one who cast their fishing lines in the ponds located on the meadows of La Noscea. We felt a slightly abstract title would feel more 'title-y' than simply La Noscean Angler. The dev team believed that the EN might be too abstract for the Japanese user, and instead decided to go with something more direct. They both mean the same thing (more or less), with the EN one being a bit more flashy.

In the end, this results in some of the names being slightly different across the board. That's ultimately what localization is. We aren't making direct copies, we are making versions which all have the same core, but are presented in ways that are adapted to the regions we are selling them in. It is the direction we have decided to take the game (with Yoshi-P's blessing, of course).

Is it the only direction we could have taken the game in? No. Is it a direction that all users will approve of? Probably not. Is it the direction we've decided is best for us at the current moment? Yes. We try our best make decisions that will be found cool or clever by you guys, though I realize that sometimes stuff just doesn't work for somebody, because, like everything it ultimately comes down to a matter of taste. Some decisions are accepted, some are criticized. We try to please most people, but realize that at the end of the day, pleasing everyone is impossible.

Localization is a complex field, and every decision we make has weight, which is why we try not to take the decisions we make lightly. I apologize if any of those decisions we make displease you, but know that we listen, and take everyone's comments and feedback seriously. We may not always reply by turning the ship around, but know that we are constantly making small adjustments to our overall course, hoping to someday arrive at that mysterious land known as 'everybody's happy.'

- Fernehalwes


PS:

The reason why the "of"s are capped in titles in EN was 100% my call. I felt that with the recent implementation of the on-screen display and those pointy brackets surrounding them, the titles now felt more like separate entities than continuations of the player's name.

When it's...

Roy Biv of the Glorious Brotherhood of Rainbow Kittens

...I'd definitely want that "of" lower-cased.

However, when the text over the player-character shows...

Roy Biv
≪of the Glorious Brotherhood of Rainbow Kittens≫

...I scratch my head. Japanese has really no standardized rules about English capping, so they decided to leave it uncapped. I, on the other hand, simply felt it looked better between those brackets with that "o" capped, and therefore made it:

Roy Biv
≪Of the Glorious Brotherhood of Rainbow Kittens≫

Cheers!

[Aeyis]

PS. They didn't garble the English language. The word pray at the beginning of a sentence is a legitimate way of forming a sentence in English.

They most certainly did. Tho I personally find it amusing that the OP would rate combat as Excellent but the localization as terrible..

All I will say in that regard is: 2.5 second global cooldown.

I will defend this game's localization team until the day I die. I strongly disagree with your thoughts on them, I find the localization to be the crown jewel of the entire game.

If I may be so bold, I think your opinions on their performance may come from a misunderstanding about their job. They aren't just a translation department, but they also create content for the game.

No, they translate. That's the job. They don't create any content. And heavens! Altho I disagree with the OP on several points, it's most certainly true that the 'localization' is one of the game's weaker points.

There isn't really any "original intended language" for this game... Had the story and everything been completely developed in japanese first and then translated/localized, you may have had a point, but that's really not how they do it this time around.

Thanks, since that is exactly how it's done it seems we have a point then.



But..for once I think I will leave it at just this. Anything in regards to localization tends to draw a worse crowd then FF7 ''Fanboyz'' to defend it to the death.

[Kallera]

This still means that these "liberties" are resulting in differences in story and characterization between the languages.

Someone should do better on that. :/