Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXVII! (Localization Koji Fox)

[Aleo]

This question regards the localisation of boss abilities from Japanese to English. I apologise for the long post but feel this should be addressed.

Many boss abilities in the game, particular those in Alexander raid have ability names which in Japanese give a very direct hint as to how to deal with them, this extends to raid specific buffs and debuff tooltips too.

However when translated in English the context is adapted and often completely changed to sometimes means something completely misleading or inappropriate, this means English players will spend more time trying to learn what a debuff does when they could learn it faster by directly translating the japanese text instead.

Two examples of this is firstly on A3 (arm of the father - savage) where a debuff in the final phase is called "throttle" in the English version, but a direct translation of Japanese translates to asphyxiate which is more in line with the context of the ability, the player is encompassed in a bubble causing them to suffocate, the debuff in Japanese also states this, with specific mention that if the debuff is not removed the player will die.

The English context talks about throttle which most people primarily recognise as a valve controlling fluid flow, almost never do people refer to thottle as windpipe and the debuff description mentions "windpipe is crushed". But this makes no sense in the actual fight because the player is encompassed in a bubble, it has nothing to do with their windpipe being hurt, and besides how do you dispel someones windpipe being crushed?

Secondly and this the big one: On alexander turn 4 (burden of the father - savage) there is a ability/mechanic called "royal pentacle" in English and "Steam Judge" when directly translated from Japanese.

The name royal pentacle implies something COMPLETELY different to what the context actually is. The adds that spawn as part of this mechanic are called steam regulators and spawn in a circle, they do not spawn in the shape of a pentacle and in addition there are only 6 of them.

Secondly a pentacle is an occult symbol associated with satanism, in Celtic mythology a six-sided pentacle is put on an altar as means of warding off evil spirits, which has NOTHING to do this fight, its Alexander a "holy" element primal and most of the abilities in this fight pertain to religious connotations.

The Japanese translation "Steam Judge" is much more effective at describing the context. The adds are called steam regulators and the correct way to deal with them is by using the Judgement Nisi debuff to remove them without deaths.

On that topic "Judgement Nisi" and its debuff "decree nisi" is a divorce proceeding in UK court law where only on the grounds that a good reason is given that the divorce does not happen - What the hell has this got to do with this fight?


The Japanese version just refers to them as decree alpha and decree beta.


So, please take more care when you localise the boss abilities, you may have to do them directly in many cases because the developers want to hint to players how they should deal with it.