the working designs style of localization isn't a thing anymore so that should tell you everything you need to know.
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I want to play Lunar, but Working Designs translations keep stopping me.
- Thread starter Valcrist
- Start date
I found their localizations really charming, and the references not to be as widespread as the thread is making it seem (though it's been years since I've played through him). Definitely more personality than a lot of localizations for JRPGs at the time lol
There are plenty of things that are not a thing anymore in games and there are plenty of translations that have similar things going on. It's never really went away.
[citation needed]
if you want to dig out something from a NIS America localization then yeah maybe you have a gotcha, they are almost as bad as working designs
Exactly this. Also, the translation was a product of it's time and there were many JRPGs which had just bad translations in comparison.
Heck, look at FFVII. Translation was very iffy and it was done by a much bigger company.
Separately, OP, you can get mobile version which has a different translation for the first game.
In general though, my preferred way to play is emulating PSX versions. These are also not as expensive as the rest (PSP digital is cheap but it has its issues, IMO).
Working Designs toned the pop culture references way, way down in their later entries. You're really hostile to people about this for no real reason and your personal hate on for Ireland is really fucking weird.
If it wasn't for Gaijinworks we wouldn't have gotten Summon Night 5 or 6 and say what you will, they're not bad games.
The "fun" (awful) translation changes were bad enough, but WD severely fucked with the gameplay of the games they brought over and that's just unacceptable, and not blown out of proportion in the slightest. We didn't know back then, but these days those translations should be considered hack jobs.
WD fanboys were among the worst people in the IRC/BBS communities for RPGs back then so yeah i have no problem dumping on them and their boy victor
I thought that for a while, but mother of fucking god is the random encounter rate totally bonkers. I'm probably aborting my EB playthrough because of it.
The PSX remakes definitely lose some of the charm, but the gains are going to overwhelm that for most I feel.
User Banned (5 Days): Antagonizing Fellow Member; History of Hostility
Seems like you'd be old enough to not act like a petulant child then, but I guess that's not the case.
if you were a real WD fan you would have included a reference to die hard or some 90s movie in your post lol
So I tried looking for the Japanese script and couldn't find anything. Also I didn't want to wade through hours of Japanese gameplay footage to find something. But I did a comparison of the conversation with the winged boys at the beginning of the game and they really went all out during that scene in the English version with calling Pike ugly and a freak. Whereas the Japanese conversation was shorter and not as mean, though they did tease him some. Nothing about him being a freak or having a ugly face. So I'm gonna assume they wrote whatever they want with the Ebonics dialogue too.
Vic Ireland was insufferable back in the day and WD localizations were awful. They were mostly grammatically correct, which is better than you'd get out of half the studios of the time, but man the jokes and localization choices felt tacked on and bad even then. Looking back now it's embarrassing to see some of the stuff they put in, and fans now would lose their minds at the gameplay changes they threw in with little thought.
Yeah, that seems like a pretty liberal (as in, taking lots of liberties, not the political ideology) take on localisation, then.
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Yeah. Adding whatever they want seemed to be their thing. Not just with the dialogue, but with the gameplay alterations as well. I think if that was going down these days, there would be backlash.
Yeaaaaaah, even back then I didn't care for their translations. I think playing Rayearth after everything else had been released was pretty much my breaking point. At best they were some cute fun, at worst you had Umi finding condoms in a house in Cefiro.
Alundra wasn't unscathed, but aside from one or two particular lines it was played fairly straight.
Alundra wasn't unscathed, but aside from one or two particular lines it was played fairly straight.
I think the main difference with AA is that it was at least somewhat fitting compared to the Japanese dialogue.
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I played some Alundra and I thought the translation was pretty good. I'm going to go back to it when the PS1 MiSTer core is finished.
Jesus Christ that homeboy/axed screenshot is horrible man. Which game is that from? I've played a few working design games but i don't think I've played that one. Doesn't look familiar
Holding on to IRC grudges, that's some decades old level pettiness
They've dated for sure, and some fall real flat, but like others have mentioned ... it's mostly NPC dialogue that I never really bothered engaging with so no harm, no foul.
this is making me wanna play Lunar 1/2 again though. Still got my OG discs.
this is making me wanna play Lunar 1/2 again though. Still got my OG discs.
They're hit or miss there. They've added QoL improvements to games which are generally good. With Albert Odyssey, they reprogrammed the game to have faster load times which was a big help (even with the faster load times, the loads are long enough to be annoying). And then on the other hand, there are instances where they messed things up and introduced issues that weren't there in the original game.
There's a page that talks about localization differences for Lunar:EB and they did increase most enemy stats. Interestingly enough, how much the stats are increased varies on an enemy by enemy basis which indicates that they were putting effort into their rebalancing (rather than just give everything a blanket +x% bonus to stats).
Working Designs really is a sort of fascinating anomaly. Victor Ireland in many ways comes across as "local man" and if WD weren't a thing I could half see him as a dude that's got a B2B business selling filters or something (not at all a putdown) yet is very much sort of a posterboy for controversial jrpg translations. It's just funny to think of like, your neighbor being this weeb agent of chaos. Anyway I remember my mom really loved jrpgs with SD characters (she called em stumpies) and made a genuine effort to get into these but could not get past the localization. It's sort of a shame because there are so many other options now but the aesthetic is largely kaput.
AO originally has a pretty brutal encounter rate as well. It was really one of the cases where their programming changes really helped the game. I know it's probably a pretty mediocre game but I really enjoy it with my rose colored kid glasses even now.
He is really pretty fun and easy to talk to. Even back in the day he was pretty open with talking to fans. I don't think I had ever seen someone from a company like that willing to talk to fans before that. However it was brutal back in that day as well. I remember having a preorder on MKR for like 2 or 3 years and how bittersweet it was that it was the last thing I ever bought retail for the Saturn.
Alundra is absolutely one of my most favourite games. Most of the dialogue is fantastic, but there are definitely some missteps (in my opinion, of course).
It could have been even worse, but they were asked by SCEA to cut some dialogue out (thank god). Here's an example:
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Alundra is absolutely one of my most favourite games. Most of the dialogue is fantastic, but there are definitely some missteps (in my opinion, of course).
It could have been even worse, but they were asked by SCEA to cut some dialogue out (thank god). Here's an example:
Ouch... Well, I only played a few hours so I guess that's why I've never seen those.
Honestly most of the stuff like there you will never see if you don't talk to all of the NPCs. I can't remember any of the games having stuff like that in the main campaign.
I always hated Working Designs' pop culture jokes but at the time I was mostly just happy the games were localized at all, and kept Japanese artwork for the boxes.
The "Spaz" logo (WD's action branding) on my Sega Ages Vol. 1 box still bugs me, though. That's some ugly shit.
The "Spaz" logo (WD's action branding) on my Sega Ages Vol. 1 box still bugs me, though. That's some ugly shit.
It actually has the same translation, just with the superfluous Bill Clinton jokes removed.
I was young when I first played Alundra, so it didn't really stick out all that much. I went back to the game recently though, and Bonaire being a complete surfer-dude stoner just takes me out of the game somewhat. Haha.
The rest of the characters though I think are well written. It's almost like they couldn't help themselves and targeted all of their silly dialogue ideas on Bonaire, the poor dude.
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You know they were all laughing it up while they wrote this guy's dialogue.I was young when I first played Alundra, so it didn't really stick out all that much. I went back to the game recently though, and Bonaire being a complete surfer-dude stoner just takes me out of the game somewhat. Haha.
The rest of the characters though I think are well written. It's almost like they couldn't help themselves and targeted all of their silly dialogue ideas on Bonaire, the poor dude.
I see people saying this a lot, but honestly they seem a lot worse than even the most dry translations to me in modern day. But I'm also an adult so idk.
We roll our eyes now in an era of endless pop culture references in basically all media, memes, and funkopops, but in the 90s these things were unlike anything you saw elsewhere and made you feel included in a world that you felt was nonexistent. Context for Working Designs translations is key here, they were localizing pretty obscure games with no intention or market to come here by their normal publishers, but the nerds at working designs found a niche localizing these games and wanted the people who play them to know that they were made by people just like them in an era before widespread communities and conventions.
How does it hold up in 2021? Not great. But it's kind of like Kevin Smith movies, products of something that at the time could best be described as counterculture.
i can't stand kevin smith movies either so this is a really good comparison actually lol
Oh man, now I'm dreaming about you guys doing a Lunar Collection with Gungho remade in this style.
As far as Grandia, I remember hearing WD pushed for it (and Vic talked about wanting to do it publicly) but Sony outbid them. They were already done with Saturn by that point though so I assume it'd have been PSX only even if they did get it. SOE also announced a European Saturn release that ended up getting scuttled along with some others they were publishing for Capcom (XMVsSF, RE2).
Oh, like I said, Alundra was not spared the pen of drunkenness, but it's also less egregious as most of their other stuff. The few things there are basically everything about Bonaire, whose name is actually a joke name "Boner" since his original name is something like Poges/Pojes. I would have to see his JP dialog, but I'm willing to bet he's supposed to be kind of a village idiot, so this entire character isn't necessarily off theme.I was young when I first played Alundra, so it didn't really stick out all that much. I went back to the game recently though, and Bonaire being a complete surfer-dude stoner just takes me out of the game somewhat. Haha.
The rest of the characters though I think are well written. It's almost like they couldn't help themselves and targeted all of their silly dialogue ideas on Bonaire, the poor dude.
Most of them are gone or don't bother to keep up the fight. Why grudge?
I have some good news for you!
Lunar: Eternal Blue Unworked patch (Sega CD, version 2.0) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
This is the 2.0 release of the unworked enhancement patch for Lunar: Eternal Blue for the Sega CD which was originally released in 1995 by Working...archive.org
I recommend checking the un-Working Designs patches:
Un-Worked Designs - stargood
stargood.org
There are patches for the Lunar games and others.
Unless I'm missing something these are the opposite of what the OP wants: they revert the gameplay and sprite changes but keep the translation.
Fully agreed, and not only that, they were infinitely better than many high-profile translations after their time, including FFVII's disastrous one. Vic Ireland (and Square's Ted Woolsey) may be disliked now for their liberties in localization, but their translations were such a breath of fresh air back then in a sea of JRPGs that read like knockoff headphone instruction manuals.
You are being far more overbearingly obnoxious about this in two posts than every single WD translation put together. Pop culture overload is not my cup of tea either, but I'll take it over the literally broken English that was the standard at the time. Denying that WD's translations were among the best back then and that they put 10x as much effort is downright ignorant.
Except for the multiple examples of games that still do this, like Phoenix Wright and pretty much every Nintendo of Europe translated game.
Ok, I didn't play it and thought they did more on the script. Thx for the info.
As someone who never played any of WD's releases, I recently read over some of the mechanical changes they did to their games and was blown away. They just kinda ruined the intended difficulty of some games because of... personal preference? It's unclear.
Anyway, I really don't think you can call Phoenix Wright comparable to this kind of thing and I'm kinda surprised that's coming up. Phoenix Wright already had puns and jokes in Japanese; they had to convey that feeling in English, to varying degrees of success and with some amount of backfiring w/r/t the setting change. It wouldn't be the same game if you didn't try to localize any of that stuff, because no one would understand what the Japanese names meant.
From what I saw of the changes by WD, they were forcefully inserting jokes were there were none originally, weren't they? That's an entirely different thing.
Anyway, I really don't think you can call Phoenix Wright comparable to this kind of thing and I'm kinda surprised that's coming up. Phoenix Wright already had puns and jokes in Japanese; they had to convey that feeling in English, to varying degrees of success and with some amount of backfiring w/r/t the setting change. It wouldn't be the same game if you didn't try to localize any of that stuff, because no one would understand what the Japanese names meant.
From what I saw of the changes by WD, they were forcefully inserting jokes were there were none originally, weren't they? That's an entirely different thing.
aside from the heir apparent of the memey WD style localization via NIS America i would say their style is basically gone and putting nintendo of europe in the same camp is stretch armstrong