I want to play Lunar, but Working Designs translations keep stopping me.

[RomanticHeroX]

Working Designs has always been a blemish on some solid games. Even back in the day there was plenty to criticize, and I get the impression that people who still defend them picked a side in the 90s and haven't reevaluated it. People who bring up broken translations like Breath of Fire 2 and Wild Arms 2 are creating a false dichotomy. There were plenty of localizations of the era that were quality and hold up better. The Woolsey games had a strong voice and hold up to this day, but even things like Phantasy Star 4, Vandal Hearts and Suikoden, despite having some rough spots, had a charm and life to them. And it's not just Clinton jokes, Working Designs games are straight up problems in 2021. I played Popful Mail for the first time a few months ago and in the first handful of hours I heard multiple uses of the R-slur, references to characters as "golliwogs" and other problematic content. This is main story dialogue. You can say that they're products of their time, sure, but I don't remember slurs in Earthbound or Ogre Battle. And this isn't even getting into the endless gameplay changes that make their games tedious, frustrating or occasionally broken.

 

[EarthPainting]

I know Working Designs had/has its fans, but their work never sat right with me. They had a really hard time resisting the siren's call of injecting unfunny gags and pop culture references all over the place, even during moments when those games took a serious or sombre tone. Like in Alundra, someone can be dying and a character will stand there going "Ah geez, we can't get basic cable here, oh oops forget I said that.", completely ruining the moment. (They were very fond of "oops, ignore that" gags in general.) There's also a character called Boner or something, and he talks about weed and farting or stuff of that calibre. And we're not even getting into all the innuendo, which they even subjected child characters to.

Someone already mentioned it, but seeing the Working Designs logo also make me expect fights to drag on. They loved to "rebalance" their projects, which usually meant inflating HP amounts to combat quick rentals. This is especially the case for boss fights, where doubling the boss HP was not uncommon. They stripped the ending in Thunderforce if you played it on Easy for the same reason, because fuck those players I guess. People might have a soft spot for them because the state of localisations was pretty spotty in general, but I think their work aged like eggs in the sun. I'll take dry or spotty English over enemas, M&M references, and yo momma jokes.

 

[Renteka-Bond]

I'll be honest, that Ebonics sequence is absolutely one I would have laughed at if I'd played it years ago. Hell, it got a chuckle out of me just seeing it hear because of how bizarre it is. Someone pointed out that it was probably written by the whitest white guy and, while most likely true, I could see this sequence happening between some old white mom and her kid and that makes me laugh.

 

[My Blue Heaven]

Working Designs has always been a blemish on some solid games. Even back in the day there was plenty to criticize, and I get the impression that people who still defend them picked a side in the 90s and haven't reevaluated it. People who bring up broken translations like Breath of Fire 2 and Wild Arms 2 are creating a false dichotomy. There were plenty of localizations of the era that were quality and hold up better. The Woolsey games had a strong voice and hold up to this day, but even things like Phantasy Star 4, Vandal Hearts and Suikoden, despite having some rough spots, had a charm and life to them. And it's not just Clinton jokes, Working Designs games are straight up problems in 2021. I played Popful Mail for the first time a few months ago and in the first handful of hours I heard multiple uses of the R-slur, references to characters as "golliwogs" and other problematic content. This is main story dialogue. You can say that they're products of their time, sure, but I don't remember slurs in Earthbound or Ogre Battle. And this isn't even getting into the endless gameplay changes that make their games tedious, frustrating or occasionally broken.

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thanks for putting out there more civilly than i could since i have no ability to pretend to respect working designs

 

[Nairume]

People who bring up broken translations like Breath of Fire 2 and Wild Arms 2 are creating a false dichotomy. There were plenty of localizations of the era that were quality and hold up better.

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I do think it's hilarious that, in trying to cherry pick examples of things worse than WD's work, they have to jump all the way ahead to Wild Arms 2.

I've been going back and playing a lot of older JRPGs, particularly on the NES, and I've been seeing that they honestly had fine localization efforts on them. I guess it's easy to ignore those though when most people tend to just ignore NES era JRPGs these days.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

I do think it's hilarious that, in trying to cherry pick examples of things worse than WD's work, they have to jump all the way ahead to Wild Arms 2.

I've been going back and playing a lot of older JRPGs, particularly on the NES, and I've been seeing that they honestly had fine localization efforts on them. I guess it's easy to ignore those though when most people tend to just ignore NES era JRPGs these days.

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Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest 2-4 have totally competent localizations. Not a lot of flavor to them, but they're competently translated. People assume it's either Dragon Quest 1's thees and thous or broken English, without actually putting any research into what they're critiquing.

 

[LazyLain]

I'm okay with localizations taking some liberties and injecting a bit of flavor here or there (the original japanese text isn't holy and there can be missed opportunities for localizers to pounce on), but those are pretty bad. Is the whole game like that, or are those the most egregious examples?

 

[My Blue Heaven]

I do think it's hilarious that, in trying to cherry pick examples of things worse than WD's work, they have to jump all the way ahead to Wild Arms 2.

I've been going back and playing a lot of older JRPGs, particularly on the NES, and I've been seeing that they honestly had fine localization efforts on them. I guess it's easy to ignore those though when most people tend to just ignore NES era JRPGs these days.

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some of the fanboys acting like there were nothing but machine translations before WD showed up. it really shows their own limited scope in RPG choices tbh

 

[Nairume]

Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest 2-4 have totally competent localizations. Not a lot of flavor to them, but they're competently translated. People assume it's either Dragon Quest 1's thees and thous or broken English, without actually putting any research into what they're critiquing.

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And I'd honestly say DQ1 is fine even with the Thees and Thous, beyond the weird name changes.

I just also played through Destiny of an Emperor in its entirety a couple months ago and Capcom honestly did a fine job with it (which actually does make BoF2 even weirder).

 

[Imran]

Working Designs at its worse was still better than the vast majority of JRPG localizations at the time.

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Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like I'd take a 100% bad translation over a 99% good one with a few boxes of straight up racism.

 

[EggmaniMN]

It isn't hard to find terrible translations like FF7, Breath of Fire 2, Star Ocean 2, Robotrek, Ys 3, Arcana, FFT, Suikoden in many spots, Wild Arms 2, Persona 1, even large parts of Xenogears. They were plentiful through the PS1 era.

 

[Ra]

Working Designs were our heroes back in the day, brought over so many obscure JRPGs in the PS1 days.

Definitely looks like a lot of it hasn't aged well, but I'll forever ride with them for getting me stuff like Vanguard Bandits.

 

[Deleted member 30544]

I don't know, as a non native English speaker, I always thought their translations were kinda charming.

I don't know why the Working Designs hate, personally I miss them and I love them *shrugs shoulders*

 

[MrWindUpBird]

Y'all, no one is acting like every translated game back in the 90's was machine translated or indecipherable. You're being just as bad as everyone else by trying to act like most of them WERE translated well when that's not the case. The reason a lot of people still hold up the WD translations, even taking out the pop culture references, is because they WERE high quality translations in an era that saw far, far more bad ones than good ones.

 

[Nairume]

It isn't hard to find terrible translations like FF7, Breath of Fire 2, Star Ocean 2, Robotrek, Ys 3, Arcana, FFT, Suikoden in many spots, Wild Arms 2, Persona 1, even large parts of Xenogears. They were plentiful through the PS1 era.

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There were a lot of bad ones, but it's not like WD was alone in doing quality work. We shouldn't excuse the massive flaws they had because other people at the same time were doing things better than them. They weren't even the first to actually put effort into their localizations.

 

[Deleted member 4090]

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.

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I'd say their localization quality was far better than just 50th percentile for the day. People point out the egregiously bad ones, but there's a whole lot of mediocre ones as well from a bunch of the one-off games outside of major series.

 

[Nairume]

Y'all, no one is acting like every translated game back in the 90's was machine translated or indecipherable. You're being just as bad as everyone else by trying to act like most of them WERE translated well when that's not the case. The reason a lot of people still hold up the WD translations, even taking out the pop culture references, is because they WERE high quality translations in an era that saw far, far more bad ones than good ones.

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Except they weren't. WD translations were okay in a time where a lot of people were doing worse than them but some were doing a lot better. We can acknowledge that they were putting in effort where some weren't while acknowledging that they were also not that great at what they were doing and made some absolutely embarrassing decisions that make their work understandably difficult for some people to revisit.

 

[skillzilla81]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like I'd take a 100% bad translation over a 99% good one with a few boxes of straight up racism.

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This.

 

[Nairume]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like I'd take a 100% bad translation over a 99% good one with a few boxes of straight up racism.

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Also this. There's no excusing things like this, and it's not like this is the only example of WD doing things like that.

 

[Encephalon]

The Grandia that we got wasn't terrible (other than the voice acting which is laughably bad), but if Working Designs had done it, we might have gotten the superior Saturn version which was technically a lot better than the PS1 port that did come over.

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I feel like this is really debatable. I started with the Saturn version, and I think I prefer it overall, but I think the PS1 version has strengths that are worth noting.

In order of importance:

Saturn:

+ Ability to scale 2d backdrops smoothly and quickly, primarily used in battles
+ 3D and character positions more stable than the PS1 version
+ Higher resolution battle backdrops
+ Parm has a unique ground texture that matches the town

- Magic tends to look very rough due to the lack of transparencies
- Low resolution CG
- Night scenes tend to look bad due to no real lighting system

PS1:

+ Much better looking in battle effects (magic, etc)
+ Higher resolution CG
+ Lighting system makes portions of the game look better

- Inability to smoothly resize images, reducing the effectiveness of some in game scenes and, more importantly, causing the battle "camera" to appear unstable (some jittering back and forth).
- Character positions in 3D spaces are less stable and far less stable 3D.
*For some reason, the instability issues are carried over to and appear much worse on the switch version outside of the 3D backgrounds themselves. It's a real shame.
- Lower resolution battle backgrounds for some reason
- Parm doesn't have a ground texture to match it's layout.

Sort of a wash:
- Cool water effect in the Saturn version, but it's broken when you move the camera and looks very flat. The PS1 version looks a little more 3D.

I think I prefer the stability of the Saturn version's visuals, but I am playing the PS1 version for the first time now and it seems fine to me.

 

[Virtua Sanus]

Most of the games they brought over would be beyond obscure in the Western world if they were never localized (like Surging Aura on Mega Drive tier unknown). I appreciate a lot of their efforts if nothing else just due to that.

I think the main difference with AA is that it was at least somewhat fitting compared to the Japanese dialogue.

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While this is absolutely true and I think they genuinely added a lot to those games and lore overall, Ace Attorney 3 straight up having an extended "This is Sparta!" reference was genuinely the most painful thing Ive ever had to read in a game.

 

[Nairume]

Had WD done Saturn Grandia, it'd have come out two years later, be exceedingly rare and inaccessible to most people who would have wanted to play it, and *rolls the dice* Gadwin would have talked like Al Gore.

 

[MrWindUpBird]

Except they weren't. WD translations were okay in a time where a lot of people were doing worse than them but some were doing a lot better. We can acknowledge that they were putting in effort where some weren't while acknowledging that they were also not that great at what they were doing and made some absolutely embarrassing decisions that make their work understandably difficult for some people to revisit.

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Except they were great at what they were doing. That doesn't mean they were perfect and I'm not saying they were. Now, I'm not gonna defend the pop culture references or the blatant racism in Albert Odyssey as that is inexcusable. That being said, at least in the pop culture aspect of things, it wasn't in the main story as it was relegated to side content or NPC dialogue 99% of the time. Their translations had a life to them in an era full of mediocre and outright bad translations and frankly, it's really not arguable. As I and many others have said, yes, there were other decent translations but they were the exception, not the norm. WOrking Design's translations WERE the norm for them.

The crusade against WD's translations has been going for years and it's always the same people who pop up in these threads.

 

[FormatCompatible]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like I'd take a 100% bad translation over a 99% good one with a few boxes of straight up racism.

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Same.

Was never a fan of the way WD handled a lot of their localizations. Not only with inserting this kind of shit into the script but also their insistence in changing the games themselves to make them harder but actually just ended up making them way more obnoxious, there's a reason Un-worked Designs is a thing.

 

[My Blue Heaven]

Except they were great at what they were doing. That doesn't mean they were perfect and I'm not saying they were. Now, I'm not gonna defend the pop culture references or the blatant racism in Albert Odyssey as that is inexcusable. That being said, at least in the pop culture aspect of things, it wasn't in the main story as it was relegated to side content or NPC dialogue 99% of the time. Their translations had a life to them in an era full of mediocre and outright bad translations and frankly, it's really not arguable. As I and many others have said, yes, there were other decent translations but they were the exception, not the norm. WOrking Design's translations WERE the norm for them.

The crusade against WD's translations has been going for years and it's always the same people who pop up in these threads.

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it's also the same people who pop in to defend their nonsense. hello.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

Most of the games they brought over would be beyond obscure in the Western world if they were never localized (like Surging Aura on Mega Drive tier unknown). I appreciate a lot of their efforts if nothing else just due to that.

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That's true of every RPG that came out that wasn't connected to Square, Enix or Nintendo. Nobody in the West would have much knowledge of Sword of Vermillion or The 7th Saga either. It's like how, in the US, there's still affection for Slayers or Trigun, whereas they're completely forgotten in Japan. Everything that came to us from a niche was noteworthy.

 

[Geode]

You know they were all laughing it up while they wrote this guy's dialogue.

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.

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That surfer dude is so immersion breaking, like I seriously doubt anyone surfs in that world, so he wouldn't have a reason to talk that way. I feel like the people that like this stuff don't actually care about the worlds they're playing in.

Also, I'm kinda surprised at all the people that are like "The changes are fine because they were better than other games.", yet aren't saying they should a proper modern localization. Yeah, I understand take what you can get at the time, but these games need an update. I know easier said than done.

 

[Don Fluffles]

Despite the cringy humor, WD's efforts had an influence on the industry we would be poorer without. Not only did they put effort into their localisations at a time when almost nobody cared, they did so for games other publishers wouldn't touch in the 90s.

Without WD, we might not have Recettear, Xenoblade or the frickin' Trails franchise over here.

 

[My Blue Heaven]

That surfer dude is so immersion breaking, like I seriously doubt anyone surfs in that world, so he wouldn't have a reason to talk that way. I feel like the people that like this stuff don't actually care about the worlds they're playing in.

Also, I'm kinda surprised at all the people that are like "The changes are fine because they were better than other games.", yet aren't saying they should a proper modern localization. Yeah, I understand take what you can get at the time, but these games need an update. I know easier said than done.

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the truth is nobody outside of the working designs awareness circle probably cares about this stuff so an update is unlikely. JRPG fans have moved on to bigger and better things. the games that WD brought over only have a cult of personality around them because of WD themselves, which is why you see people fall over to defend them.

Without WD, we might not have Recettear, Xenoblade or the frickin' Trails franchise over here.

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fans did more to have these come over than WD, jesus. what am i even reading here lol. the delusion for some of you is just nuts.

 

[Nairume]

Except they were great at what they were doing.

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They weren't, though.

Their work was full of questionable localization decisions, they relied heavily on punching up dialog instead of letting games stand on their own, they often broke the games they worked on when they tried to tweak mechanics or difficulty, and they took forever to finish their work.

Working Designs was fine to sometimes good and had the benefit of just marketing to a much smaller audience with a lot less competition. If you want "great" at what they were doing, Ted Woolsey was running circles around them and it's not like he was alone in that.

 

[Maximum Spider]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like I'd take a 100% bad translation over a 99% good one with a few boxes of straight up racism.

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Kinda fucked up that this isn't the main sticking point in this thread.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

Without WD, we might not have Recettear, Xenoblade or the frickin' Trails franchise over here.

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FF7 had far more to do with this. JRPGs had a well established niche before that, but it was Final Fantasy that opened the flood gates.

 

[My Blue Heaven]

Kinda fucked up that this isn't the main sticking point in this thread.

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it's okay to paper over the racism if you like or have fanboy nostalgia for the company involved i guess

 

[Starlatine]

I think the main difference with AA is that it was at least somewhat fitting compared to the Japanese dialogue.

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an 100% straight translated AA would beb the dullest, dumbest game to ever get out of japan

and with even more dumb references and puns, which suprisingly enough sometimes were toned down on the english version

 

[noinspiration]

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.

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Didn't they make one of the games they localized literally impossible to beat? I recall reading something like that.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

If you want "great" at what they were doing, Ted Woolsey was running circles around them and it's not like he was alone in that.

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Jeremy Blaustein is another great example. Play Snatcher for an example of great localization contemporaneous with WD.

 

[My Blue Heaven]

Didn't they make one of the games they localized literally impossible to beat? I recall reading something like that.

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you're thinking of Exile 2 and yes their gameplay changes made it nigh-impossible to beat without glitching or exploits

 

[Nairume]

you're thinking of Exile 2 and yes their gameplay changes made it nigh-impossible to beat without glitching or exploits

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They also messed up Lunar 2 by making it to where you had to spend your magic xp (already a precious resource) to save, on top of jacking up enemy stats.

 

[Ballou]

Did Lunar on PS1 have anything as bad as a few of those images in the OP? I played it when I was 11, but I can't remember much of the dialogue. I'm sure there was stuff that went over my head.

 

[Deleted member 17210]

Jeremy Blaustein is another great example. Play Snatcher for an example of great localization contemporaneous with WD.

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Snatcher's localization was amazing for its time. They put in a lot of effort for something that had so few copies made.

 

[Wereroku]

Didn't they make one of the games they localized literally impossible to beat? I recall reading something like that.

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That was a bug more then an intended change. They didn't find it until the game was released and was impossible to fix.

 

[MrWindUpBird]

They weren't, though.

Their work was full of questionable localization decisions, they relied heavily on punching up dialog instead of letting games stand on their own, they often broke the games they worked on when they tried to tweak mechanics or difficulty, and they took forever to finish their work.

Working Designs was fine to sometimes good and had the benefit of just marketing to a much smaller audience with a lot less competition. If you want "great" at what they were doing, Ted Woolsey was running circles around them and it's not like he was alone in that.

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Take away the pop culture and difficulty changes Woolsey literally did the same thing WD in the games he translated.

 

[My Blue Heaven]

smarter people than me back in the day used to brand victor ireland as basically a charismatic used car salesman who has now somehow managed to get a cult of nerds to be in his corner all the way to 2021. that's a testament to how good he was at basically being a salesman i guess

 

[werezompire]

I do think it's hilarious that, in trying to cherry pick examples of things worse than WD's work, they have to jump all the way ahead to Wild Arms 2.

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Lots of games had worse localizations than WD then, something like Wild Arms 2 is just one of the worst.

I'd go as far as to day that Lunar:EB has the best localization of any 16-bit JRPG other than Earthbound. And it's hard to compare the two since Lunar was very focused on the main cast and Earthbound's main cast are blank slates.

For early localizations, Nintendo and Sega were generally competent. Square was usually competent but became very unreliable by the PS1 era (FF7 and Parasite Eve are really bad). A lot of Enix's SNES games had problems with Robotrek having the worst localization. Breath of Fire 2 was dreadful. Lufia 2 has a decent translation but the English version is incredibly buggy. Persona 1 Americanized the game and cut out the alternate story path. Suikoden 2 was buggy and had more than one spot where they forgot to translate the text entirely.

One of the reasons I liked Working Designs is that they were one of the first to actively try to be funny at a time when coherent was a bar that many weren't meeting. And yes, they missed the mark frequently but that was still better than the competition.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

Take away the pop culture and difficulty changes Woolsey literally did the same thing WD in the games he translated.

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Which Woolsey games were racist or had slurs?

 

[t26]

Take away the pop culture and difficulty changes Woolsey literally did the same thing WD in the games he translated.

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It is not like Woolsey didn't add any pop culture reference.

 

[Leo-Tyrant]

This is one of the reasons I decided to learn Japanese. I wanted to get the actual meaning behind the conversations in FFVII, Xenogears, Grandia, etc.

I have been working every single day for about 540 days straight towards this goal. Its the hardest thing I have done in my life and I'm still years away of reaching a a good "baseline".

But I'm able to play a bit of FFVII and Grandia in the original language and it feels incredible (even though I spend too much time sometimes, due to the Kanji + low resolution text in old games). There really is a lot of context that gets lost in translation, nevermind the actual translator idiosyncrasies.

I dont suggest this approach, it would be better to just have "better translations", but...it does exist as a nuclear option.

 

[Nairume]

Take away the pop culture and difficulty changes Woolsey literally did the same thing WD in the games he translated.

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"Take away some of the things that made WD worse than somebody else and they wouldn't be worse than somebody else"

Though I don't recall Woolsey having racist shit in his work.

Not to mention he'd still be better than them at getting stuff out on time.

 

[Geeklat]

I'm likely remembering things poorly as I haven't played Lunar in a long time, but I don't recall anything sticking out. All the examples posted are from "Not Lunar." Can someone post examples from Lunar of the bad pop culture references?

 

[mael]

Come on Working Design translation on Saturn game were awesome it can't be that bad?

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DEAR GOD!