Games

[icycalm]

Nich Maragos of Atlus USA was recently defending the company's decision to cut some voiceovers from the NA version of the PS2 port of Arcana Heart, and in the process gave a rundown of changes to all their recent and upcoming localizations:

Going down a mental list of stuff we've announced...

Rondo of Swords: English dub, no cuts.
FES: English dub, no cuts.
Drone Tactics: JP game had no voice, Hard mode added.
Summon Night TA: English dub, no cuts.
R-Type Command: JP game had no voice, no cuts.
Spectral Force 3: English dub, no cuts.
Etrian Odyssey II: JP game had no voice, no cuts.
Operation Darkness: English (and I do mean English) dub, no cuts.
Trauma Center UtK2: English dub, no cuts.

And I can't think of anything offhand that we've cut in the unannounced games either. So it looks like we'll be continuing our general policy of not cutting stuff.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.ph ... tcount=157

Interesting stuff. I think those guys are doing a fantastic job, all thing considered.

[Jedah]

This guy surely has a Greek name...

Atlus is one of the most important publishers. It's the only company taking risks to publish Japanese games that console makers and rich publishers aside, had decided a decade ago are not commercially viable in the west. Well I'm not sure whether they're making enough money, but I hope they'll stay in business for a long time.

[icycalm]

This guy surely has a Greek name...

Well, he is an American, so he must be second- or third-generation or something. This is his blog:

http://www.maragos.org/

He used to write for a famous independent review site called the Gaming Intelligence Agency (see here), before that was closed down and he moved on to localizations.

Atlus is one of the most important publishers.

Note that we are talking about Atlus USA here, which is a completely different company from the Japanese Atlus. Usually, the US branches of Japanese companies only localize games from their Japanese parents, but the awesome thing about Atlus USA is that they will localize games from anyone, as long as the rights are available and they think there's a Western market for them. See, for example, the games Nich listed:

Rondo of Swords: Success
FES: Atlus
Drone Tactics: Success
Summon Night TA: Flight-Plan
R-Type Command: Irem
Spectral Force 3: Idea Factory
Etrian Odyssey II: Atlus
Operation Darkness: Success
Trauma Center UtK2: Atlus

as well, as, for example, Arcana Heart, which was published in Japan by AQ Interactive.

And many of these games are top in their genre. Arcana Heart was the best fighting game of 2006, and Operation Darkness and Itsuwari no Rondo were the best SRPGs of 2007. None of these games would have been played much outside Japan if not for these guys.