Tim Rogers wrote:at any rate, i've noticed that a lot of japanese games with shitty pedestrian stories are, at least, "well-written" from moment-to-moment in terms of dialogue. and when they're released in english, they're just shitty pedestrian stories with dialogue written by a guy who was the president of his japanese club in high school.
like, seriously.
i'm not talking about "japanese sounds better because it's japanese banzai nippon lol". i'm talking about common sense.
watch this video (or try to)
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/38371.htmlthis is infinite undiscovery (we will not talk about how "bad" the title is).
listen to the voices.
like, really listen to them.
note the following trend:
1. the main character gets FUCKING WHOMPED by this two-ton ogre.
2. like, slammed in the face with a GIANT FUCKING CLUB
3. he is sent FLYING BACKWARD THROUGH THE AIR
4. he collides with the earth, BREAKING shards of rock from the ground
5. his response to this excruciating pain is to shout "CUT IT OUT!", almost as though it were one were (like, "CUTITOUT!")
now, i have issues (
hatred issues) with much of what suffices for "drama" in japanese. the male protagonist who always talks like he's just finished running a marathon, etc.
that said, if i were forced at gunpoint to play infinite undiscovery, i would first ask my captor to let me play it in japanese, and if he said no, i would tell him to go ahead and shoot me.
in fact -- and this is what you might not realize -- the amount of thought that goes into english translations of these japanese games are far creepier than any "subs vs dubs!!!" argument on the internet.
like, who do you think
translates this shit? it's obviously done by the doughboys who studied japanese sanctimoniously so that, someday, they could give videogames and anime the holy treatment they deserved.
what you end up with is something exceedingly creepy.
fact: in japanese, many screams of pain or discomfort tend to happen to be actual words. personally, i hate this kind of thing by default because it leads to a lot of hideously backward thinking. we won't get into that!
so the localizers decide, "well, in japanese, what he says when he gets hit LITERALLY means 'please stop', soooooo, let's localize it as 'CUTITOUT'". they high-five themselves, finish drinking their yoohoo, grab their disposable razor, shave a layer of pimples off their face, and get back to work.
in other words, they don't think of how retarded it sounds.
and then, well. there's the voice-acting. it's phoned in. listen to that shit. seriously. try and stomach it for the full length of the trailer.
protip: let the trailer run in a separate tab. try to listen to the soundtrack apart from the video.
notice how when the guy says "CUTITOUT" he says it exactly the same way every time.
notice how the names of attacks and magic spells or whatever, also, sound the same every time.
what i'm saying when i say the japanese version is "better", more often than not, is that the
little things are better. like, they'll record
more than one expression of pain for each class of damage per character, and randomize them.
that's the sort of thing i'm getting at. of course, here in outer space, any words typed in cold cold text give off the immediate impression of a guy with a karate kid bandanna and fourteen chins.
in closing: seriously, internet, it's not my fault that i just happen to be able to understand japanese and you don't :(
