Official Rune Factory Frontier Thread of country life and monster slavery

[noname2200]

Thread seems pretty dead, but for those of you interested, X-SEED did a peice on the localization of this game.

http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=6027588

"Rune Factory Frontier: “It’s geeky. It’s ridiculous. It’s the kind of game you will never admit to liking or playing to your Gears of War crew. It’s your dirty turnip secret.”

Hi, and welcome to the 2nd installation of the questionable content coming out of XSEED Games. This round of localization talk will center on Rune Factory Frontier, our soon to be released simulation-RPG-esque game for the Wii. I’m an editor here at XSEED and, not unlike a man confessing his sins, I will own up to my part in localizing it.

In this first post I want to talk a bit about how RFF started taking shape on the American side, even as the game was being set to release in Japan. For those who aren’t familiar with the localization process, Mike (the other editor at XSEED) expanded on it quite, er, viscerally, in his Retro Game Challenge blog last month. For those with weak visual stomachs I’ll explain it clinically and then leave it up to you to add the gore.

What is localization and what does it mean for your RPGs?

Localization is the process by which games are brought over from Japan and made consumable for the American market. What this usually involves (at least in our case) is a team of speedy translators, morally bankrupt editors, marketing gurus, PR gods and suffering interns. Together we cannibalize a Japanese game and spin it back to you in English. What usually confuses people though is that localizing a game and publishing it under our name doesn’t involve messing with the nuts and bolts of the programming. We don’t design the game or alter gameplay. The game is essentially what it is in Japan, just now in a language that makes sense to you, and is presented in a way that’s also going to make sense to you. And for good or for bad, the localization team will flavor the game.

Rune Factory Frontier is my first title here at XSEED, and while this admission might alarm the many hardcore fans of the franchise, I can assure you that the other members of the localization team caught most of the off-color humor I tried to smuggle in. Most of it anyway.

Due to our company’s relatively tiny size (localization has a mere 5 doomed souls), we tend to work on games in mostly autonomous pairs of two that are decided by a flurry of pointing fingers, or the ever popular, volunteer them when they’re in the bathroom method.

As the only girl in localization the powers that be thought it would be a good idea to assign me to a game that might require a…softer touch than they were used to employing. Luckily for them, the translator I was working with (Doh) tends to name his home bases in our prep games things like “Biscuit Farm” while mine skirt more sinister ground as “Blood Gulch” and “Boneyard.” So in that sense they got at least one soft touch, though not from me.

In localizing a game you have to always keep in mind that you’re trying to make it accessible and palatable to the fans. To do this it’s best to set the tone beforehand and have a general compromise on how the story is going to flow. We do this by playing the Japanese version first and getting a feel for it. And, as no one in this office can really lay any claim to being normal, we also follow strict guidelines that generally keep us from inserting inappropriate David Hasselhoff jokes or over-abusing the phrase, “lovely coconuts.”

For Rune, Doh and I made additional compromises early on in the editing stage. He was to be severely limited in his use of the word “awesome” in the dialogue (as it wasn’t exactly RPG canon), while I had to steer clear of any references to the disturbing nature of some of the accessories in the game (see here ?)[ ] and inappropriate readings of the word “strawberry” (I still managed to sneak one in though so please try and find it!).

Between Doh’s avid delight in pursuing the game’s girls and my own monomaniacal approach to the game (making money through farming, fishing, and selling Runeys into slavery, in this case), Rune Factory actually ended up pretty balanced.

This is how we approach all our titles, and thus what you’ll see in the upcoming game is an honest effort for Rune to retain its original essence, but with a bit of quirk where we could coax it out.

On that note I’ll cut off here and hopefully still have some people at this point to say to…

Next time on the Rune Factory Frontier blog… To the OCD farmer in us all."