Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana is a great action role-playing game marred by a shoddy localisation. Following fan outcry over grammatical errors, inconsistencies and typos, NIS America announced today it’s doing the whole thing over again.
In a letter addressed to “All Customers of Ys VIII“, NIS America president and CEO Takuro Yamashita acknowledged that the localisation had not reached an acceptable level by the company’s standards, and an internal investigation was being held to discover how it occurred as well as ensure it doesn’t happen again. More importantly, the company is having the entire localisation gone over again to fix the existing problem.
As for Ys VIII itself, we will have a new translator and editor go over the entire localisation to fix grammatical errors, typos, inconsistencies, and also to take a fresh look at the dialog and characterizations. For the script, where necessary, we will re-translate and re-edit the game including updating voicework to reflect these changes.
That’s some pretty substantial bending-over-backward to make players happy right there, but an appropriate response given the scope of the flubs and fumbles made in localising the eighth game in the venerable role-playing series to English.
One of my favourite examples involves a place named the “Crevice of the Archeozoic Era” in Japanese. It sounds so mysterious, doesn’t it?
Here’s the English version:
Not only did this place already have a perfectly good English language name, the translators opted to translate “crevice” as “big hole”. Big hole.
Along with poor translating, localisation errors also led to food recipe names being swapped, leaving players confused over which buffs were received when eating in-game meals.
The images in this post are all derived from a gallery linked on the Reddit page for fans of Ys developer Nihon Falcom, which organised a write-in campaign aimed at letting the Japanese video game maker know how poorly North American publisher NIS America had botched the localisation.
Yamashita said the company plans to offer the results of the re-localisation as a free download to PlayStation 4 and Vita players next month, with the delayed PC version launching with the updated translation.
Comments
5 responses to “NIS America Is Redoing Ys 8’s Shoddy Localisation”
Nice one! No mucking around, pledge to fix.
Good to see a company willing to admit to a glaring issue and going out of their way to fix it (I’m looking at you ‘Fire Emblem: Fates’ with your “…” conversation).
google translate?
Except it’s not. It’s a token effort. They’ll spend maybe 2-3 weeks fixing up some of the gameplay-affecting issues and obvious typoes and nonsense sentences. Fixing the localization would require re-translating it. Their localization is stiff, dry and lifeless even aside from the actual nonsense.
I’m not sure about how other people feel, but if it’s that bad, they should provide free replacements for people who bought the physical version. I just don’t think a patch would be sufficient in this case.