“I’m going to let anyone interested in on a little secret. I just interviewed Gabe Durham, series editor for Boss Fight Books. The interview will be up at LitReactor.com near the end of the month, but in terms of this book, I should be upfront and say this is the one he felt most assumed the reader had played the game. And I would agree. It’s a super-popular game, and it’s not unfair to assume that people have played it. I think that, doing it again, I would play the game first. Which is not a criticism of the book whatsoever. I enjoyed big portions of it even without playing the game or really knowing the characters.
Perhaps most fascinating were the portions about translation. It’s funny to consider how late in the game translation has come in to the world of video games. I mean, they’ve always had word-for-word translation, which is why we have things like All Your Base Are Belong To Us or A Winner Is You. But with a game like Chrono Trigger, with so much text, the translation is a lot more involved. In addition, there are a lot of jokes, references, and colloquialisms that have to be changed altogether. Think about it like this: Maybe a Japanese game would have a joke about one of those canned coffee vending machines I hear they have that sound awesome. And maybe the joke about hot cans of coffee wouldn’t really fly because, for whatever reason, in America we’ve decided that the only drink that should come out of vending machines is a liquid that will RELEASE THE GRIME FROM PENNIES.
Anyway, that joke, it can be left in, or it can be localized. Maybe with a hilarious jab about the fact that you could peel the paint off your house with the vended drink. Or a joke that’s less hilarious, more thinly-veiled outrage from an American man who wants a goddamn hot can of coffee.
I listened to this great show a while ago (http://jeffrubinjeffrubinshow.com/episode/38-mass-effect-3-with-mike-drucker/) that was mostly about Mass Effect 3, but the guest was Mike Drucker, a comedian who did some localization for the 3DS Kid Icarus game. This was in 2012, and I gathered that this sort of localization, this level of care, was a relatively new thing.
At any rate, food for thought. And Chrono Trigger served the meal.”