Happy Birthday to RPGOne ;P

RPGC Community Yonin no Translators Translation Pagoda
#1

That’s it, RPGOne is now 5 years old. It was born an April 5th, and it quickly learnt to walk :P.

They updated the site with a new project: Chrono Trigger remake, and a new Project module.

http://www.rpgone.net

I saw the update yesterday, but I couldn’t post due to lack of time (and I still have to update YnT, I know of someone that is wishing to kill me heh).

I’m wondering, have you been following RPGOne these years, or actively using one of their patches? which is your experience about them? I think they are doing a rather good job, and it can be seen on the whole group of skilled people that gives form to it.

#2

Honestly, I find RPGOne to be a bit wasteful, working on projects that don’t need to be worked on. FF6? CT? Why make new translations (or dare I say… transliterations?) when perfectly good translations already exist? I talked to Sky Rendar about it a long time ago before he joined them, and he didn’t seem to have much of a reason other than “Woolsey sucks”, and I’ve always hated when people said that (mostly because it’s simply <a href=“http://tomato.fobby.net/old/woolsey.php”>not true</a>). And they’re also apparently going to retranslate the Mother games for some reason. WHY?! I know it’s their own hobby and they can work on whatever, I just wish they’d work on something that needs to be worked on… you know, like YnT does! =D

That said, I am following the Slayers RPG pretty closely. I couldn’t care less about them translating games that have already been translated, though.

#3

Just having the time, skill/knowledge and will is enough to justify whatever you do if it doesn’t dammage anyione :P. Anyway, I always want the translations to be the closest to the original (in fact, I don’t tend to play games in my native language, I prefer the US or Japanese versions if possible). I can’t talk too much about the differences between Final Fantasy 3 (US) and 6 (Jap), but the official US translation of CT is really uhm… “different” (if you prefer it that way), in fact Woolsey said in an interview that the CT trans got cut down by about the half.

About that “sex, alcohol, and drugs” = “good stuff”, I wouldn’t say so, but I find it to be another part of the game itself, and shouldn’t be thrown away (nor anything else heh), and if someone thinks some “minor” dialogues are bad because their kids could read it… then don’t let them play it… most children here wouldn’t be surprised with things like that… there are talks in class about sex, drugs, etc what they do, how to do it, etc when you are near 14-16.

#4

I’d be willing to bet that the Chrono Trigger script was more intact than almost ALL 16-bit or lower RPG translations. 50% may not sound like a lot, but considering space limitations and cutting off the “fat” of a translation, it’s not that bad. Plus, it’s possible Woolsey was referring to 50% of the physical space, not 50% of the content. (I could say “That man over there is a really evil bad guy!” or I could say “That guy is really evil!” Both mean the same thing, but the second one is more succinct, but somebody could argue that I cut 50% of the original out. But I would say the second sentence is better because I kept all the original meaning and emotion of the original sentence, just with less beating around the bush) Chrono Trigger’s translation, while more succinct than the original Japanese, kept the same basic meaning of the original, and that’s what’s important. Plus it was written in an interesting and entertaining manner, which is more that can be said about RPGOne’s future translation, if their FF6 translation is any indication. (Although, to be fair, I hate to say it, but very, very, very few fan translations end up having particularly interesting scripts that don’t end up being extremely overdone).

The fact is, if you’re going to re-translate a SNES RPG because the translation was bad, FF6 and Chrono Trigger are the LAST places you should look, because frankly, they were the two of the best-translated SNES RPGs (along with possibly SMRPG). Look at stuff like Breath of Fire 2 if you want to see a bad translation (and even that is better than most NES games).

Now, if they were only translating the games out of pure love or whatever (which is why I don’t mind when people spend time making silly hacks on games they love and stuff), then fine, but the way they always act like they’re crusading against the evils of bad translation or whatever really aggrivates me.

But that’s just me. You DID ask what everybody thought about RPGOne. :wink:

#5

Well, I consider 50% quite a lot, and even more when considering all the dialogues CT has.

Well, when I saw it time ago I decided to take a peek, compared the same dialogues, and noticed that most were really different and keeping just slightly the context. I don’t deny that the US script was good tho.

But that’s something you can never know :P. And who knows… maybe those jokes or puns were never present in the original or were fully different.

It depends of how translators and revisers treat the script, but it’s mainly a fault of the original game and scriptwriter (always the translator and reviser are good).

Heh, I agree with you :stuck_out_tongue: Gideon Zhi was looking at it, together with another person… I don’t remember who was he tho… maybe ChrisRPG as well.

I never felt them that way actually…

That’s just a way of knowing which people to kill when I conquer the world ;P.

#6

This is precisely what happened with Gun Hazard. We had precious little space for text; however, what’s there is very well written and keeps as much of the original meaning as humanly possible. It’s quite possibly one of the best scripts in any of my games yet. I really wish most of my games could have gotten the same treatment, to be honest. The space limitations were extremely cruel, but the end result was countless revisions and an incredibly good script.

Insofar as BoF2 is concerned, I was looking at it with Nightcrawler (maybe) and Tomato (maybe) a while back. It’s been too long and I don’t really remember who, but the project never went anywhere. That doesn’t mean it’s not dead, though it’s not being done by me anymore. This guy is giving the game better treatment than I ever would have; I’d love to do something like this some day, but I just don’t really have the time.

#7

I gotta agree. I both love and hate the GBA version. Love it because it’s portable (and cheaper. At least when I bought the GBA cart, the SNES cart was still worth about $40-50), and it’s a good game otherwise.
I hate it because it Capcom just copied the stupid translation from the SNES, without even a crappy machine-based grammer check.
:bowser: