Tales of Phantasia PSX Translated

I know it feels like I’m going on and on, but this is also and important point. Think of these three:

“I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate HATE YOU!”
“YOU SPOONY BARD!”
“I, Garldand, will knock you all down”

Number one is one of those cases where the change gets it right. The original was a very boring and plain equivalent. This one is memorable and fits the character like a glove.

The other two are not. They are famous, loved lines. You love them, I love them, we all love them, so much that Squeenix is keeping them and even cracking jokes about them in other games. They are nowhere even remotely near good localizations. We love them because we read them when we were little, and looking back, they are just so silly we can’t help but laugh. We love them because we are influenced by nostalgia, but from the point of view of someone going through a game the first time around, they make no sense. How many of you knew a word as archaic and unused as “spoony” back then? How many know what the word means even now?

The point is, you stick that kind of line in a game now, it gets rightfully purged by quality check. That’s what I mean about Woosley being, while not the devil he is painted as, not any kind of brilliant mind either. He did a fairly decent job for the time, period.

You rang? :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, I’ll take those classic lines over the literal ones any day. I can’t imagine what my online alias would’ve been if ‘You Spoony Bard’ didn’t exist.

I get that, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. They got lucky and the line stuck, but that only makes it good retroactively. It provided absolutely nothing to the script or characterization and made no sense, it was only quirky enough that people remembered it. That’s all the difference between that and a spelling mistake. It was so odd it became a catchphrase, but that’s different from “HATE x16” which was so fitting it became a catchphrase.

CT was an isolated case of an obsessive guy who felt the need to “fix” a perfectly functional script with just a few mistakes.

FF6 is another (see: Sky Render). And the new ToP script can’t possibly be “better” than the existing script for SNES, even if the SNES script itself is a fan translation. (Never played the GBA version, so can’t comment.) In any case, you’re right that pre-2000 localizations were bad, but again, that doesn’t mean that fan translations are therefore good if they’re “not worse” than those.

“This guy are sick” and “l i t t l e m o n e y” are as famous as those, but that doesn’t make them anything else but fuck-ups. It’s the same deal here: I said I appreciated some changes. But he still makes some severe blunders at times which not even that rememberable, just… make no sense whatsoever at the time and people just shut them off from memory, like Cyan’s nonsensical “let’s go” speech at the end of Sabin’s scenario after the split or the comment about Terra being “Loaded for bear” (?). I said I do not hate the man, but not every single change he made was necessarily acceptable or an improvement.

Of course there were errors - he did the entire script, which I believe was about 600 pages, single-handedly, in under a month. It’d practically be impossible not to make errors. The question is not about the errors but about the deliberate changes he made to the script, which is where some people get all het up and where I feel he turned a lacklustre script into a memorable one.
The other two examples you mention are famous because people laugh at them. With FF6’s lines, people tend to laugh with them.

I forgot you worked on the Star Ocean project, Cid. I remember hearing that someone was planning to do a dub patch, like what DeJap was originally going to do before the hard drive failure. Do you know anything about that project?

Yes, the groundwork did get done (the translations of the voice clips are on the SO shrine) and it was actually going to be hosted on RPGC. Unfortunately, DF got into an accident shortly after it started, and quit romhacking at around the same time, so the project died before we recorded a single line.

The point is, you stick that kind of line in a game now, it gets rightfully purged by quality check. That’s what I mean about Woosley being, while not the devil he is painted as, not any kind of brilliant mind either. He did a fairly decent job for the time, period.

Woolsey translated neither of the two games you mention. I agree, those lines are funny the way Zero Wing is funny. But the vast majority of the lines in FF6 and CT are more like the first one you quote.

I know this is sorta off topic, but people started to mention FF6’s translation and I was wondering if the GBA FF6 has a significantly better translation than the ps1 FF6.

Still, the Garland line is the only reason he’s memorable (apart from his name).

Well, in FF1 practically nothing was memorable.

A great way to see the difference between good and bad translations is FF Tactics. Even ignoring the grammatical errors, the dialogue generally made sense and was quite close to the original Japanese, but it was bland and often confusing. The new translation for PSP shows the entire thing in a totally new light, and is infinitely more enjoyable (at least to those of us with a big enough vocabulary to enjoy it).

Fullmetal: That depends on who you ask. Some people are miffed at the changes they made. Personally, I think they kept the best of Woolsey’s lines while improving immensely on the script. I was particularly impressed with the opera scene, which not only rhymed but kept the rhythm of the musical notes.

Oh no? What about “Here lies Erdrick” or “TCELES B HSUP”? :stuck_out_tongue:

Now that I think of it, FF1’s translation was pretty good, if a bit boring. I can’t think of any truly awkward lines other than Garland’s famous one.

Man, that really makes me want to get a PSP now. You must be right about the PSX translation being close to the original Japanese, because it’s just like Japanese to leave stuff out of the dialogue and have the reader fill in the blanks. Seriously, I took a look at the script just now and it reads as if they took a normal English translation and cut out every other line of dialogue. While this Japanese vagueness is something I can appreciate in some situations (I don’t usually like having every little thing spelled out for me), in the case of FFT’s complicated story it works out horribly. It would also be cool to see some sort of medieval European flavor thrown into the script, since I thought the culture of Ivalice was pretty cool.

I absolutely love the script so far for FFT:LW. I loved it in Vagrant story, I loved it in FF12, and it’s definitely not disappointing me now. It’s like reading Shakespeare without the poetry. It’s a whole other experience.

Now that I think of it, FF1’s translation was pretty good, if a bit boring. I can’t think of any truly awkward lines other than Garland’s famous one.

“Warriors! Revive the power of the ORBS!” 8p There was nothing there to be awkward, really.

Eh, we wouldn’t have too high demands from such an old game.

It’s like reading Shakespeare without the poetry.
Does not compute :stuck_out_tongue: Sounds interesting though.

The more I play, the more impressed I am. I’m particularly taken with the use of metaphor in the script, something almost unheard of in an RPG. Sydney’s line in Vagrant Story comparing false memories to “summer snow” was the first inkling, but FFT:LW is chock-full of excellent lines like this. In the scene in Dorter, it begins to rain just as your party comes across Wiegraf, and he says his luck “turns ill with the weather”. Algath’s odious screed against commoners is far more coarse now, but the imagery is much more vivid (I wish I had the text with me). Dycedarg (I think) mentions diplomacy failing as “turning words to swords”, an inspired image.

The only thing I wish is that these lines were voiced. Not so much for the spectacle (which would be amazing) but simply because in text-only RPGs I’m used to scrolling past the text quickly, and now I actually have to stop, pay attention, and let the words sink in.

Well, as long as said voice-acting isn’t at the quality of, uh, Lunar:SSSC, in which all but one of the cast would be beaten in terms of quality by Keanu Reeves and William Shatner …

Yeah, I borrowed Megaman ZX:Advent and I still have that awful, awful voice acting in my mind. Eugh.

i’m just posting in this thread because it had ToP in the title

There are several voice-acted FMVs in Lion War (and the FMVs are absolutely gorgeous - a very organic, hand-drawn style which fits perfectly with the art style of the game) and so far I have nothing but good things to say about them.

The new version isn’t perfect, though - the much-discussed lag is definitely there, and manifests itself in practically every special move. The music also sounds much lower quality than the original. However, neither of these really bothers me all that much, and the new script more than makes up for it.

However, I do wish I knew someone else with a PSP so I could do some of this cooperative stuff…

FFT is thus far the first and only thing to make me, in some minute way, want a PSP. I was a big fan of the original FFT for all its flaws, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about this one.