![]() Well it wasn't just me - we have a team of translators and editors who approach these games. So that's where we had to come up with this pun that we ultimately went with, which was "how do you avoid dangerous cults? Practice safe sects!" Okay, let's drill into that localization process - how, exactly, did you go from a flying futon joke to a safe sex joke? If we literally translated that, it wouldn't work. If we put in "why did the chicken cross the road?" it's not much of a pun it doesn't feel in line with Majima's character. It's basically a "why did the chicken cross the road" kind of joke. So in Japanese, that pun is "futon ga futon da", which means "a futon is a futon" or, "a futon flies." It's a pun on words. One of the perfect examples is, Majima encounters this.did you play the substory where he goes to infiltrate a cult? In that substory, one of the options he has is to crack a pun, in order to get this girl to snap out of her cult tendencies. Whether or not that means changing the dialogue a little bit, changing the style in which it's delivered, making dialogue options a little bit more punchy, that kind of thing. ![]() ![]() It's very clear to us when the writing that exists in the game is supposed to be like, "ha ha here's a joke." So we just want to make sure that if they intended for it to be funny, it also has to be funny to our audience. It's very clear when the developers want to be funny. Strichart: The humor of a Yakuza game is a fine line to walk. How do you translate that for a Western audience? The Yakuza games have a winning sense of humor. What follows is a version of that conversation we've edited for clarity. It was an interesting conversation that went beyond the localization process (Atlus uses a translator/editor tag-team approach, rather than relying on translators alone) to touch on how, exactly, you translate humor, and how players in different regions can view a game or its characters completely differently. That writing is translated and localized for the West by Atlus (alongside longtime series translator Inbound) starting with Yakuza 0 and continuing on through Yakuza Kiwami (a remake of the original 2005 game) and Yakuza 6. The localization of all three games has been overseen by Atlus' Scott Strichart, who recently sat down to chat about the ins and outs of adapting these games' humor and gravity for Western players. For all its focus on cold-hearted criminals and petty evil, Yakuza 0 is a remarkably funny game it affords players the freedom to quickly jump from incredibly serious, macabre scenes (a criminal is tortured in a warehouse) to (teach a shy punk band to act like Cool Rude Dudes in public). The hook that holds together all these disparate game design elements, that pulled us and scores of Western players like us through the game, is the writing. From a player's perspective, it can be overwhelming - my partner and I recently completed Yakuza 0, and saw that our 87 hours of combined play merited a "completion" score of roughly 33 percent. For example, Yakuza 0(the series prequel released outside of Japan early last year) sets itself up as a playable crime serial set in '80s Japan.īut it can also be a cabaret management game, a blind date sim, a 3D beat-'em-up, an emulator of old Sega arcade classics, a rhythm game, a light-hearted RPG about solving stranger's problems, a real estate management game, and a surprisingly good place to learn the basics of tabletop games like shogi and mahjong.įrom a developer's perspective, the scope of such a project seems daunting.
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