A Conversation With Sega's Localization Team On Censorship, Consistency, And Comedy
Earlier in 2018, we got a chance to sit down with some members of Sega's fantastic localization team. Sam Mullen, localization director at Sega/Atlus, and localization producer Andrew Davis joined us for a roundtable conversation about the ins and outs of localizing games like Yakuza and Persona. Rather than a traditional interview, Mullen and Davis mostly talked about how these games end up on U.S. shores, so we've presented the subject matter and posted what the two localizers talked about.
On localizing content that feels out-of-place or problematic in a different region:
Sam Mullen: I would say that's not an uncommon thing that happens and it's one of those really tricky things for us because, if we're too heavy-handed - like, let's say we do choose to do nothing. Our staff is really tuned into that kind of sentiment and all the stuff that goes around it, something we definitely think about a lot and talk about a lot. We look at it, we constantly engage in Japanese content and we understand that the things that different cultures react to is just different and we're very hyper-sensitive about that. We do nothing, though, and it's like walking into a wall and going "Well, people aren't going to like that."
On the other hand, if we're too heavy-handed, we get dinged with this whole censorship kind of thing. There's a certain consistent base that will be like "Hey you should just tell us what the–you know, don't mess with the content." And that's if we're really heavy-handed and aren't sensitive to the actual true localization process, which is what we are trying to keep it to what it originally was, we're trying not to change it too much. But there is a space in-between where we can kind of like "slight touch" and make it so certain things don't pop out quite as hard.
It goes back to, like I was saying on the [PAX West] panel, our intention is to have users react emotionally in the same way that the original creator intended. So if the creator was not intending the user to have some kind of visceral reaction to this content, but if we leave it as-is and they'll have a reaction to it, well then we're kinda not really doing our job. That's the whole thing, find this perfect space in-between where all parties are being addressed. Now, there are some extreme cases where you can't make everyone happy and at the end of the day you have to just say this is where it's going to fall. It's a little bit of hoping that people understand, but that's not really an excuse that can be made, anyway. We do have conversations with our dev teams, we do make cases and we do have open conversations, but sometimes creators have a hard line on something.
Andrew Davis: But often development can be a global collaborative process, like developers in Japan will listen to our feedback and sometimes they will say "We're in the middle of design for this, do you think this will be something that could be appropriate globally?" And sometimes we'll come back with our comments and say "Well, this is how this will be seen in this culture," whether it's American culture or whatever. Like I've had to say, "In Germany, you have to understand this would be very sensitive." So we can go back to the dev teams and sometimes we do have the opportunity to have a dialogue and it's always interesting.
Mullen: I remember recently with [Yakuza] Kiwami this time last year, there's a character, one of the two hostesses you can find of have a relationship with. One of them identifies as a lesbian. I remember having a lot of discussion with Scott [Strichart, Yakuza localization producer] about how to approach that storyline. The way her story results in Japanese, if translated straight, comes off as that like "Well you just never met a real man" kind of feel to it. But I don't think that's the intention they were going for, that's just the way it comes across in English. So I do remember there being this light feeling of needing to change the language, because that's not the point here.
That entire story arc is actually really interesting, because it gives people an interaction with a type of character that isn't represented much elsewhere, but there are definitely some complicated things here. I would say that the Ryu Ga Gotoku [Yakuza] Studio guys are actually currently very hyper-aware of that. Some of the stuff that we haven't announced or confirmed for the west, like the remasters of 3, 4, and 5, in the Asian and Japanese markets, they did make some content adjustments for that. [Yakuza producer] Nagoshi-san himself has spoken about how back in 2009, attitudes to certain things were different back then. They recognize it and are making adjustments to the content for the remasters.
They are listening and it's kind of our job on the localization side to make sure that all the overseas talk that is in our regions and our languages is being communicated. That's part of the localization job, it's not just text.
On the subject of how much overseas fanbases matter to development decisions:
Mullen: One thing I do want to clarify, because I do see this confusing a lot in the media. When [Nagoshi] says "overseas," people always interpret that to mean the west, and that's not what he means. Specifically speaking, he's talking about Asia as the primary overseas market, he's not talking about us. We're included in "overseas," but right now Japan has a huge push to try and get more uptake in the Asian market, which is why they're releasing their games with usually Chinese and Korean at the same time. Right now, with Sega Japan, they're trying to get in that market that's opening up. You know how markets are, whoever's there on the ground first is the strongest presence. Those guys are really focused on the overseas market, so when they say that, they're talking about opening new Yakuza audiences, which of course the west is part of that, but don't forget Asia. Asia is a huge part of that push as well.
On the subject of the recent resurgence of Japanese-developed games:
Mullen: It's kind of complicated. There's a couple of things going on. For one, in the early-2000s, you have to remember that Japan owned everything then. It was like, all the content was basically Japanese, but when the western developers started coming on the scene, Japan saw the uptake kind of starting to decline and that's really scary because that's a contraction to them. So they're thinking, "Why is this happening? Oh it must be that these western developers and these styles of games are taking our business." And the natural reaction is to after that and run to that, but ultimately you're trying to sell a product to someone – this product is appealing to cultural underpinnings of what we like in narrative, what we like in storytelling, what we like in settings, and whatnot. It's very challenging for someone from outside a culture to go in and try to get at that. It's really hard, it would be like a western developer really trying to make a JRPG that plucks at the heartstrings of a Japanese person who cares nothing about overseas content.
When Japan started doing that, you can kinda tell like this is Japan trying to run after that, not being very organic or natural. For a while, there was the whole [Keiji] Inafune thing and everyone just being down on their luck, and finally you just had other people being like "Man, F that. I'm just going to make the game I want to make. I don't want to make the game I think other people want to play, I want to make the game I want to play." And they start making those games.
At the same time that happened, we have the resurgence of accessibility of Japanese content. Back in 2004, if you wanted to access Japanese content, you'd be downloading mpegs off of shady bittorrent sites. Before that, you're trading VHSes at your anime club, so the access was really hard, right? But with the advent of like Crunchyroll and more easily accessible manga sites, the savviness of users to get Japanese that in a good time – there's an entire visual novel market now, Danganronpa is on Steam of all places. What it is is that, because these people have such easy access to it at such an early age, understanding the mindset of foreign characters in pop culture is way easier.
It's still like, you can only experience Japanese culture to a certain extent by consuming the pop culture. You can't really consume pop culture and be like "I know what it's like to be a Japanese person." That'd be a pretty ignorant statement. But you can still draw the lines between different types of pop culture, like the trends and whatnot, so when you step into a game that kind of needs you to understand what Japanese humor sounds like, what the reference, what the pacing is going to be, like Yakuza, you're already primed with that know-how. So if I drop like "Kiryuu-chan," you already know, like, okay -chan, that's a thing that's a term of endearment, I get that. And that's kind of common knowledge now. But if you asked a young pop culture consumer in 2004 what's different between -san, -chan, -kun, and -sama, they'd be like "What the f–what is that?" But now I bet you most people could probably at least take a crack at it, right? So there's just a cultural kind of intake where people are just a little bit more primed to receive the quirky stuff that Japanese people are making for themselves in a way that was just not there 15 years ago.
On localizing comedy and finding funny translators:
Mullen: The translators on our team I would say are actually pretty serious people. They're very straight-laced, but that's what we need. What their job is is to literally read a line and go "Okay. He's making a joke here. This joke doesn't make any sense so someone's going to have to rewrite this."
Davis: They will literally write that as a comment in the file. "Oh this is a pun. The pun is this. Go nuts."
Mullen: But they hand it over to the editors and our editing team, some of them are slightly bilingual or have experience speaking Japanese, but they're not like Japanese speakers or like bilinguals by any stretch. They're usually writers, people with journalistic backgrounds, people who are just wordsmiths, or funny and interesting people. So when they're getting this Japanese texts, just like a copywriter, you give them a report and it's their job to go "Okay well I'm going to make this not sound stupid."
So they come in and and they make all this dry, translated text, some of it is already funny because the original intention was set up to be funny, but they come in and they make it hot. They find and insert all the funniness, they find the stuff to go in there and go "Oh we can make this more serious or I'm gonna make you cry, so I'm going to write this really cry-worthy stuff right here." So they play that up. That's the way our company does this.
Davis: One thing we were experimenting with is different editors taking ownership of certain characters. I came on to Valkyria Revolution on the tail end of that project, but I heard that there was an experiment done where the editing team on that one sort of took longer shifts on certain characters and tried to fit their voice.
Mullen: And in that game especially, if you really pay attention...Valkyria Revolution as a game aside, the localization itself I felt the team did a really good job on it. If you really look at it, each character does have a very unique voice to them, which is very different from other characters, because literally a different person was writing the other characters. Now functionally that's actually really difficult because the game scripts are not set up that way.
Davis: There's conversations.
Mullen: Yeah, there's conversations, and having three different editors comb through a single file three times, because they're having to like–someone wrote this character to be interesting, but then the next person comes through and they're going "I am going to write this line this way so it feeds into my line a little bit better" and it creates a lot of complexity. Ultimately, I don't think that was necessarily an effective way to do it, it just depends on the project and the scope. But there are certain people who have different skills, like we have people who are better at straight-laced writing, we have funny pun people, we have guys who are tearjerker-type writers, so we have different people for different content, and we try to pair them up with the content that works for them. Going back to Yakuza, Majima's way of speaking, that's Scott Strichart's thing that he made, he built that. It's actually kind of crazy difficult for us because we can't just have one of our producers be the only person who can write for this character. That's like a risk, right? He could be hit by a car one day and then suddenly Majima's dead in the localization, we have to write him out of the series because we can't nail his voice anymore.
In Japanese, the way he speaks is somewhat formulaic, the way he crafts and constructs his lines, and you think that he just needs to say these words in this style, but English is not that simple. The person who's writing has to have access to all kinds of idioms, and turns of speech, and creative ways of writing. It's a little bit more complicated than that.
Davis: Japanese in particular does have a lot of opportunities for speech styles that are recognizable, like "gimmicks" in Japanese speech that don't come off as forced as "gimmicks" in English speech.
Mullen: Like having characters that end their lines with "piko" or something like that. Everything they're saying ends with piko, you made them say that. Like you can change the way Japanese sounds and say "This character sounds like this."
Davis: Or even the character Kai in Valkyria Chronicles 4, she actually uses masculine speech in her dialogue, which is not something you really...there isn't like masculine and feminine speech in English, like not really distinguishable. So we have to come up with other ways to get that across that she is blunt, cool, you know, it sort of diffuses into the larger editing rather than a simple grammatical thing.
Mullen: One of the things you actually have to do in Japanese characters, like if you have a character in game or an anime or whatever that has like multiple characters that interact with each other, they actually create these charts that say this character when speaking to this person uses these types of pronouns. When they refer to themselves, they use these types of pronouns, because it changes depending on the person they're talking to, and you actually have to map that out so it's consistent.
On writing a consistent voice for games with contrasting styles:
Mullen: One of the things we constantly have to worry about is consistency. Yakuza 5 is like 2.5 million JPCs [Japanese characters], Persona 5 was 50 percent bigger than that. In order to even attempt to get it done on time, so we didn't have to release the game two years after the Japanese release, we had to start translating mid-development. But text is being churned through, they're making changes so stuff that they we were already done with was getting ripped out and thrown away. And then like, oh s---, if you change that then this reference I wrote in doesn't make sense now and now I gotta go back and [frustrated groan].
Keeping up with it is a big mess and keeping character consistency is one of the biggest challenges, so our localization team spends a lot of time doing what we call pre-production, which is where they map all the characters, they say this is a sample of their speech, this is what they sound like, the kind of stuff they say, they don't say things like this, they don't have this kind of attitude, but they do these things, and they say things like this. With that understanding, the editing team tries to walk toward a single goal, but just by virtue of two different people writing for the same character, they're going to sound different at different parts of the game. Ideally, someone comes through and does a whole pass over the text and says it's all fitting in, but sometimes that's just like not possible.
Davis: Not with three million JPCs.
Mullen: If you're an incredible editor and you can move through fifteen thousand JPCs a day, which is like 7500 words–
Davis: That's basically proofreading at a publisher, which, I've done that, but...
Mullen: But if you're moving at that speed, it's like, what's the math on that? So a single person going through a game that's like three million JPCs, let's work that out. How long would it take them to do that?
Davis: Even at 15,000?
Mullen: Yeah, which is already breakneck speed. Like they do nothing other than that, no email, no nothing, no coordination. [Mullen uses his phone's calculator] It would take them 230 working days to do that. So, working weeks...46 weeks. That's from the point that it stopped being translated, because if it's still being translated, you might end up with other inconsistencies there. The translation team, as they're translating part of the game, they may have to go back to the beginning part and be like "Ah, now I understand this." Consistency across characterization and translation is definitely a huge challenge for everyone.
2018 saw the release of Yakuza 6 and Yakuza Kiwami 2, as well as PC releases of Yakuza 0 and an announced release of Yakuza Kiwami. Valkyria Chronicles 4 was released earlier this year, as well as a Switch port of the first Valkyria Chronicles. Further projects in the Persona 5 universe have also been announced.
The inclination to go back home is probably one of the biggest themes that permeates all of human art: literature, cinema, paintings. It’s an alluring concept because, as Thomas Wolfe once said, you can’t go home again. Because home isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind, a mental box containing your childhood obsessions, your fraught or precious moments with your family, the foolish ambitions of youth. You can go back to the location you grew up, sure, but most of the time that desire is rooted to return to a moment in your life, when you were a particular person, a person you can't ever be again.
Except sometimes you can cheat.
There are secret ways to return. Little passageways that lead to places where you can feel those moments of who you were like vibrations. Sense memory, made famous by Proust's madeline moment in Remembrance Of Things Past, is such a pathway, with a familiar smell returning you to your childhood home’s kitchen. Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy proposes that love, true adult love, is in itself a form of time travel, with couples able to return to the excitement of their early courtships upon occasion and remember the intimate sacredness at the foundation of their relationship during turbulent times. There’s also plain intellectual property-based nostalgia, which has become a billion dollar industry for the like of corporations like Disney.
I go home a lot. Whenever I see a clip of The Terminator, Dune, or Star Wars IV: A New Hope, I’m immediately back to those weekends when my dad showed my brother and I those movies on Laserdisc while we ate thin and crispy crust pepperoni pizzas. Songs from The Killers' Hot Fuzz will make me briefly recall the sensation of walking around The Mall Of Georgia when I was a teenager. However, I think the most potent way to go back for me is replaying certain games.
Hitman Blood Money’s got this great level called "A New Life" that takes place in a suburban neighborhood. As assassin Agent 47, you’re tasked with taking out an FBI informant named Vinnie Sinistra and stealing a necklace containing microfilm from his wife.
I know the level by heart. Every square inch. I have its floorplan mapped out in my brain from the hours upon hours in high school I’d spend playing through it, planning every approach, knowing every valuable location. I know it as well as I know any place I've called home. I’ve killed poor Vinnie in every way imaginable. I’ve sniped him from his neighbor’s garage with a silenced scope. I’ve dropped a mine behind his living room chair. I’ve pushed him into the pool and drowned him. I’ve deliberately pulled an alarm and then waited for Vinnie in his safety closet, kitchen knife in hand. I've even disguised myself as a clown and strangled him for giggles.
It’s a perfect level. A neighborhood that’s spacious but not too big, with plenty of secret spots packed with opportunity. Want to sneak into Vinnie’s yard as a garbage man? Kill one of the unlucky fellows, throw them in the garbage truck to dispose of the body, and go on your way. There’s also a treehouse that gives you a clear shot of Vinnie’s path and is a useful sniper's nest. A surveillance van is parked near the house. The quickest way to get through the level is to raid the FBI’s surveillance van, killed the men inside, steal one of their suits, stroll into the living room and pop Vinnie in the head — if you don’t mind a few more bodies besides your target.
I go back to" A New Life" every now and again not only because it gives me vaguely fuzzy feelings about being a high schooler and getting away with playing games on school time. It also reminds me of being a young person adoring games for reasons that were then hard to put into words, learning level design without realizing that’s what I was doing and coming to appreciate flexible game design that encourages the player to bend systems to their will. Even years later, I still get traces of the sensation that I felt playing "A New Life" for the first time, wowed by the sheer amount of freedom Blood Money gave me. These little trips give me a brief but poignant appreciation for how far I’ve come as someone with a professional interest in the creation and artistry of games.
BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME. I wanna hear about you, reader. What are some of your most cherished video game levels that you’ve played over the years and continue to come back to? Why do you love them so much? Because they’re designed well or there’s some personal attachment to them? Let us know in the comments below.
Slightly Mad Studios, the developer behind Project Cars 2 (pictured) and Need for Speed: Shift, seems to be getting into the hardware business. In a tweet, Slightly Mad Studios’ CEO Ian Bell announced the Mad Box video game console.
What is the Mad Box? It's the most powerful console ever built... It's literally 'Mad'... You want 4k, you want VR at 60FPS? You want a full engine for free to develop your games on it? You have it.
— Ian Bell SMS (@bell_sms) January 2, 2019Variety spoke to Bell to learn further details, and it sounds like Slightly Mad's plans are fairly ambitious. According to the CEO, Slightly Mad wants to make a high-end console that will support most major VR headsets, run games at 120 FPS, and be as powerful as a "very fast PC 2 years from now." Bell also told Variety that Slightly Mad already has several interested investors, but didn't offer any further specs or business plans. If this all comes together, the Mad Box will release in about three years.
[Source: Variety]
This is certainly a strange way to announce a gaming console. The hardware business is very complicated and fraught with pitfalls, so who knows if this dream will become a reality. On the other hand, maybe Slightly Mad Studios has a solid business plan, because its console sounds like something that many gamers would love. Either way, we're interested to follow this project's progress over the next few years.
Click to watch embedded videoA lot of Pokémon fans have warm, fuzzy memories related to walking into a theater to see their favorite Pocket Monsters on the big screen. The Pokémon Company is looking to tap into those warm fuzzies with its next film, which is actually a computer generated "reimagining" of the original Pokémon movie from 1999.
Pokémon the First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back took the cast from the insanely-popular TV cartoon and detailed their first encounter with the psychically-charged Mewtwo. The CG reimagining Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution is set to release in Japan on July 12, but we're still waiting for news on an English translation.
Why, hello there! Every year around this time, I like to reflect on the last 10 games I played and write haiku based on my experiences. What can I say? It's just something I do. Lucky for you, I also post my works so you, the reading public, can appreciate my efforts.
If you like this kind of stuff, you're clearly Very Smart and you can find more of my work here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. As always, you're welcome. Can we still say "Happy new year" now?
Overwatch Mystery heroes: It’s all I play anymore. Doomfist again? Crap.
Just Cause 4 Started the download. This is taking a long time. Thanks, Xfinity!
Earth Defense Force 5 They really did it! A fun game with spiders, man! The best podcast game
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Playing with my kids The list of banned fighters grows Like Villager’s tree
Red Dead Redemption II Cinematic mode Makes the journey bearable Horse, are we there yet?
Tetris Effect The other effect? When you watch someone else play They’re doing it wrong
Fortnite Oh, they have planes now? What an innovative way To lose games faster
Hitman 2 Check out this cool joke: “Why can’t anyone notice The barcode tat—” UGH...
Forza Horizon 4 Crash through fence, “AWESOME!” Everything I do is “COOL!” Is this the bad place?
Spider-Man Kind of like Batman, But with a boring New York. This is amazing?
Click here to watch embedded videoWe don't know much about the cyberpunk platformer The Last Night, but this spiritual successor to the 1992 game Flashback made a strong first impression during its E3 2017 trailer (above). The Last Night is about a second-class citizen who becomes disheartened by the seemingly pointless existence of his neighbors who's day-to-day lives are completely gamified.
Developer Odd Tales originally planned to release The Last Night in 2018, but the team has encountered massive business, legal, and funding issues.
Then... - We encountered massive business, legal & funding issues we can't talk about. - We had to cancel a new trailer of The Last Night at The Game Awards 😰 - We're currently raising funds, so get in touch: hello@oddtales.net
— timsoret (@timsoret) December 31, 2018The Last Night looks cool, so we hope that Odd Tales is able to find some workable solutions to its problems and deliver on its vision.
In an SEC filing yesterday, Activision Blizzard announced that it was terminating the contract of Spencer Neumann, chief financial officer "for cause unrelated to the Company’s financial reporting or disclosure controls and procedures." The company has put him on paid leave and put the onus on Neumann to demonstrate why he should still be employed.
Though the reason for Neumman's departure was not immediately clear, Reuters is now reporting that Netflix is hiring Neumann to be the streaming giant's CFO. Before his time at Activision, Neumann served as the CFO of Disney Parks and Resorts division. Netflix confirmed the appointment on January 2nd.
In the meantime, chief corporate office Dennis Durkin is filling Neumann's role, and will take it over if Neumann leaves. Durkin was the company's CFO until May 2017 when he assumed his current position.
This shuffling comes on the heels of Activision Blizzard reporting a loss of seven million monthly active users (down to 345 million) from the previous quarter, and Destiny 2 not performing to the company's expectations, among other financial concerns.
[Source: Activision, Reuters, Variety]
This article has been updated since its original posting on December 31 to include information about Neumman's reported departure to Netflix and Netflix's confirmation.
Fallout 76's debut was a bit rocky. Not only did the game receive a number of subpar reviews (including ours), but some fans were so angered over its collector’s bags that one law firm solicited players for a class-action lawsuit.
Sadly, Fallout 76 still isn't a completely stable experience for many players. For example, nuke codes have been broken since the beginning of the New Year, so players haven't been able to launch nukes.
#Fallout76 Players: We’re aware of and actively investigating an issue with Nuke silo access. Thank you for your patience while we look into this issue.
— Bethesda Support (@BethesdaSupport) January 1, 2019However, publisher Bethesda is hoping to turn the game around. The company released a number of fixes in December and has doubled down on its commitment to improve the game in a recent blog post. According to Bethesda, Fallout 76 will soon have new quests, weekly events, new Vaults opening, a new PvP mode, Player Vending, and more. Unfortunately, we won't have more specifics on the release of these things until Bethesda publishes its next set of patch notes.
In spite of all its issues, Fallout 76 shows some promise, and we hope that Bethesda can turn this game around.
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