The 90's Were Not Prepared for This Much Epic.
One of my favorite games of all time is Chrono Trigger. It was epic in story, gameplay, graphics (at the time), sound, and replayability.
The game was released on the Super Nintendo in North America in the ancient year of 1995. It's a RPG (role-playing game) developed by Squaresoft, now known as Square-Enix, towards the end of the SNES's life cycle. It would soon be the opinion of myself and others that it was the finest game conceived up to that point and possibly even now.
Final Fantasy VII hadn't come along yet and popularized RPGs in the States. They were thriving in Japan, but not so much here. However, that didn't mean there wasn't a fan base for 'em.
The game had a great premise: Time Travel. It focused on 3 friends from one time period and their companions they meet in other time periods from the past to the future. You can't have an epic story without the characters struggling against opposition though. The antagonist was Lavos. Lavos was an enormous parasite buried in the core of the planet that was feeding off the energy generated by the planet. Without giving too much away, it awakens fully at some point in history and destroys most of the life on the planet in the process. The characters learn of this at some point and devote themselves to preventing the event from ever happening.
The soundtrack for this game is simply amazing. I actually own the soundtrack. I bought it on import direct from Japan. It made me fall in love with the music of Yasunori Mitsuda who would later go on to score my other favorite game, Xenogears.
I've always loved RPGs more than other games. Recently, I've had the urge to play Chrono Trigger again. Except, I wanted to play it with the original dialogue intact. What I mean by that is, I wanted to play it with the dialogue unchanged from what it meant originally in Japanese. During the NES and SNES days, Nintendo had a nasty habit of censoring everything that might be deemed questionable to the American public. That means we missed out on story elements of a more "adult" nature found in games published on Nintendo consoles. Chrono Trigger was no exception. The story is still great, but censorship pisses me off. This is no fault to the people responsible for the localization process in NA though. They did great with the short amount of time they had and the restrictions placed on them by Nintendo's rules.
So, I found a version of the game that was retranslated from the original Japanese to English by a fan. I was eager to see the story again with its original wording intact. That was, until I actually started playing.....
4/6/2008 - EDIT: The following paragraph was stated in a time where I didn't know the full story behind the retranslation effort. In a way, my completed version is now phase II of that effort.
The translation was unbearable! Freakin' unbearable; I had to stop after 10 minutes! This group did a literal translation from the Japanese. Those of you familiar with the Japanese language understand how much of an ungood thing this is. You get what's been termed as Engrish. Engrish is the retarded, inbred cousin of English. They also chose to leave in the Japanese terms for respect when addressing someone. So, Crono wouldn't be Crono. It'd be Crono-sama. I hate it when people do this.....HATE IT! It's a personal preference thing, but... damn.
To the guy's credit, he supplied the public with an Excel spreadsheet containing all the dialogue from the original NA release, the original Japanese release, and his English translation. As a result of this literary atrocity, I decided to be proactive about my complaints. I took this spreadsheet and am now converting all of his text to grammatically correct and easily understood English. Whilst also, I am removing all the Japanese terms of respect and adding English equivalents where appropriate.
As you can guess, this is quite the undertaking. There are about 20,000 lines of dialogue in the game. I've managed to get through roughly 6,000 since I started a few days ago. There are plenty of instances where a sentence spanning several lines can be translated into just a few words. The original localization team must have figured this out too as I've used their translations as a basis for many sentences throughout. However, I am not changing any story elements.
So, once I'm done, it's getting inserted into the game and then I'll finally play the game like I wanted to. *phew*
The game was released on the Super Nintendo in North America in the ancient year of 1995. It's a RPG (role-playing game) developed by Squaresoft, now known as Square-Enix, towards the end of the SNES's life cycle. It would soon be the opinion of myself and others that it was the finest game conceived up to that point and possibly even now.
Final Fantasy VII hadn't come along yet and popularized RPGs in the States. They were thriving in Japan, but not so much here. However, that didn't mean there wasn't a fan base for 'em.
The game had a great premise: Time Travel. It focused on 3 friends from one time period and their companions they meet in other time periods from the past to the future. You can't have an epic story without the characters struggling against opposition though. The antagonist was Lavos. Lavos was an enormous parasite buried in the core of the planet that was feeding off the energy generated by the planet. Without giving too much away, it awakens fully at some point in history and destroys most of the life on the planet in the process. The characters learn of this at some point and devote themselves to preventing the event from ever happening.
The soundtrack for this game is simply amazing. I actually own the soundtrack. I bought it on import direct from Japan. It made me fall in love with the music of Yasunori Mitsuda who would later go on to score my other favorite game, Xenogears.
I've always loved RPGs more than other games. Recently, I've had the urge to play Chrono Trigger again. Except, I wanted to play it with the original dialogue intact. What I mean by that is, I wanted to play it with the dialogue unchanged from what it meant originally in Japanese. During the NES and SNES days, Nintendo had a nasty habit of censoring everything that might be deemed questionable to the American public. That means we missed out on story elements of a more "adult" nature found in games published on Nintendo consoles. Chrono Trigger was no exception. The story is still great, but censorship pisses me off. This is no fault to the people responsible for the localization process in NA though. They did great with the short amount of time they had and the restrictions placed on them by Nintendo's rules.
So, I found a version of the game that was retranslated from the original Japanese to English by a fan. I was eager to see the story again with its original wording intact. That was, until I actually started playing.....
4/6/2008 - EDIT: The following paragraph was stated in a time where I didn't know the full story behind the retranslation effort. In a way, my completed version is now phase II of that effort.
The translation was unbearable! Freakin' unbearable; I had to stop after 10 minutes! This group did a literal translation from the Japanese. Those of you familiar with the Japanese language understand how much of an ungood thing this is. You get what's been termed as Engrish. Engrish is the retarded, inbred cousin of English. They also chose to leave in the Japanese terms for respect when addressing someone. So, Crono wouldn't be Crono. It'd be Crono-sama. I hate it when people do this.....HATE IT! It's a personal preference thing, but... damn.
To the guy's credit, he supplied the public with an Excel spreadsheet containing all the dialogue from the original NA release, the original Japanese release, and his English translation. As a result of this literary atrocity, I decided to be proactive about my complaints. I took this spreadsheet and am now converting all of his text to grammatically correct and easily understood English. Whilst also, I am removing all the Japanese terms of respect and adding English equivalents where appropriate.
As you can guess, this is quite the undertaking. There are about 20,000 lines of dialogue in the game. I've managed to get through roughly 6,000 since I started a few days ago. There are plenty of instances where a sentence spanning several lines can be translated into just a few words. The original localization team must have figured this out too as I've used their translations as a basis for many sentences throughout. However, I am not changing any story elements.
So, once I'm done, it's getting inserted into the game and then I'll finally play the game like I wanted to. *phew*
