12 posts tagged “nis america”

If there's something that can get me to post, it's GUST news. Snackbar Games seems to have scooped the story that Atelier Iris: Grand Fantasm is coming to the USA. I must admit that I never made it to the end of that game; I kind of missed the high adventure and sentiment of The Azoth of Destiny. Maybe I'll go back and give it another chance. It's certainly not a bad game by any means; the battle system in particular is great fun. Maybe if Ana had had more speaking lines...

• I had hope for the voices. I really did. I believe in my heart that it's possible for people speaking English in a video game can sound cool and captivating. But once again, I found myself rushing to switch the audio to Japanese, to avoid embarrassment in front of my coworkers.
• Within 10 minutes of starting the game, centuries-old solemn protector Shurelia said the line "cut the chatter". We'll see if that was a fluke or if this is going to be another game where every character sounds like some flippant young dude. It's hard to tell yet because most of the dialogue so far has been between Lyner and Jack, two flippant young dudes.
• So far the localization has been solid, so maybe that line was not indicative of how Shurelia is going to speak for the rest of the game. Most lines are translated just about the same way I would have done them myself, with about 75% emphasis on saying exactly what the original line said, and 25% on making it flow naturally.
  
• NISA gets some credit for sneaking zombo.com references into the story. I thought the "unattainable is unknown" line might have been a coincidence, until "the only limit is yourself" was said about the same topic.

Of course, I'm thrilled to be playing through the game again. NISA gets mountains of thanks from me for bringing this to the USA.

Commence exceeding the level of allowed excitement about a game you've already beaten.

Three days until I'm playing Ar Tonelico again! Zoooop! 

NISA has updated their Ar tonelico site with some more text, more screenshots, and a character trailer. Most of the voices seem all right, but I'm rather worried about Shuleria. She's supposed to be a centuries-old, sagely protector, but she sounds kind of like Ash from Pokemon. @_a

I guess I won't be going to bed after all! It looks like they got the Flash source for the original Japanese site and reworked the whole thing in English. Nice job, NISA. Check it check it out!!

I have reserved the ability to preorder the North America version of Ar tonelico; what are you waiting for?

The NISA e-mail included our first glimpse of the English version:

• Orica has become "Aurica"; I'm not sure why, but it's not bad.
• Misha is spelled "Misha" after all; a lot of the original materials romanized it as "Misya", which I'm glad they avoided for the English release.
• Glassmerc (グラスメルク), the synthesis system, is now "Grathmeld". Again, not so bad, since it was a pretty arbitrary-sounding name to begin with.

I guess we'll see how the rest of it goes. I'm most worried about characters' individual voices getting lost in NISA's often too-droll, ephemeral writing style. Will stoic, centuries-old Shuleria talk like a Southern Californian? Ah, that's too harsh... I can't wait to play again!

Zoh my gods, NIS America is planning a premium edition of Ar tonelico for North America! This game didn't even have a premium box in Japan! I am so looking forward to playing through this game again in English, and then passing it around to all of my discriminating gamer friends so they can see what I've been babbling about all this time.

I've long been amused and distressed by the way video games are marketed in the USA. Inevitably there is a bulleted list enumerating unquantifiable things like "intense, fruit-bat-based combat" or "an immersive story based on the theme of love". As if you'd hold two games side by side and do a feature comparison: "Ah, this game has an intense battle system, but that game has a thrilling battle system."

Today I read NIS America's press release for Ar tonelico, in which they play up the game's undeniably Akihabaraesque nature:

If you don't know the word yet, educate yourself now. This is the word that has defined the progress of Japanese geeky pop-culture and fandom for the past 5 years, and its allure is its resistance to definition. Now it's a bullet point in the marketing for a game release in the USA. We've come a long way. To NIS America's credit, they go on to give an impressively honest and unmarketingy explanatory paragraph of what the word means.

Combined with the company's decision to take a bunch more time to localize it right (and assuming that's what they're doing, not just buying time because they weren't anywhere near finished), I'm cautiously optimistic about the US release of this game. Go NISA!

P.S.: I am a little sad that they rejected the original subtitle The Girl Who Kept Singing At The End Of The World in favor of the genericky Melody of Elemia.

I finished Atelier Iris 2 tonight, finally. The last dungeon and final boss took a lot of leveling up and backtracking to collect better items.

Awesomes:

• The story of Felt and Viese, exchanging letters between two different worlds, and finally reuniting, is heartwarming. They did a great job of telling that story. Viese is one of my favorite game characters of all time.
  
• This series is a legendary story in which you actually get to see the legends. Many stories make reference to legendary people, events, and artifacts from the distant past; if they were so great, why is the game about some people who lived way after them? In AI2 you actually go back and meet the people, experience the events, and create the artifacts that were legendary in AI1.
• The combat system felt quite fun, trying to balance Break attacks (which can delay the enemy's turn and earn you chains for big experience bonuses) and Charge attacks (which can set you up for special moves). The encounter bar, which I liked from Ar tonelico, made random battles way less annoying than in AI1.
  

Anti-awesomes:

• As I posted before, the localization was not ideal. It was better than AI1, but it still had a lot of mistakes. The worst was the way they localized the name エラスムス. It's obviously supposed to be "Erasmus", a real name belonging to historical figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Saint Erasmus. They spelled it "Elusmus" for some reason. Likewise, a tablet became a "doublet", even though in the dialogue someone says "what's this tablet?"
• The game has some bugs. Like in AI1, character's voices sometimes skip or get cut off. Many localized strings don't fit in their boxes, so they dangle outside the boxes or just get chopped. Likewise, some boxes are too tall for their contents, so you end up with an empty line at the bottom of a speech bubble. This is all stuff I probably would have let go back before I became a part of the QA process at a software company.
• A few times in the story, when "Elusmus" is speaking (and it's obvious because his voice has some digital effects on it), the dialogue label says "Felt". If I wasn't paying close enough attention that could have gotten confusing, especially because almost everyone speaks with the same dialect whether they're an easygoing teenaged swordfighter or a centuries-old alchemist's soul trapped in a gem.