Japanese language support

[magusgs]

As for NISA.. They know that the English Audio is high quality, and usually worth every cent they spend on it.

Wait, what?

[BigNutter]

I really shouldn't be posting at 2:30 in the morning.... but the Dub for computer games are can be off kilter... All the NIS games I've played so far are not off kilter.

Two games that I know that seem off are Pokémon Channel and Mystic Heroes. Pokémon Channel biggest offender is Meowth. Whist it's done by the same voice Actress who voiced Team Rockets Meowth, her performance seems off during the Pokémon News Section. The TV Episode in the game is only features her and the Narrator (except for Jessie and James Singing), and many Pokémon.

Mystic Heroes just seems off and you're expected to know the back story.. which you should do in Japan..

[james039]

I may be in a minority here, but what about people *learning* Japanese?

Also, let's be clear that the product in question starts off as a product with Japanese dialogue/Japanese Text for the sake of this discussion.

OP was suggesting that in the era of blu-ray, the space exists on the disc to produce full English dialogue, English text, and *retain* the original Japanese dialogue, text on the disc.

Now, for the Japanese beginner, importing the game is pretty much useless since their language understanding is insufficient to play the game with sufficient understanding. However, having a fully bilingual version would be quite handy.

I can't believe *anyone* would argue against a release which contained full English/Japanese dialogue and text, since you can pretty much use this anyway you want.

NIS Japan couldn't possibly have any issue with this since: The US release is generally the same price as the Japanese release, and it will NOT cannibalize their market.

NIS America has to add language options to the game to support Japanese dialogue, so it isn't much further a leap to add another option to select which text to display (and store both on the single disc).

[BigNutter]

The only Aurgument I have is the size of the extra Languages.. Which is important for some devices and other games. But most NIS games are small, and the space exists.

This is also the Era of the DLC, or Optional Downloads for your console..

[magusgs]

NIS America has to add language options to the game to support Japanese dialogue, so it isn't much further a leap to add another option to select which text to display (and store both on the single disc).

You make it sound like all they have to do is add a menu option and the game would be ready to play in Japanese. It doesn't work like that. Look at Sakura Wars 5 for PS2. They included 2 discs, one with dub and one with subtitles--and the saved games aren't even compatible. And all they did was switch the voice tracks, right? This implies a certain level of technical complexity "under the hood". And as Ar Tonelico 2 shows, localization isn't merely a matter of translation. The process itself creates bugs that have to be addressed. Your proposal to simply add a menu option could cost many hours of bug testing, in which they'd need to have testers play through the entire Japanese language version to make sure nothing got messed up. Why? All so a handful of hardcore otaku can play the game in both languages? I'd rather they focus their energy on more important tasks, like debugging the English version.

And I already mentioned the rights issues. Whatever their relationship with NIS Japan, for other companies (like Gust) they only have the rights to publish the English/French version. Negotiating rights to release the *Japanese version* overseas would inevitably prompt additional licensing fees.

[BigNutter]

I've got to agree with you there.. The Major problem with games that they use different types of text encoding..

In the Final Fantasy Interview I linked to (http://www.ffcompendium.com/h/interview.shtml) He Talked about Double Byte Text.. You can fit most Latin-based Characters (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German) in a single byte. Japanese has more Characters than English. There several ways to write stuff, actually I've seen a sentence written out of 4 different Character "sets." You need two bytes to fit most of the commonly used characters.

The other problem is that Japanese use less Character than English. You use 5 Japanese character and say something quite easy.. 5 Characters in English? "HekNO" Barely understandable at best.. It's easy to turn those 5 in to 10 by making the text single byte. Etna is 3 characters in Japanese, Megaman/Rockman is 5 characters.. two more well known characters.. If you don't know the first.. what the heck are you doing here?

Anyway, You can fit more meaning in to 5 symbols than 10 English Characters. http://www.siliconera.com/2010/04/29/ni ... ns-part-2/

Anyway, it's easier to slot in the Audio Language toggle than the text, in some cases, all you need to do is make the game play the other Audio files.

[Solice]

I've got to agree with you there.. The Major problem with games that they use different types of text encoding..

In the Final Fantasy Interview I linked to (http://www.ffcompendium.com/h/interview.shtml) He Talked about Double Byte Text.. You can fit most Latin-based Characters (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German) in a single byte. Japanese has more Characters than English. There several ways to write stuff, actually I've seen a sentence written out of 4 different Character "sets." You need two bytes to fit most of the commonly used characters.

The other problem is that Japanese use less Character than English. You use 5 Japanese character and say something quite easy.. 5 Characters in English? "HekNO" Barely understandable at best.. It's easy to turn those 5 in to 10 by making the text single byte. Etna is 3 characters in Japanese, Megaman/Rockman is 5 characters.. two more well known characters.. If you don't know the first.. what the heck are you doing here?

Anyway, You can fit more meaning in to 5 symbols than 10 English Characters. http://www.siliconera.com/2010/04/29/ni ... ns-part-2/

Anyway, it's easier to slot in the Audio Language toggle than the text, in some cases, all you need to do is make the game play the other Audio files.

The single simple word you're speaking of is unicode, which is basically double byte characters. Basically, if you start with unicode, you account for being able to replace any character set with any other, since its at that point, you're just replacing one unicode group with another. There's no engine rewriting to work out at that point. If the game engine is written in a manner that separates the text (media layer) from the engine itself (presentation layer), then its as simple as opening a text file and replacing strings.

That being said, games are often written in a manner that allows for multiple tables of media to exist in a game at once. For example, if the system is set to English, it will pull out text for an event using a (sample) function call: strGetTextEventText(12, intLangEnglish)... for Japanese, it could be strGetstrGetTextEventText(12, intLangJapanese)... you get the idea. The difficulty of implementation is all based on how the game was written (which would add a trivial amount of effort required on the programmers' part), let alone other factors that have been mentioned earlier in this thread.

Even with this being said, games that aren't written for multiple markets at the time of inception aren't going to have this nice feature of which media to select from. They might have implemented in a manner that only allows one media set at a time. A game of recent memory was NISA's Sakura Wars release. I haven't taken a look at the game save data, but I have enough reason to believe that its the Japanese release with the text replaced (thus the reason why game saves might not be compatible, it would be a different directory name). To this end, localization teams have to work with what they're given. There are generally few or no programming resources initially allocated for such projects.

[bloodyaftertaste]

Even with this being said, games that aren't written for multiple markets at the time of inception aren't going to have this nice feature of which media to select from. They might have implemented in a manner that only allows one media set at a time. A game of recent memory was NISA's Sakura Wars release. I haven't taken a look at the game save data, but I have enough reason to believe that its the Japanese release with the text replaced (thus the reason why game saves might not be compatible, it would be a different directory name). To this end, localization teams have to work with what they're given. There are generally few or no programming resources initially allocated for such projects.

Well since the PS2 version of Sakura Wars comes with two discs, one English and one Japanese, I would think that they replaced they text, same with the voice acting for the English disc if I'm understanding this correctly. Otherwise I think they would have also made the Japanese Text Stay on there as an option since they are letting you have the option to play it in Japanese. Though since it is an NA release they might just have thought that not much use would come of the Japanese text.

[Solice]

Even with this being said, games that aren't written for multiple markets at the time of inception aren't going to have this nice feature of which media to select from. They might have implemented in a manner that only allows one media set at a time. A game of recent memory was NISA's Sakura Wars release. I haven't taken a look at the game save data, but I have enough reason to believe that its the Japanese release with the text replaced (thus the reason why game saves might not be compatible, it would be a different directory name). To this end, localization teams have to work with what they're given. There are generally few or no programming resources initially allocated for such projects.

Well since the PS2 version of Sakura Wars comes with two discs, one English and one Japanese, I would think that they replaced they text, same with the voice acting for the English disc if I'm understanding this correctly. Otherwise I think they would have also made the Japanese Text Stay on there as an option since they are letting you have the option to play it in Japanese. Though since it is an NA release they might just have thought that not much use would come of the Japanese text.

Exactly what I said. I addressed the reports of the save game data being incompatible between the two discs included in the same package, which would suggest different encoding. Save games between different regions usually have different directory names under which they save the stuff on the memcard, usually only different by a couple of characters which denote the intended region and would prevent loading the data in a different region game unless other software was used to fool it.

[bloodyaftertaste]

Even with this being said, games that aren't written for multiple markets at the time of inception aren't going to have this nice feature of which media to select from. They might have implemented in a manner that only allows one media set at a time. A game of recent memory was NISA's Sakura Wars release. I haven't taken a look at the game save data, but I have enough reason to believe that its the Japanese release with the text replaced (thus the reason why game saves might not be compatible, it would be a different directory name). To this end, localization teams have to work with what they're given. There are generally few or no programming resources initially allocated for such projects.

Well since the PS2 version of Sakura Wars comes with two discs, one English and one Japanese, I would think that they replaced they text, same with the voice acting for the English disc if I'm understanding this correctly. Otherwise I think they would have also made the Japanese Text Stay on there as an option since they are letting you have the option to play it in Japanese. Though since it is an NA release they might just have thought that not much use would come of the Japanese text.

Exactly what I said. I addressed the reports of the save game data being incompatible between the two discs included in the same package, which would suggest different encoding. Save games between different regions usually have different directory names under which they save the stuff on the memcard, usually only different by a couple of characters which denote the intended region and would prevent loading the data in a different region game unless other software was used to fool it.

YAY I think I'm finally able to understand what you are saying more clearly! But thanks for that last part. I'm still trying to understand all this programing stuff and such. Why I have a hard time with it idk.

[magusgs]

Solice is supposed to be cryptic and incomprehensible. It's part of his persona. Starting to understand him--now that's when you need to worry.

[james039]

I am a computer programmer and I do understand the *potential* difficulty in modifying an existing game to support 2 languages. This is especially problematic in cases such as Japanese games (which sadly, are often presumed to never possibly receive a release outside Japan) which have a high potential of being programmed without proper separation of the string tables from the game code.

In these situations even allowing for multiple dialogue languages involves substantial overhaul of the existing code, which is probably why some games end up English dialogue only (much to the disappointment of fans) because it would be too much work to basically rewrite the game program.

If a game is written from the ground-up with proper encapsulation and modularity of audio, video and text resources, then including multiple text languages becomes a trivial matter and should always be done.

[vampko]

I'm fine with the text being how it is. I would rather have them continue to localize their games, and If I wanted the original text, I would just import it. Localization is improving, and it would just be more work to, first, do a straight translation, then second, do a localization. I used to be on the 'against localization' bandwagon, but after Trinity Universe, I've seen how much good can be done by this team.

[vampko]

oh, and on top of what I've said, just import the game. There's no point in NISA keeping the Japanese characters in the game, on top of Japanese audio, Localized dubbing, AND the dub subs.
You import a game if you want it in the Japanese language with Japanese dialogue. It would be a waste of NISA's money to include all this, be grateful they've always gone the extra mile to give us both audio tracks. Most publishers nowadays don't bother with it. They also have included dual-audio for the most PSP games. They go a long way for us fans, so we don't need to push them to go to even more lengths just to please a crowd that could get exactly that extra content by just importing the Japanese version. Or, you could try and import an Asian-English version, which a fair amount of games get.