NURVUSS'S PROFILE

author=Liberty
Did you know... that the punctuation in Suikoden II translation was like that in the Japanese version too? That little nugget threw me for a loop. Here I was thinking the translators were idiots when it came to English punctuation use, but nope. They were being true to the original!!!!!!..........!!!!!

That said, I'm gonna break out my PSX (yes, I have a PSX, not a PS1 :D ) on release day and plaaaaaay II again. In fact, fuck it. I'm gonna clock it in one sitting and aim for the special scene with Clive.

author=Jeremy Blaustein
So, 108 characters, right? What you want to do, obviously, is you'd like each character to have a unique voice. What most people don't understand is that Japanese offers you the opportunity to have an extremely wide range of voices in written material ... In Japanese, you can make a lot of things clear in the way you write dialogue. The reader can read it and say 'This is an 80 year old person from the north-eastern region of Japan, who has a lower class education, a bad sense of humor, and watches a lot of cop dramas.' ... Now in English, you don't have that. So now you've got 108 characters and you've got two months to translate something.

author=Nick des Barres
We were delivered the script among code, with no indication as to who was speaking. Text was bunched together based on location. The solution? Play the game multiple times, searching as we did so for strings to gather context. We did our best. We were actually provided with Murayama-san's personal encyclopaedia and log of Suikoden's wold. It rivalled Game of Thrones and beyond in complexity.

author=Casey Loe
I'm not tech savvy enough to know if the files we were working on were source code o what, but I recall it as strings of English text in files full of gibberish, probably the instructions regarding the text and chaacter portrait display. I believe we were eventually able to figure out which chaacter was speaking by matching hexadecimal strings or something.

author=Casey Loe
Writing the same line in English usually takes at least twice as many characters, so if the original Japanese line filled up all four lines of the text box, then the English text would need to be cut to the bone to make it fit. That meant going over every line dozens of times, replacing every word with its shortest possible synonym, cutting every bit of flaor and information that wasn't absolutely essential, deleting any idiom that wasn't more space-efficient than what it represented, and so on, until lines I had once been proud of were reduced to elementary-school primer text. And then since the final game did end up having a thinner font that often didn't fill up the text boxes, it often ended up looking like we made those cuts for no reason at all.