Localizers are the detritus of the declining culture of the west, Journalists are enablers. These smaller developers need to pull out and form their own AA publishing houses…
This is the actual line in japanese :
君”付けか“ちゃん”付けか、君をどう呼んだものかと思ってね
Van doesn't ask Quatre directly if they're a boy or a girl, he akwardly (yes context matters) ask their honorifics instead. The point of that line isn't supposed to be "correct" or "natural", it's suppose to be akward because Van isn't confortable. "Are you a boy or a girl ?" is a complete mistranslation of the scene.
There's nothing wrong with NISA translation, sure you can always argue about using that translation instead of a different one, but it's still a perfectly faithful translation of the japanese text and intent.
> I was wondering how to call you, should I add "kun" or "chan"?
This could be directly translated as
> I was wondering how to call you, should I add "Mister" or "Miss"?
Of course it's supposed to be awkward. Asking someone what sex they are (something that's usually quite apparent) is awkward because implying someone's gender is indeterminate is an implicit insult.
In fact, the friendly awkwardness of the line in Japanese actually *precludes* the use of "preferred pronouns" crap, which is not only designed to make sex less apparent and androgyny *less* awkward but is also sterile, formal and anti-friendly.
If somebody came up to me and asked me what my pronouns are, it would definitely be cringey and awkward since it should be obvious. Seems like mission accomplished.
"What's between your legs xD"
There, I'm a master flavour localizer now. Why is it localizations always lean to that kind of convention and not my example?
it is NISA Usa that did this, their translations are used in the disgaea series the entire trails series among a few more things. They used to be good but with work like disgaea ..I say up to 4-5 remasters for pc and older trails games but the newer releases .....they don't distort it badly but there are issues like shown here
OK admittedly without all the political baggage, it's not THAT bad then. Like, at least it makes some kind of sense and it isn't just shoehorned in completely out of nowhere. I could still think of a few better ways to do it though that aren't ideologically motivated...
Also nice Tower of God reference!
It's the same as Sully back in Zero.
Lloyd thought she was a male because she has no chest and behaves like a tomboy but she's actually a girl.
In Kuro Van thinks Quatre is a female because looks androgynous.
If this weren't 2024 the joke would translate as asking if he's a girl.
Yep. It's definitely phrased that way because it's 2024 and that makes it cringe.
My point was that at least it's not destroying the actual meaning of the scene, adding it out of nowhere
> Lloyd thought she was a male because she has no chest and behaves like a tomboy but she's actually a girl.
And Lloyd got no end of grief for it, and no one ever let him live it down.
Reposting from my other post on the falcom sub:
Honorifics and pronouns aren't exactly analogous, so while I would imagine some English speakers of some ages and cultures would ask for pronouns, the actual best localization (as opposed to the best translation, which would be to preserve honorifics) would be more neutral, like "I was wondering how to refer to you." (or something to that effect; I'm not being paid to write these lines). The pronoun line implies both that gender theory in Calvard is at the very specific point it is at in our modern western culture today as well is that Van ascribes to it, which adds additional facts to the character and world that wasn't there originally. Conversely, "I was wondering how to refer to you" can be said by any English speaker, is inoffensive regardless of personal belief (since it says implies nothing about either the existence of a gender binary nor the existence of fluid pronouns) and says nothing about the world or character that wasn't already there originally. That said, this is NIS America, so their localizers probably aren't cognizant enough to realize their own speech patterns and phrases are shaped by their specific worldviews and culture.
> OK admittedly without all the political baggage, it's not THAT bad then.
Van and Quatre might share a history; the name "Quatre" has been used one other time in Trails, and that was in a very infamous scene related to a lodge of a religious cult (the main victim, Renne, is also in this game). Van was also a victim of that cult when he was young. The cult was so bad that even the bad guys in this universe joined ranks to totally annihilate them. We're not sure if this Quatre is the same as that Quatre, but Falcom had to know that we'd notice this, so it's unlikely to be a coincidence. The ages are also about right.
Basically, think of the cult that Van was a prisoner of as being a cross between the very worst of Jeffrey Epstein and the very worst of big pharma and you have some idea of what was going on.
One of the biggest things I'm looking forward to when I play this game is whether Quatre and Renne recognize each other, and whether Renne recognizes Quatre as that Quatre, the same one she was trapped in the Paradise lodge with.
> Van doesn't know if use male or female honorifics
If that's the case, I don't see anything wrong with this translation.
I guess you could translate it as: "I don't know if I should call you Mr. or Mrs." but the "What are your pronouns" translation is close.
Going to go against the grain here… but in English where we don’t have honorifics, how is this any different? This is one of the few exceptions where the equivalent for the language it’s written in is acceptable, as opposed to myriad other times where it’s politics shoehorned in due to the agenda of the translator.
The literal equivalent interpretation of the meaning of the line in Japanese is “we use honorifics in this language based on gender, what kind of language should I use?”
It is specifying a grammatical concept regarding the Japanese language.
The most accurate equivalent interpretation in English would also be inquiring about a grammatical concept. Asking about pronouns makes complete sense because it’s addressing the equivalent grammatical concept.
This is a very rare circumstance where the character saying “are you a guy or a girl?” actually is further from the literal translation of the line in Japanese. The way this is translated maintains the element of inquiring about how one should use grammar.
A gendered honorific and a custom pronoun are not the same thing, not in grammatical use and *certainly* not in political valence.
You're smart enough to know the vast gulf of difference between "Sir? Ma'am?" and "What are your preferred pronouns™?" This line is the former.
They're not really "equivalent". And that's at best, just an excuse to camouflage the underlying politics. There's no reason to refer to pronouns specifically.
This is more a NISA problem than a Falcom problem IMO. I wonder sometimes if the original Japanese developers and companies understand this sort of thing at all.
yea it is a nisa problem....they used to be good all the way up to disgaea 4-5 I say but the later jrpgs have ....issues. Main reason I don't give a thought of my day to disgaea 6-7 because I doubt those made it through intact
They were really only good with disgaea because it belonges to NIS, aka their parent company, the way they handled localizartions for other devs really badly.
Gust games were really screwed by NISA inserting memes or making stupid changes
Yeah, the way they completely botched Ys 8 is still the stuff of legends. Fantastic game, maybe the worst localization I've ever seen. NISA had to issue a formal apology and redo the whole thing.
Bad translations like these will continue to be why Japanese games are held back, compared to Western games. Do they think the wokest western games have this cringe of dialogue? I'm gonna bet Star Wars Outlaws won't even set a pinky into two characters awkwardly asking about pronouns in dialogue. There is no way Yasuke will ask the female protag what her pronouns are or vice versa. People simply do not communicate that methodically in any English speaking country, unless they're forcing themselves to.
The younger generation does communicate this way. Was out at a club and this early 20s girl came up to my gf and said “yes girl slay!”. Then immediately looked terrified. I guess she realized she “assumed” gender and asked my girlfriend her pronouns. Thought the whole thing was weird. At least three other younger girls came up and asked her pronouns while talking to her. They do it so naturally it is kind of unnerving. Like asking what’s your name when you first meet someone.
We were at a night club for a Halloween event and she was a dressed as a succubus.
People are downvoting this because they don't want to admit that it's true, but young people (esp. young Americans) *absolutely* talk in this strange mixture of algo-speak, black slang and HR compliance. Is it the same as bitter-aging-millenial localizer speak? Nah. But it's definitely been shaped by it in the same way an abused animal's behavior is shaped by the personality of its owner.
\>inb4 "slang changes" or "your slang was stupid, too"
Not this way, it hasn't and wasn't. Slang usually connotes youthful irreverence, not cowed terror.
> People are downvoting this because they don't want to admit that it's true, but young people (esp. young Americans) absolutely talk in this strange mixture of algo-speak, black slang and HR compliance.
Damn, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange was so on the nose regarding the younger generation employing a mix of many dialects and slang.
Burgess actually got very annoyed at people asking him how he felt that he failed to predict modern teen slang. His point was just that the slang was super different/unintelligible, not that he was guessing how future teens would actually talk.
God please don't let them ruin Ys too.
This is so frustrating, because I love Falcom and I know they would never involve themselves in this shit, but as English-speakers we're stuck with this trash from the activist localizers.
Hello again.
The game's official eng version isn't out yet but u could purchase the Chinese version and then apply the patch it's very easy and u can enjoy the games direct translation instead of "wokalization, lol".
I played zero with the Geofront patch, and would have played Azure that way too, except that the patch was taken down by Geofront when the official localization was announced.
In my opinion, the Geofront fan patch is much, much better than most professional localizations. It's a remarkable accomplishment that such a tiny, niche JPRG series got such an insanely good fan translation.
You can find both patches on the internet, I'm not going to stop you, but I also played the NISA localization of both games, and it was pretty good with no obvious problems. Reverie, on the other hand, not so much. Reverie didn't have woke translations, just so many mistakes and typos.
Ohh yeah, i actually did play both of those with the geofront patch! I haven't played the localized azure / zero yet. I had more trouble finding fanpatches of the later games.
The reason Crossbell has such high-profile fan translations in the first place is because after the Sky trilogy was localized, Xseed skipped over the crossbell games and localized Cold Steel 1 next. The reason was money: Cold Steel 1 had much better graphics, and was a Persona-esque high school setting type game. Xseed figured that would sell better than the buddy cop underdog story. That were probably right. The decision to skip Crossbell's localization probably saved Trails in the west.
For ages, there was never any plans to localize Crossbell, and the Geofront team decided to do it themselves. Falcom and NISA let Geofront try their best and waited to see what the outcome would be. The Geofront localization was so good that NISA signed a deal with Geofront to buy those localizations and use them as the basis for the official localization. That's how NISA was able to get Zero and Azure localized and out so quickly.
Due to the Geofront and the fan support for the Crossbell project, those localizations were extremely high profile. Geofront didn't just localize Crossbell, they IMPROVED the games, by adding a wide array of quality of life features to the Crossbell games that weren't there before. None of the other fan localizations had as much support and money behind it as the Geofront, that's why it's the easiest one to find.
Dang. But now Geofront isn't available right, so I should hold onto the ones I have? (I'm sure they're available on gray-area sites?)
Does that mean, though, that the official releases of Crossbell are as good as Geofronts? Or the same?
> Geofront isn't available right, so I should hold onto the ones I have? (I'm sure they're available on gray-area sites?)
Geofront isn't legally available, because most of the people who worked on Geofront project got hired by NISA to work on the official localization. Geofront wasn't just a small fan project, actual industry professionals from Xseed and other places donated time and worked on the project. One of the biggest reasons why Trails exists in the west is that when Xseed took on that first localization for Trails in the Sky FC, it wasn't just a project: Sky FC converted a lot of people at Xseed into Trails fans.
>Does that mean, though, that the official releases of Crossbell are as good as Geofronts? Or the same?
I never played the Geofront version of Azure, but I played the NISA version of Azure and I played the Geofront and the NISA version of Zero, a bunch of times apiece. In my opinion, the NISA and Geofront version of Zero are pretty close. There's no obvious nonsense in either game, and to be honest, I think the image in the OP is far more likely to be due to the immense text size of Daybreak just meaning some stuff fell through the cracks.
Trails through Daybreak has more text than War and Peace, and not just a little more, Daybreak is MUCH longer than War and Peace.
Once you know how ridiculously large the amount of text is in these games, you can see that it might not even be a political thing, it might just be there was so much work to do that somethings got overlooked.
That happened with Reverie, there were a lot of typos in the localization of Reverie, not woke political stuff, just mistakes. The enormous script size of a trails games create these problems. Even the Xseed localizations were not perfect, if you replay them, you find typos and things.
With regards to GeoFront, Scott Tijerina (the youtuber KillScottKill) was the leader of Geofront, and he passed away as the Zero and Azure NISA localizations were coming together. He received a tribute at the end of Azure in the official NISA localization:
https://x.com/NoisyPixelNews/status/1633120548380131329/photo/1
Well done, faithful servant of the goddess, find your eternal reward in Aidios' arms. Scott dedicated so much time, effort, energy and passion to getting Lloyd, Ellie, Tio and Randy's story to the English speaking world. He was a fan, but he had more to do with getting the official NISA localization of Zero and Azure made than arguably anyone else did. That's the thing about small, niche JRPGs: a single fan can still make a massive difference.
I don't believe, for a second, that Scott would have allowed anything into the official localization that would have diverted attention away from where it should be: the story, the game and these characters. He loved Crossbell and trails way too much for that.
That's all incredible information. Thank you for sharing. Sucks that Scott died as everything was coming together :(
That said, I don't particularly have a political leaning one way or the other, and I don't care about "wokeism" one way or the other. Frankly, stuff like the pronouns thing above just sounds unnatrual to me, especially in a JRPG - but even if I gave a shit, I just truly want to play these games with a translation that is as close to the original writers intent as possible. I realize how insanely difficult that is to achieve when localizing from Japanese to English, though.
I have yet to start Cold Steel onward. I know, that's insane. But I replayed Sky trilogy after finishing Crossbell because I rushed through Sky the first time and regretted it. Playing Sky twice and Crossbell once - with as much attention as each deserved - obviously took up a ton of time.
So right now I'm searching for the best possible way to play Cold Steel onwards. As close as humanly possible to the true essence the creators were going for, in English.
Whatever string of hacked fan translations / mods / whatever for each that I have to do, I'd be willing to. So if you or anyone else has recommendations along those lines, along with how I might find each thing, I'd super greatly appreciate it.
Obviously I know Google exists, but it's been giving me, at best, conflicted answers. "Use the chinese version of X and get this fan translation - use this spreadsheet(???) version -- no actually use the japanese version and then this spreadsheet with this mod to link -- etc" ... You see what I mean. So anyone who is aware of a straightforward list, or is able to create and immortalize something somewhere in a Google Doc, or whatever, I (and I'm sure others who google this very page in the future) would be so appreciative!!
But to you who I am replying to, thanks again so much for all that background info! I love hearing about stuff like this. Despite having not played much of the series yet relatively speaking, I am very invested in it, but I don't want to waste my time (and it's a lot of time to play these games) with subpar translations :(
(edit, I realize there might be dubious legality to some or all of this request? if so, please PM me in the right direction if any good samaratans stumble across this!)
> But to you who I am replying to, thanks again so much for all that background info! I love hearing about stuff like this. Despite having not played much of the series yet relatively speaking, I am very invested in it, but I don't want to waste my time (and it's a lot of time to play these games) with subpar translations :(
So, I finished all 10 games on Steam, I've sunk over 100 hours into each game, and I have every single Steam achievement except for one in Sky SC (Rambling Gambler, I can't get four of a kind at poker in the Ruan Casino) and one in Azure (the horror coaster one). I found this series during the pandemic and I love trails to bits and it's become my favorite game series.
I know that I'm very different from most people in this world, and I know entertainment shouldn't ever be made for me. Stuff I'm likely to fall in love with is also likely to be not well received by most people. I've known that all my life, but if makes a big difference when one series seems to cater everything to my tastes and sensibilities. You can't make money if I'm a super-fan of your work, there just aren't enough other people like me. It's a very lonely life, if you get my meaning.
>Frankly, stuff like the pronouns thing above just sounds unnatrual to me, especially in a JRPG - but even if I gave a shit, I just truly want to play these games with a translation that is as close to the original writers intent as possible. I realize how insanely difficult that is to achieve when localizing from Japanese to English, though.
As someone else mentioned in this thread, that can be really tough. The most famous example as regards to trails is that Xseed famously changed Estelle Bright's personality in the Sky trilogy from what it had been in Japanese. This is a hard thing to sync with, because Xseed didn't change the game's images and what you see lines up with the dialogue....mostly.
Trails is famously difficult to localize because of the sheer size of the script. Large script size + small, niche JRPG that doesn't sell well means there's not much room for profit.
Here's a 10 year old Kotaku article on the localization nightmare that was the first two Sky games. It's an utter miracle that there are people in this world passionate enough to willingly put themselves through a Kiseki localization:
https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-biggest-rpgs-bar-1740055631
None of this excepts people from doing the best job that they can, but it does mean that if there are a few typos, I won't complain about that too much.
Stories like this, and knowing how much work it is to bring a trails game west, only serves to prove to me that Zemuria's heroes aren't just the ones in the game. People like Jessica Chavez and Scott Tijerina are the unsung heroes who have sacrificed to make trails in the west happen. It used to be if we'd get localizations, now it's when. So many of the people who worked on localizing trails became fans of trails, if you ask Brittany Avery what her career's biggest accomplishment is, she'll tell you it was being the voice actress for Ferris Florald (prominent character in Cold Steel).
Also, if you read the above article, it's pretty obvious, from where I sit, that Falcom was actively trying to sabotage the English localizations in the early days. I can see their point of view, there is this hubris in Japanese culture about selling their stuff in the west, I think the same hubris that convinced Square to create Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is why Falcom wasn't crazy about trails localizations into English at the start.
>So right now I'm searching for the best possible way to play Cold Steel onwards. As close as humanly possible to the true essence the creators were going for, in English.
As someone who played the Xseed localization of Cold Steel 1 and 2, and the NISA version of Cold Steel 3, 4 and Reverie, I think those localizations were mostly good. Obviously, things are going to get lost in translation, but the Cold Steel games are a ton of fun to play.
There are some issues, the harem stuff can be a bit annoying sometimes, but the depth of the story is amazing. At the end of Cold Steel, seeing the hundred days war from the other side, and seeing who was really responsible for it, still gives me chills.
I fully encourage you to play these games in the way that wors best for you, but these games are good and they don't have any DEI bullshit in them, or MAGA propaganda, if that's your pet peeve.
Start from Sky, it's by far the best arc, and introduces characters and events whom you will want to know and understand when they pop up in later games.
I envy you. I finished Reverie in February, and I've finished all 10 games. I went in order, except for Azure (which wasn't localized until just last year) which I played after Cold Steel !! instead of after Zero. These games are good if story and music is your thing.
Sky will always be my favorite, because my first step into this world was the Liberl Kingdom. Enjoy the ride and remember, Trails games are a lot, so be sure to take frequent breaks.
Thanks for the encouragement! I’m really enjoying it.
Do you have any tips for navigation? I see quest logs and markers aren’t inclusive in the experience. While I do like the added challenge of paying attention to dialogue I do find myself stressing that I’m about to get lost all the time lol
> Do you have any tips for navigation?
Out of all the games, Sky FC and SC are the two easiest to navigate. The Kingdom of Liberal is basically a circle: you start in Rolent and work your way counter-clockwise. Bose is next, then Ruan, then Zeiss, then Grancel (the capital city) and then back to Rolent. The center of the circle is Valeria Lake, and it empties into the ocean in the Ruan region.
In each of the five major areas, there are assorted places to go and people to see, but in both of the first two Sky games, you can't move onto the next region until you finish with the current one, so it's hard to get lost. It's only at the very end of Sky SC where you have the ability to move freely between all five region and you can go wherever you want to.
When you play Sky SC, you'll be used to this, and you'll know where everything is the second go around Liberl.
>I see quest logs and markers aren’t inclusive in the experience.
Sky FC was a PSP game that was released in Japan in 2004, this was before quality of life improvements like quest markers were a thing. When the Bracer Guild posts a request asking you to exterminate a monster, I can 100% vouch that it's sometimes very hard to actually find the monster you're supposed to exterminate. That's one of the reasons why the fans are so insistent on a Sky trilogy remake: these games are special to a lot of people, but there's no denying it's not newbie friendly due to how dated a lot of it is.
The Sky trilogy is worth it, but it also has a steep learning curve.
One thing I would stress: make absolutely sure that you collect every single volume of Carnelia if you're going through Sky FC right now. The two best weapons in the game (one for Estelle and one for Joshua) are only gettable by obtaining every single volume of Carnelia and trading the books in for one of the two ultimate weapons near the end of the game. The trade-in spot is also easily missable (I missed it myself my first time through Sky FC).
This is a recurring thing in Trails: always collect all the books, as each game will let you trade in the books for an elite weapon at the end of each game. Some of these books are very easily to miss, as they require you to go far out of your way to where your next game objective is. There's one of these in the Zeiss region, for example, that makes you go all the way to Wolf Fort (which is in the exact opposite direction of where the main story needs you to go) at an odd time in the game.
Falcom loves to hide these books all over the place, and make sure you read every book you get. Falcom puts a metric ton of lore into these collectable books that you find in each game. The one in Reverie (3&9) was about a pair of characters in that game, and Nadia, upon first seeing the book for sale in Times Department Store in Crossbell, wanted royalties.
>While I do like the added challenge of paying attention to dialogue I do find myself stressing that I’m about to get lost all the time lol
Trails is not just dialogue heavy, but that dialogue is detail heavy. World building has a point of diminishing returns, that's why no one else goes as overboard on it as trails does.
Harry Potter leaves many details of its wizarding world unspecified, because adding those details would slow down the pace and lose readers. Trails believes more world-building is always better, and the level of detail trails will give you is unparalleled. Enjoy the ride, no one else does it like trails does.
> Didn’t know about the collectible book importance.
No problem, and don't just collect the books, stop and read them as well. Carnelia has an absolutely massive piece of lore in it. You'll meet one of the main characters from the novel (the titular Carnelia) in Sky the 3rd, and you'll meet the other main character, as well as the author of the novel, in Cold Steel 1.
These aren't just collectible novels, they are heavy bits of foreshadowing. You will often read about a character in a collectible book during a game and then meet the character the book was about in a later game. In Cold Steel 1, the novel is Red Moon Rose which is about the grandmother of one of the main party members, who we finally meet two games later in Cold Steel III. Collecting the books gets you the best weapons in the game, but reading the books gets you background details on the world and the characters.
Tbh I haven’t started yet, I just know that once they go out of print they become impossible to find and I hear that you need to play every game to understand the story so I picked them up. I want to start at Sky too but sadly I don’t have a pc at the moment and I have an IPhone so I can’t emulate either.
There's a strong [sentiment ](https://youtu.be/moLXNFF1ngk?si=HjWuo_JXaMB5Vuu_)going around that Falcom are bringing Sky to modern systems. So you might want to wait and see if the ports do come. Though, if you have a fairly modern laptop lying around the house you should be able to play Sky with relatively no hassle on integrated. The games are also discounted on Steam at the moment.
True, but the time (and sometimes even money) it takes to learn is sometimes more than your average joe is able to give. And especially if the only purpose is to exercise it with gaming, many will sooner simply download fan translations instead of mastering Japanese.
"Japanese is hard to learn" is a stupid/malicious localizer meme pushed by people who themselves don't speak Japanese.
It's not fucking hard. If you have an IQ above room temperature you are capable of learning any human language you want. It's just words and grammar. Learn enough of them and you can speak it. Is it easier for those of us who were lucky enough to learn as kids when we had God-tier neuroplasticity? Yeah, probably. But humans never stop picking up languages that we use a lot. Just start consuming Japanese media and drilling Japanese words/grammar and you'll be at conversational fluency within a year.
I defy any other Japanese speaker here to tell me anything about Japanese that is *actually* still hard/abstruse if you use it often. Maybe Keigo? But etiquette is a bitch largely just because of high stakes, not because the rules are actually difficult.
I would add that there are degrees of knowing a language. Even if you never understand Japanese well enough to hold a conversation or play a game / watch an anime entirely in Japanese, you can still listen to the original voices and pick out some things the translation misses. Especially for simple cases like in the OP.
And the tools we have these days to learn / translate Japanese are second to none.
Mostly true but kanji is hard as shit compared to anything using the Latin alphabet. Japanese isn't actually too hard to speak, the problem is reading the 2000 funny shaped moon runes.
There comes a moment for foreigners when kanji flips from "God, why do I have to know this" to "thank God these are here".
Think of them as very tiny words. Or very complicated emoji. That's really all they are. You recognize corporate logos and warning symbols all the time. It's the same skill. (In fact, a few key common kanji were included in the emoji list outright. 🈯️)
My advice would be to focus on words, not individual kanji.
When you learned kana, there was probably a brief phase where you had a few key words' orthographies memorized and used that to jog your memory on individual kana. Kanji is just that, but for longer until you've learned enough to communicate.
It's a lot easier to remember the meaning and spelling of 快速 (a word you see every day) than it is to remember all of the readings and possible valences of 速, for example.
To be fair it is also malicious of localizers to say “translations will always have inaccuracies so if you want accuracy you should read/watch in Japanese” when these localizers are maliciously misrepresenting the work. It is not unreasonable for the translated work to be authentic and capture the meaning correctly, and in all these cases GG have criticized it is very easy, if the localizers actually did their work in good faith.
completely minimizing the difficulty of learning a language.
You need to immerse yourself in it to learn it. Watching anime and playing games doesn't cut it.
Not all of us can afford to go live in japan somehow for 2+ years
There are plenty of Japanese web forums, and Japanese people on Western services like Twitter or Discord.
As for the AI thing, you can local-host your own model, or, if you're a normal person with a life, use Duolingo and GPT.
i have gptplus. does it really actually work well?
It can barely answer accurate questions about video games or movies, so i assume it is not great for learning language.
It's not as good as a person and speaks in sterile HR-speak, but I guess it would be a decent enough synthetic substitute if you just wanted to drill speaking in the language and no one was around to to it with you.
there are fan translations for all the new games. PLEASE dont buy any of western releases, they dont deserve money as they gave them to company that deliberately stalls releases for YEARS.
> PLEASE dont buy any of western releases, they dont deserve money as they gave them to company that deliberately stalls releases for YEARS.
I'm not the biggest NISA fan on the planet, but this is just untrue. NISA has given us Zero, Azure, Reverie, Nayuta, and Daybreak in a span of the last 21 months. 4 Trails releases and 1 spin-off game release between September 2022 and next Friday is a much snappier release schedule than Trails has ever had before. Yeah, they got Zero and Azure out because they built on Geofront's work, fine, but that's still a lot of games in a short amount of time.
I understand that everyone wants worldwide releases at the same time as the Japanese releases, but that isn't something Falcom will do, as they don't share game scripts until after the Japanese release of a game, unlike every other studio on the planet. I'm okay with waiting, personally, because the games have been worth it for me. We'll probably get Daybreak II this time next year, and we'll only be one game behind Japan at that time.
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/).
This is not a formal warning.
Japanese creators never cared about the translation or localisation work so now you have people doing the localisation work that have taken it upon themselves to not do their job correctly at the same time. It is doubly worse than mistranslations that are never checked in a SNES game. It comes off as Japanese companies just taking American consumers for granted.
I think it's more where they check if things have complaints and they don't see any complaints from many woke localizers, and get tricked into accepting them.
But that still means I shouldn't give my money to such mindless activity. They either need to understand the problem or they'll have me buy the Japanese version as a last resort.
> Japanese creators never cared about the translation or localisation work so now you have people doing the localisation work that have taken it upon themselves to not do their job correctly at the same time.
This goes triple for Falcom. If you read the history of Falcom localization, particularly of Trails games, you might come to the conclusion (as I have) that Falcom spent years deliberately trying to sabotage the western localizations. Only Xseed knows for sure, but Falcom has historically never given a crap about anyone outside the Asia region. They are a Japanese studio that makes games for a Japanese audience. Their games are localized by NISA because NISA has the best resources available to grow sales, not because NISA is a faithful localizer.
This is a pretty easy localization to make accurately, even if you don't want to use Japanese honorifics, which you might not want to, since this isn't a fantasy world that is necessarily meant to represent Japanese characteristics. In the original, a rough translation of the original two lines is, "I don't mean to make you feel bad, but how would he liked to be called, by a Mr. or Ms.?" It's that simple.
Since their first acquaintance is a business one, you could easily use the English words like those and just rewrite the rough translation to feel a little more natural in English. Van literally asks Katoru if he'd like to be called "-kun" or "-chan," with the former being a mostly male calling and the latter being a mostly female one.
More so than the idea of asking pronouns probably not being a thing in a fantasy world like that where the traditional gender norms of the real world aren't as rigidly set anyway (there isn't the same history of sexism in the Kiseki world as there is in the real world) and the way the developers set up the dialogue, asking third person pronouns just isn't a thing in Japanese because they are used so rarely and have so little effect on Japanese communication. Primarily we use third person pronouns to simplify the way we feel about GROUPS of people and not one person in specific. It's very rare that you wouldn't just use that person's name (which is why honorific suffixes are a big thing) to the point that second person pronouns are often considered rude and unnatural to us and this tends to rub off on third person pronouns so that the many times when people use them it is with the intent to be rude and offensive.
These nuances of culture can't be just wiped away. The game was originally written in Japanese. Even if the world created only has vestiges of the original language used to create it because of the influence it has on the developers, it should still reflect that. Van isn't speaking that formally here, but he's still trying to be polite and it's more offensive that they can't translate that correctly than anything else. This is reflected by the fact that after being shocked Katoru admits that he's often misunderstood at a glance and Feri thinks that even he was mistaken as a girl at first. It underpins that gender is not the issue here, because just casually brushes it off after an initial reaction and Aaron's thoughts after that even confirm that.
People in Japanese correct each other or ask to be referred certain ways to reflect the way they feel about each other's familiarity primarily, but this doesn't have anything to do with pronouns and has everything to do with levels of politeness. Politeness is important in Japanese grammar, where as count and gender or even subjects in sentences are not referenced nearly as often in English or a romance language.
People need to realize there is not one monoculture. Before there was ever a discourse about this type of thing, Japanese people have been intentionally calling people by disrespectful language in order to tease or belittle for literal centuries and it has little to do with the modern concept of respecting or not respecting how someone views themselves and more to do with baked-in societal norms of class, status,familiarity and hierarchy,.
This entire scene is about access to different levels of society that are normally not granted to them and all of the dialogue reflects the theme of status and hierarchy. This is more important to East Asian societies than it seems to be in the West, hence why you see it be a theme in countless games made by those countries and it is important to reflect the culture that created the game, not to transplant into your culture, which is just selfish imperialism. While it is true that Van is trying to clarify what an androgynous character is, the underpinnings of that are politeness and formal expectations in a rigid world of norms among business/military/government relations, not him trying to respect a personal identity of how somebody wants to represent themselves.
I hate it when smooth-brained localizers argue that it's necessary to make it feel natural. The dialogue can still feel natural and yet reflect that it comes from a different language. Read Russian, French, German, Spanish language novels translated into English and you often can tell very easily what the country of origin, even if it's set somewhere else, like a Nabokov novel for instance.
For some God-forsaken reason, it's only East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean where translators seem to want to erase every single bit of culture from the original and transplant it with something else. This idea that East Asian languages and culture are too "foreign" or "stilted" or "unnatural" in English essentially just reinforces that there's something "wrong" with them that needs to be fixed. No, people are well aware these ideas how important politeness, structure and hierarchies are in Asian societies and even if you don't translate the exact words, remnants of the culture behind should still be left behind in the same way you don't just erase chav slang from British thugs, flirty speak from French or Spanish romantics, or Russian epithets from mobsters.
Yeah, it's like, how hard is it to just localize it to something like "I'm not sure how I should address you" or something similar?
I came up with that immediately, and it's a *far* more effective translation of the *sentiment* being shown.
Ironically, the way they phrased it actually ends up sounding *disrespectful,* if anything.
But then, whoever translated this obviously doesn't have much in the way of respect for *anything,* not even themselves, so maybe that's where the real problem lies?
> But then, whoever translated this obviously doesn't have much in the way of respect for anything, not even themselves, so maybe that's where the real problem lies?
It should also be noted that localizing a trails game is not the same thing as localizing most other games. Trails games are insanely text heavy, and it is a ton of work to localize and because there is so much work to do, sometimes, localizers get lazy or the work isn't completely checked.
A standard trails game has more text than the Harry Potter novels, all 7 of them combined. Also more text than the Lord of the Rings, all 3 novels, combined. Daybreak is reported to be the most text heavy game out of all of them.
NISA's track record is admittedly not great, but Cold Steel III, IV, Zero, Azure, and Reverie were all fine, localization-wise, although Reverie had a lot of typos and stuff in it, it was still mostly fine.
> it's only East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean where translators seem to want to erase every single bit of culture from the original and transplant it with something else
It's easier to get away with. If you try to do it with something like Spanish, there's a large population of bilinguals who will call you on it.
If India ever started producing large quantities of media Westerners really wanted to watch, you would see the same discourse spring up around Hindi.
What the fuck is this? I want none of this shit in my games. This is not a question that any sane person would ever ask.
I honestly hope the Trails fans are going mad right now. They need to patch this shit out immediately.
Good fucking lord, not falcom man. One of the few devs whose games I love to death and will buy day one. Fck you NISA, I can only hope it doesn't become even worse (which it will). Man, can't even enjoy games without them introducing their politics.
Damn. I wish my younger self had known that going into Dangan Ronpa.
I was lucky to play the original Project Zetsubou version of DR1, read the Birdman(?) translation for 2, and I was legit excited to see things get ported over to the US.
It wasn't until V3 that I started to see quite a bit of the nonsense due to what happened with Angie and Gonta.
Fan translators have been rather reliable in that regard, so I'm thankful. I'm always afraid of the fan translators putting their own sentiments over the original meaning and text, but that hasn't been the case so far unless I'm ignorant.
Japanese companies should be braver to cut ties with woke localization companies, because they're actively degrading the quality of their original products. And I'm pretty sure there are based localizers who would enjoy the extra work.
Lol this is because Hatsuu an ex xseed
These games localizations weren't better then than they're now
Most Estelle lines in Sky were fanfiction in comparison with jp script
You telling me Estelle dialogue is so different from the official ones in english it's a completely different personality?....
Sheesh... now I'm curious how bad it is and if I can find any examples...
So aside from historically being shit, NiSA are now also woke?
Has anyone ever tried informing Falcom of this? Are they aware of localizers butchering their source material going all the way back to Xseed?
What the response should be:
"Why do you care about which pronouns to use for me? When speaking directly with me, won't you simply call me by name or refer to me as 'you' 99.9% of the time? The pronouns are only relevant when talking about me in the 3rd person, which means I likely won't be part of the conversation. So I ask again, why do you care?"
For fucks sake. I love Trails in the sky and Trails Of Cold Steel, so it's really sad to see that they are fucking up this series with this bullshit. No mentally sane person actually speaks like that in real life.
I hope that perhaps someone makes a delocalisation patch for it, though I am not holding my breath.
Fuck. I have it pre-ordered. I know the localisation sucked for years now but Falcom is basically the only developer I'm willing to trust with overall making great games. Ys 8 is masterpiece.
That one is a hard one. In JP Van asks if he should use "-chan", ie refer to Quattre as a girl, so basically the translation is correct, it just sounds cringe as hell.
Considering the situation, ie Van has no idea if Quattre is a girl or not and he decides to confirm, here it is meant as equivalent of asking his gender.
So, basically translation omitting honorifics would be: "Not sure if I should refer to you as a girl". So, pronouns phrase is not wrong, it's just been beaten to death and cringe as shit.
Yeah, no chance in hell we are getting someone asking "are you a girl?" in [current year].
"I was wondering how I should be referring to you" is fine enough. No one, absolutely no one asks another person their pronouns outside xitter
Yeah, it's really cringe and also when someone asks "what are your pronouns" the don't really care about what you are only what you want to be.
It would've been much better if he said "can I call you mista" if the proper translation doesn't matter.
Correct me if im wrong japanese senseis, but isnt -chan used as a way to show that you find a female friend endearing? so in this case, the localization would still be wrong.
Yes, it depends of context, so it may even be seen as despective. But I'm sure some localizers on x are already typing why pronouns is the correct translation because reasons
-chan can be used for male or female, it doesn't matter. It's just a term of endearment for somebody who is lower in social standing than you. Not class or wealth or anything, just socially, usually younger. Typically it's for women or young girls.
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/).
This is not a formal warning.
Maybe they shouldnt ommit honorifics in the first place?
Did they aim this localization for 12yo EOP Timmy that can only speak in slangs and brainrot language, that they can't even understand something as simple as honorifics for this clearly anime JRPG game meant for people who loves the Japanese culture?
Even in OP case, just do the Pokemon thing; "Are you a boy or a girl?" that's it. Using "pronouns" on this context is just another wokecalizer lingo.
> Maybe they shouldnt ommit honorifics in the first place?
In my opinion: they shouldn't. I much prefer to have honorifics and some things like nicknames from Randy and Na-chan just don't work without them. But that's not on NISA, but Xseed. Xseed started omitting honorifics in the Sky and Cold Steel, and NISA kept doing it to keep consistency. Would it surprise me if NISA ommited honorifics, had they been responsible for the series as a whole? No. But currently that direction is not on them.
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/).
This is not a formal warning.
according to steamdb it only sold less than 10k: [https://steamdb.info/app/2138610/charts/](https://steamdb.info/app/2138610/charts/)
so a nice flop for the studio
That might be western fans buying the Japanese version of the game and using a fan translation patch to play the game, if that's only sales in the west. The game doesn't release until Friday, July 5th.
This is a little off topic but.. is there a Japenese word for "I" ?
I'll see the subtitle say something like "I'm going to use my strongest attack!" but in spoken Japanese language, I hear the character always say their own name as if they're saying "Sakura chan is going to use strongest attack" in speaking about herself.
There are several words for "I," but you usually don't use them unless you need to emphasize that you're the topic of the sentence.
What you're seeing is a little complicated, but as I understand it, characters talk like that as an indicator that they're childish. It's impolite to use "you" to refer to someone; instead you speak their name. E.g. "Is this Mr. Tanaka's?" instead of "Is this yours?" Kids will often refer to themselves by their name because they haven't really learned how to use pronouns.
Personal pronouns are a little weird in Japanese. So there are three words for I, watashi, boku, and ore. The first is usually used by women, the second is rather gender-neutral but can be used by boys mostly, and ore is almost exclusively for men. There is also a habit of people using their own name as their own pronouns or I. I've not seen it much outside of child characters in anime or as a joke. Such as Dio uses his own name in place of I. I doubt it's that uncommon for people to speak of themselves in the third person in Japanese. It's a very different language to English, it rhymes accidentally and commonly, and has three different alphabets. It's also funny that the word please is commonly sewn into most sentences. They also have a lot of leftover things from the feudal era and Shinto beliefs that leak into everything.
Source: several hundred hours of subbed anime.
Okay good to know. I feel like that one can really blend in with watashi if you're not listening close enough. I'm not claiming to know Japanese fluently or anything, I've just picked up some basic phrases over the many years. Watching a bunch of Korean shows now, I realize I know almost nothing about the language besides how to say thank you and counting to three. I probably should learn both languages, since that's where all the good content is coming from.
Yeah its fine. Anyway actually in total i think there is about 6 most commonly used "I" s you can hear in anime.
The ore , boku , watashi then there is
Jibun , atashi(equivalent of ore but for girls) and uchi (effectively equivalent of boku but for girls)
Here's all of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns#List_of_Japanese_personal_pronouns
I've heard atashi, uchi, and watakushi used in addition to your list.
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/).
This is not a formal warning.
Ah okay gotcha mods, I didn't intend to break any rules and since it was neutral and not really offensive, will keep this is mind for the future, crazy that admins do this to you.
Imagine being so fragile that you actually expend mental energy caring about this. Y’all are hilarious in the fact you don’t see your own fragility and weakness
If I were to pay for Trails games, what would be the cut-off point? Still remember kinda fucking myself by starting with Cold Steel 2 and being overwhelmed right at the tutorial sewer, but people have assured me I should still give the series a try, if I like turn-based RPGs.
Best to start from the start, but if you want a decent cut off point then it's one of these:
Trails in the Sky (oldest)
Trails from Zero
Trails of Cold Steel 1
Trails through Daybreak (newest)
I wouldn't recommend going with Zero or Daybreak, Zero moreso since a major part of Zero's story is the culmination of a certain character that was first introduced in one of tbe Sky games, and a lot of Sky characters does show in the Zero series and you might be losing a bit of a context there.
Daybreak have less of an issue wit this but it does have characters that were first introduced in Sky and Cold Steel and it does somewhat continue the character arc of that same Sky character present in Zero.
I'd say the two cleanest starting points would have been Sky (the very beginning) or Cold Steel (which starts with the least amount of intersecting series characters) - and I would want to move from Cold Steel to Zero first after the first two Cold Steel games and start Sky after Cold Steel 3. Reverie is **not** a starting point.
tl;dr two best options:
* Sky -> Sky SC -> Sky 3rd -> Zero -> Azure -> CS1 -> CS2 -> CS3 -> CS4 -> Reverie -> Daybreak (the "correct" order)
* CS1 -> CS2 -> Zero -> Azure -> CS3 -> Sky -> Sky SC -> Sky 3rd -> CS4 -> Reverie -> Daybreak (the "alternative" order which I think will spoil you the least)
Protip, take your time and do not do all of them consecutively. They are very dense games and will 100% burn you out.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation on how to approach the series.
And don't you worry, friendo, I learned my lesson with turn-based RPGs back in my teens, when I tried playing through Final Fantasy games back-to-back, and I ended up speeding through IV, not doing Interlude or The After Years, and then falling off VI once I realized I doomed Shadow to death.
Nowadays, even though I find myself enjoying my time with turn-based RPGs more, I still try to play one or two games from a different kind in-between. Especially when my tastes and preferences have been so refined, a TBRPG that might not have aged well (either mechanically or performance-wise) could require a slower pace and a refreshed palate.
Not the first time a Trails game had bad localization. One reason I haven't bothered with the series. I do think though some have been retranslated on the pc via fan patches.
Now it bites us in the back that english is so dominant. The game doesn't even has german as an alternative to english, and i can't speak nor intend to learn japanese, just to avoid the american woke translation culture.
Dam. Lolcoelizers strike again. I hate these parasites more than i hate game journos
At least the game "journalists" aren't actively destroying games from within like the localizers are.
Localizers are the detritus of the declining culture of the west, Journalists are enablers. These smaller developers need to pull out and form their own AA publishing houses…
Blackmailer vs corporate sabotage
Journalists would absolutely destroy from within, if only they could translate Japanese to English
I'm up to 3k vocab in Anki after a few weeks. I'll escape from being an English-only peasant if it's the last thing I'll do. Fuck translators.
What was the script in Japanese?
Van dosn't know if use male or female honorifics
"Are you a boy or a girl?"
This is the actual line in japanese : 君”付けか“ちゃん”付けか、君をどう呼んだものかと思ってね Van doesn't ask Quatre directly if they're a boy or a girl, he akwardly (yes context matters) ask their honorifics instead. The point of that line isn't supposed to be "correct" or "natural", it's suppose to be akward because Van isn't confortable. "Are you a boy or a girl ?" is a complete mistranslation of the scene. There's nothing wrong with NISA translation, sure you can always argue about using that translation instead of a different one, but it's still a perfectly faithful translation of the japanese text and intent.
> I was wondering how to call you, should I add "kun" or "chan"? This could be directly translated as > I was wondering how to call you, should I add "Mister" or "Miss"?
[удалено]
...and this logically maps to preferred pronouns how?
[удалено]
Of course it's supposed to be awkward. Asking someone what sex they are (something that's usually quite apparent) is awkward because implying someone's gender is indeterminate is an implicit insult. In fact, the friendly awkwardness of the line in Japanese actually *precludes* the use of "preferred pronouns" crap, which is not only designed to make sex less apparent and androgyny *less* awkward but is also sterile, formal and anti-friendly.
If somebody came up to me and asked me what my pronouns are, it would definitely be cringey and awkward since it should be obvious. Seems like mission accomplished.
"Sorry, are you a 'sir' or a 'ma'am'?" demeans the listener. "What are your preferred pronouns?" demeans the listener *and the speaker*.
"What's between your legs xD" There, I'm a master flavour localizer now. Why is it localizations always lean to that kind of convention and not my example?
it is NISA Usa that did this, their translations are used in the disgaea series the entire trails series among a few more things. They used to be good but with work like disgaea ..I say up to 4-5 remasters for pc and older trails games but the newer releases .....they don't distort it badly but there are issues like shown here
OK admittedly without all the political baggage, it's not THAT bad then. Like, at least it makes some kind of sense and it isn't just shoehorned in completely out of nowhere. I could still think of a few better ways to do it though that aren't ideologically motivated... Also nice Tower of God reference!
It's the same as Sully back in Zero. Lloyd thought she was a male because she has no chest and behaves like a tomboy but she's actually a girl. In Kuro Van thinks Quatre is a female because looks androgynous. If this weren't 2024 the joke would translate as asking if he's a girl.
Yep. It's definitely phrased that way because it's 2024 and that makes it cringe. My point was that at least it's not destroying the actual meaning of the scene, adding it out of nowhere
> Lloyd thought she was a male because she has no chest and behaves like a tomboy but she's actually a girl. And Lloyd got no end of grief for it, and no one ever let him live it down.
Reposting from my other post on the falcom sub: Honorifics and pronouns aren't exactly analogous, so while I would imagine some English speakers of some ages and cultures would ask for pronouns, the actual best localization (as opposed to the best translation, which would be to preserve honorifics) would be more neutral, like "I was wondering how to refer to you." (or something to that effect; I'm not being paid to write these lines). The pronoun line implies both that gender theory in Calvard is at the very specific point it is at in our modern western culture today as well is that Van ascribes to it, which adds additional facts to the character and world that wasn't there originally. Conversely, "I was wondering how to refer to you" can be said by any English speaker, is inoffensive regardless of personal belief (since it says implies nothing about either the existence of a gender binary nor the existence of fluid pronouns) and says nothing about the world or character that wasn't already there originally. That said, this is NIS America, so their localizers probably aren't cognizant enough to realize their own speech patterns and phrases are shaped by their specific worldviews and culture.
> OK admittedly without all the political baggage, it's not THAT bad then. Van and Quatre might share a history; the name "Quatre" has been used one other time in Trails, and that was in a very infamous scene related to a lodge of a religious cult (the main victim, Renne, is also in this game). Van was also a victim of that cult when he was young. The cult was so bad that even the bad guys in this universe joined ranks to totally annihilate them. We're not sure if this Quatre is the same as that Quatre, but Falcom had to know that we'd notice this, so it's unlikely to be a coincidence. The ages are also about right. Basically, think of the cult that Van was a prisoner of as being a cross between the very worst of Jeffrey Epstein and the very worst of big pharma and you have some idea of what was going on. One of the biggest things I'm looking forward to when I play this game is whether Quatre and Renne recognize each other, and whether Renne recognizes Quatre as that Quatre, the same one she was trapped in the Paradise lodge with.
> Van doesn't know if use male or female honorifics If that's the case, I don't see anything wrong with this translation. I guess you could translate it as: "I don't know if I should call you Mr. or Mrs." but the "What are your pronouns" translation is close.
Going to go against the grain here… but in English where we don’t have honorifics, how is this any different? This is one of the few exceptions where the equivalent for the language it’s written in is acceptable, as opposed to myriad other times where it’s politics shoehorned in due to the agenda of the translator.
> in English where we don’t have honorifics Master, Mr., Ms., Mrs., Mme., Dr., Professor, Sir, Ma'am, Cllr, Lord, Lady, Esq., etc.
Normal people would ask about sex/gender not about pronouns. That's what Van implies in japanese.
The literal equivalent interpretation of the meaning of the line in Japanese is “we use honorifics in this language based on gender, what kind of language should I use?” It is specifying a grammatical concept regarding the Japanese language. The most accurate equivalent interpretation in English would also be inquiring about a grammatical concept. Asking about pronouns makes complete sense because it’s addressing the equivalent grammatical concept. This is a very rare circumstance where the character saying “are you a guy or a girl?” actually is further from the literal translation of the line in Japanese. The way this is translated maintains the element of inquiring about how one should use grammar.
A gendered honorific and a custom pronoun are not the same thing, not in grammatical use and *certainly* not in political valence. You're smart enough to know the vast gulf of difference between "Sir? Ma'am?" and "What are your preferred pronouns™?" This line is the former.
Easy: > Uh… should I call you Mister or Miss…? It’s an innately awkward question so it should be portrayed that way.
They're not really "equivalent". And that's at best, just an excuse to camouflage the underlying politics. There's no reason to refer to pronouns specifically.
This is more a NISA problem than a Falcom problem IMO. I wonder sometimes if the original Japanese developers and companies understand this sort of thing at all.
NISA are the original lolcoelizers, even before woke was a thing their translations were shit
yea it is a nisa problem....they used to be good all the way up to disgaea 4-5 I say but the later jrpgs have ....issues. Main reason I don't give a thought of my day to disgaea 6-7 because I doubt those made it through intact
They were really only good with disgaea because it belonges to NIS, aka their parent company, the way they handled localizartions for other devs really badly. Gust games were really screwed by NISA inserting memes or making stupid changes
Yeah, the way they completely botched Ys 8 is still the stuff of legends. Fantastic game, maybe the worst localization I've ever seen. NISA had to issue a formal apology and redo the whole thing.
Yes, the non-EN versions are much more tolerable.
Damn localizers...
Bad translations like these will continue to be why Japanese games are held back, compared to Western games. Do they think the wokest western games have this cringe of dialogue? I'm gonna bet Star Wars Outlaws won't even set a pinky into two characters awkwardly asking about pronouns in dialogue. There is no way Yasuke will ask the female protag what her pronouns are or vice versa. People simply do not communicate that methodically in any English speaking country, unless they're forcing themselves to.
> Do they think the wokest western games have this cringe of dialogue? They would be right.
The younger generation does communicate this way. Was out at a club and this early 20s girl came up to my gf and said “yes girl slay!”. Then immediately looked terrified. I guess she realized she “assumed” gender and asked my girlfriend her pronouns. Thought the whole thing was weird. At least three other younger girls came up and asked her pronouns while talking to her. They do it so naturally it is kind of unnerving. Like asking what’s your name when you first meet someone. We were at a night club for a Halloween event and she was a dressed as a succubus.
People are downvoting this because they don't want to admit that it's true, but young people (esp. young Americans) *absolutely* talk in this strange mixture of algo-speak, black slang and HR compliance. Is it the same as bitter-aging-millenial localizer speak? Nah. But it's definitely been shaped by it in the same way an abused animal's behavior is shaped by the personality of its owner. \>inb4 "slang changes" or "your slang was stupid, too" Not this way, it hasn't and wasn't. Slang usually connotes youthful irreverence, not cowed terror.
> People are downvoting this because they don't want to admit that it's true, but young people (esp. young Americans) absolutely talk in this strange mixture of algo-speak, black slang and HR compliance. Damn, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange was so on the nose regarding the younger generation employing a mix of many dialects and slang.
Burgess actually got very annoyed at people asking him how he felt that he failed to predict modern teen slang. His point was just that the slang was super different/unintelligible, not that he was guessing how future teens would actually talk.
Because you wouldn't be institutionally punished if you told the goth he wasn't a 2,000 yo vampire or the emo she's being a drama queen
Lol, this one got automoded, case in point
God please don't let them ruin Ys too. This is so frustrating, because I love Falcom and I know they would never involve themselves in this shit, but as English-speakers we're stuck with this trash from the activist localizers.
Use the fan patch it's decent
Theres fan patches that get rid of bullshit like this? any idea where I can find them?
No but there is an eng patch made for the Japanese and Chinese version of the game. U can find it on 4chan
Hello again. The game's official eng version isn't out yet but u could purchase the Chinese version and then apply the patch it's very easy and u can enjoy the games direct translation instead of "wokalization, lol".
Can you DM where I mind find this sort of thing? My google fu is failing (tbh i think google just sucks now)
Yh wait I'll dm u
I played zero with the Geofront patch, and would have played Azure that way too, except that the patch was taken down by Geofront when the official localization was announced. In my opinion, the Geofront fan patch is much, much better than most professional localizations. It's a remarkable accomplishment that such a tiny, niche JPRG series got such an insanely good fan translation. You can find both patches on the internet, I'm not going to stop you, but I also played the NISA localization of both games, and it was pretty good with no obvious problems. Reverie, on the other hand, not so much. Reverie didn't have woke translations, just so many mistakes and typos.
Ohh yeah, i actually did play both of those with the geofront patch! I haven't played the localized azure / zero yet. I had more trouble finding fanpatches of the later games.
The reason Crossbell has such high-profile fan translations in the first place is because after the Sky trilogy was localized, Xseed skipped over the crossbell games and localized Cold Steel 1 next. The reason was money: Cold Steel 1 had much better graphics, and was a Persona-esque high school setting type game. Xseed figured that would sell better than the buddy cop underdog story. That were probably right. The decision to skip Crossbell's localization probably saved Trails in the west. For ages, there was never any plans to localize Crossbell, and the Geofront team decided to do it themselves. Falcom and NISA let Geofront try their best and waited to see what the outcome would be. The Geofront localization was so good that NISA signed a deal with Geofront to buy those localizations and use them as the basis for the official localization. That's how NISA was able to get Zero and Azure localized and out so quickly. Due to the Geofront and the fan support for the Crossbell project, those localizations were extremely high profile. Geofront didn't just localize Crossbell, they IMPROVED the games, by adding a wide array of quality of life features to the Crossbell games that weren't there before. None of the other fan localizations had as much support and money behind it as the Geofront, that's why it's the easiest one to find.
Dang. But now Geofront isn't available right, so I should hold onto the ones I have? (I'm sure they're available on gray-area sites?) Does that mean, though, that the official releases of Crossbell are as good as Geofronts? Or the same?
> Geofront isn't available right, so I should hold onto the ones I have? (I'm sure they're available on gray-area sites?) Geofront isn't legally available, because most of the people who worked on Geofront project got hired by NISA to work on the official localization. Geofront wasn't just a small fan project, actual industry professionals from Xseed and other places donated time and worked on the project. One of the biggest reasons why Trails exists in the west is that when Xseed took on that first localization for Trails in the Sky FC, it wasn't just a project: Sky FC converted a lot of people at Xseed into Trails fans. >Does that mean, though, that the official releases of Crossbell are as good as Geofronts? Or the same? I never played the Geofront version of Azure, but I played the NISA version of Azure and I played the Geofront and the NISA version of Zero, a bunch of times apiece. In my opinion, the NISA and Geofront version of Zero are pretty close. There's no obvious nonsense in either game, and to be honest, I think the image in the OP is far more likely to be due to the immense text size of Daybreak just meaning some stuff fell through the cracks. Trails through Daybreak has more text than War and Peace, and not just a little more, Daybreak is MUCH longer than War and Peace. Once you know how ridiculously large the amount of text is in these games, you can see that it might not even be a political thing, it might just be there was so much work to do that somethings got overlooked. That happened with Reverie, there were a lot of typos in the localization of Reverie, not woke political stuff, just mistakes. The enormous script size of a trails games create these problems. Even the Xseed localizations were not perfect, if you replay them, you find typos and things. With regards to GeoFront, Scott Tijerina (the youtuber KillScottKill) was the leader of Geofront, and he passed away as the Zero and Azure NISA localizations were coming together. He received a tribute at the end of Azure in the official NISA localization: https://x.com/NoisyPixelNews/status/1633120548380131329/photo/1 Well done, faithful servant of the goddess, find your eternal reward in Aidios' arms. Scott dedicated so much time, effort, energy and passion to getting Lloyd, Ellie, Tio and Randy's story to the English speaking world. He was a fan, but he had more to do with getting the official NISA localization of Zero and Azure made than arguably anyone else did. That's the thing about small, niche JRPGs: a single fan can still make a massive difference. I don't believe, for a second, that Scott would have allowed anything into the official localization that would have diverted attention away from where it should be: the story, the game and these characters. He loved Crossbell and trails way too much for that.
That's all incredible information. Thank you for sharing. Sucks that Scott died as everything was coming together :( That said, I don't particularly have a political leaning one way or the other, and I don't care about "wokeism" one way or the other. Frankly, stuff like the pronouns thing above just sounds unnatrual to me, especially in a JRPG - but even if I gave a shit, I just truly want to play these games with a translation that is as close to the original writers intent as possible. I realize how insanely difficult that is to achieve when localizing from Japanese to English, though. I have yet to start Cold Steel onward. I know, that's insane. But I replayed Sky trilogy after finishing Crossbell because I rushed through Sky the first time and regretted it. Playing Sky twice and Crossbell once - with as much attention as each deserved - obviously took up a ton of time. So right now I'm searching for the best possible way to play Cold Steel onwards. As close as humanly possible to the true essence the creators were going for, in English. Whatever string of hacked fan translations / mods / whatever for each that I have to do, I'd be willing to. So if you or anyone else has recommendations along those lines, along with how I might find each thing, I'd super greatly appreciate it. Obviously I know Google exists, but it's been giving me, at best, conflicted answers. "Use the chinese version of X and get this fan translation - use this spreadsheet(???) version -- no actually use the japanese version and then this spreadsheet with this mod to link -- etc" ... You see what I mean. So anyone who is aware of a straightforward list, or is able to create and immortalize something somewhere in a Google Doc, or whatever, I (and I'm sure others who google this very page in the future) would be so appreciative!! But to you who I am replying to, thanks again so much for all that background info! I love hearing about stuff like this. Despite having not played much of the series yet relatively speaking, I am very invested in it, but I don't want to waste my time (and it's a lot of time to play these games) with subpar translations :( (edit, I realize there might be dubious legality to some or all of this request? if so, please PM me in the right direction if any good samaratans stumble across this!)
> But to you who I am replying to, thanks again so much for all that background info! I love hearing about stuff like this. Despite having not played much of the series yet relatively speaking, I am very invested in it, but I don't want to waste my time (and it's a lot of time to play these games) with subpar translations :( So, I finished all 10 games on Steam, I've sunk over 100 hours into each game, and I have every single Steam achievement except for one in Sky SC (Rambling Gambler, I can't get four of a kind at poker in the Ruan Casino) and one in Azure (the horror coaster one). I found this series during the pandemic and I love trails to bits and it's become my favorite game series. I know that I'm very different from most people in this world, and I know entertainment shouldn't ever be made for me. Stuff I'm likely to fall in love with is also likely to be not well received by most people. I've known that all my life, but if makes a big difference when one series seems to cater everything to my tastes and sensibilities. You can't make money if I'm a super-fan of your work, there just aren't enough other people like me. It's a very lonely life, if you get my meaning. >Frankly, stuff like the pronouns thing above just sounds unnatrual to me, especially in a JRPG - but even if I gave a shit, I just truly want to play these games with a translation that is as close to the original writers intent as possible. I realize how insanely difficult that is to achieve when localizing from Japanese to English, though. As someone else mentioned in this thread, that can be really tough. The most famous example as regards to trails is that Xseed famously changed Estelle Bright's personality in the Sky trilogy from what it had been in Japanese. This is a hard thing to sync with, because Xseed didn't change the game's images and what you see lines up with the dialogue....mostly. Trails is famously difficult to localize because of the sheer size of the script. Large script size + small, niche JRPG that doesn't sell well means there's not much room for profit. Here's a 10 year old Kotaku article on the localization nightmare that was the first two Sky games. It's an utter miracle that there are people in this world passionate enough to willingly put themselves through a Kiseki localization: https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-biggest-rpgs-bar-1740055631 None of this excepts people from doing the best job that they can, but it does mean that if there are a few typos, I won't complain about that too much. Stories like this, and knowing how much work it is to bring a trails game west, only serves to prove to me that Zemuria's heroes aren't just the ones in the game. People like Jessica Chavez and Scott Tijerina are the unsung heroes who have sacrificed to make trails in the west happen. It used to be if we'd get localizations, now it's when. So many of the people who worked on localizing trails became fans of trails, if you ask Brittany Avery what her career's biggest accomplishment is, she'll tell you it was being the voice actress for Ferris Florald (prominent character in Cold Steel). Also, if you read the above article, it's pretty obvious, from where I sit, that Falcom was actively trying to sabotage the English localizations in the early days. I can see their point of view, there is this hubris in Japanese culture about selling their stuff in the west, I think the same hubris that convinced Square to create Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is why Falcom wasn't crazy about trails localizations into English at the start. >So right now I'm searching for the best possible way to play Cold Steel onwards. As close as humanly possible to the true essence the creators were going for, in English. As someone who played the Xseed localization of Cold Steel 1 and 2, and the NISA version of Cold Steel 3, 4 and Reverie, I think those localizations were mostly good. Obviously, things are going to get lost in translation, but the Cold Steel games are a ton of fun to play. There are some issues, the harem stuff can be a bit annoying sometimes, but the depth of the story is amazing. At the end of Cold Steel, seeing the hundred days war from the other side, and seeing who was really responsible for it, still gives me chills. I fully encourage you to play these games in the way that wors best for you, but these games are good and they don't have any DEI bullshit in them, or MAGA propaganda, if that's your pet peeve.
Time to learn Japanese I guess 😭
Damn I just stared collecting these games…
Same where did you start, I am going to start at Trails of Sky, I think these games are 50 hours a pop, quite the undertaking.
Start from Sky, it's by far the best arc, and introduces characters and events whom you will want to know and understand when they pop up in later games.
I started playing sky today :)
I envy you. I finished Reverie in February, and I've finished all 10 games. I went in order, except for Azure (which wasn't localized until just last year) which I played after Cold Steel !! instead of after Zero. These games are good if story and music is your thing. Sky will always be my favorite, because my first step into this world was the Liberl Kingdom. Enjoy the ride and remember, Trails games are a lot, so be sure to take frequent breaks.
Thanks for the encouragement! I’m really enjoying it. Do you have any tips for navigation? I see quest logs and markers aren’t inclusive in the experience. While I do like the added challenge of paying attention to dialogue I do find myself stressing that I’m about to get lost all the time lol
> Do you have any tips for navigation? Out of all the games, Sky FC and SC are the two easiest to navigate. The Kingdom of Liberal is basically a circle: you start in Rolent and work your way counter-clockwise. Bose is next, then Ruan, then Zeiss, then Grancel (the capital city) and then back to Rolent. The center of the circle is Valeria Lake, and it empties into the ocean in the Ruan region. In each of the five major areas, there are assorted places to go and people to see, but in both of the first two Sky games, you can't move onto the next region until you finish with the current one, so it's hard to get lost. It's only at the very end of Sky SC where you have the ability to move freely between all five region and you can go wherever you want to. When you play Sky SC, you'll be used to this, and you'll know where everything is the second go around Liberl. >I see quest logs and markers aren’t inclusive in the experience. Sky FC was a PSP game that was released in Japan in 2004, this was before quality of life improvements like quest markers were a thing. When the Bracer Guild posts a request asking you to exterminate a monster, I can 100% vouch that it's sometimes very hard to actually find the monster you're supposed to exterminate. That's one of the reasons why the fans are so insistent on a Sky trilogy remake: these games are special to a lot of people, but there's no denying it's not newbie friendly due to how dated a lot of it is. The Sky trilogy is worth it, but it also has a steep learning curve. One thing I would stress: make absolutely sure that you collect every single volume of Carnelia if you're going through Sky FC right now. The two best weapons in the game (one for Estelle and one for Joshua) are only gettable by obtaining every single volume of Carnelia and trading the books in for one of the two ultimate weapons near the end of the game. The trade-in spot is also easily missable (I missed it myself my first time through Sky FC). This is a recurring thing in Trails: always collect all the books, as each game will let you trade in the books for an elite weapon at the end of each game. Some of these books are very easily to miss, as they require you to go far out of your way to where your next game objective is. There's one of these in the Zeiss region, for example, that makes you go all the way to Wolf Fort (which is in the exact opposite direction of where the main story needs you to go) at an odd time in the game. Falcom loves to hide these books all over the place, and make sure you read every book you get. Falcom puts a metric ton of lore into these collectable books that you find in each game. The one in Reverie (3&9) was about a pair of characters in that game, and Nadia, upon first seeing the book for sale in Times Department Store in Crossbell, wanted royalties. >While I do like the added challenge of paying attention to dialogue I do find myself stressing that I’m about to get lost all the time lol Trails is not just dialogue heavy, but that dialogue is detail heavy. World building has a point of diminishing returns, that's why no one else goes as overboard on it as trails does. Harry Potter leaves many details of its wizarding world unspecified, because adding those details would slow down the pace and lose readers. Trails believes more world-building is always better, and the level of detail trails will give you is unparalleled. Enjoy the ride, no one else does it like trails does.
Thank you, so much, for that detailed breakdown. Didn’t know about the collectible book importance. Thanks for taking the time!
> Didn’t know about the collectible book importance. No problem, and don't just collect the books, stop and read them as well. Carnelia has an absolutely massive piece of lore in it. You'll meet one of the main characters from the novel (the titular Carnelia) in Sky the 3rd, and you'll meet the other main character, as well as the author of the novel, in Cold Steel 1. These aren't just collectible novels, they are heavy bits of foreshadowing. You will often read about a character in a collectible book during a game and then meet the character the book was about in a later game. In Cold Steel 1, the novel is Red Moon Rose which is about the grandmother of one of the main party members, who we finally meet two games later in Cold Steel III. Collecting the books gets you the best weapons in the game, but reading the books gets you background details on the world and the characters.
Tbh I haven’t started yet, I just know that once they go out of print they become impossible to find and I hear that you need to play every game to understand the story so I picked them up. I want to start at Sky too but sadly I don’t have a pc at the moment and I have an IPhone so I can’t emulate either.
There's a strong [sentiment ](https://youtu.be/moLXNFF1ngk?si=HjWuo_JXaMB5Vuu_)going around that Falcom are bringing Sky to modern systems. So you might want to wait and see if the ports do come. Though, if you have a fairly modern laptop lying around the house you should be able to play Sky with relatively no hassle on integrated. The games are also discounted on Steam at the moment.
It’s not too late to start learning Japanese.
Not an easy language to learn. And frankly, most people aren't going to go through that trouble just to play games as they were intended.
Few things worth doing are easily learned.
True, but the time (and sometimes even money) it takes to learn is sometimes more than your average joe is able to give. And especially if the only purpose is to exercise it with gaming, many will sooner simply download fan translations instead of mastering Japanese.
"Japanese is hard to learn" is a stupid/malicious localizer meme pushed by people who themselves don't speak Japanese. It's not fucking hard. If you have an IQ above room temperature you are capable of learning any human language you want. It's just words and grammar. Learn enough of them and you can speak it. Is it easier for those of us who were lucky enough to learn as kids when we had God-tier neuroplasticity? Yeah, probably. But humans never stop picking up languages that we use a lot. Just start consuming Japanese media and drilling Japanese words/grammar and you'll be at conversational fluency within a year. I defy any other Japanese speaker here to tell me anything about Japanese that is *actually* still hard/abstruse if you use it often. Maybe Keigo? But etiquette is a bitch largely just because of high stakes, not because the rules are actually difficult.
It’d be even easier if you’re surrounded by people who speak that language, maybe that’s why people are hesitant. But I agree with you
I would add that there are degrees of knowing a language. Even if you never understand Japanese well enough to hold a conversation or play a game / watch an anime entirely in Japanese, you can still listen to the original voices and pick out some things the translation misses. Especially for simple cases like in the OP. And the tools we have these days to learn / translate Japanese are second to none.
Mostly true but kanji is hard as shit compared to anything using the Latin alphabet. Japanese isn't actually too hard to speak, the problem is reading the 2000 funny shaped moon runes.
There comes a moment for foreigners when kanji flips from "God, why do I have to know this" to "thank God these are here". Think of them as very tiny words. Or very complicated emoji. That's really all they are. You recognize corporate logos and warning symbols all the time. It's the same skill. (In fact, a few key common kanji were included in the emoji list outright. 🈯️)
The problem is the sheer amount of them you have to memorise.
My advice would be to focus on words, not individual kanji. When you learned kana, there was probably a brief phase where you had a few key words' orthographies memorized and used that to jog your memory on individual kana. Kanji is just that, but for longer until you've learned enough to communicate. It's a lot easier to remember the meaning and spelling of 快速 (a word you see every day) than it is to remember all of the readings and possible valences of 速, for example.
To be fair it is also malicious of localizers to say “translations will always have inaccuracies so if you want accuracy you should read/watch in Japanese” when these localizers are maliciously misrepresenting the work. It is not unreasonable for the translated work to be authentic and capture the meaning correctly, and in all these cases GG have criticized it is very easy, if the localizers actually did their work in good faith.
completely minimizing the difficulty of learning a language. You need to immerse yourself in it to learn it. Watching anime and playing games doesn't cut it. Not all of us can afford to go live in japan somehow for 2+ years
It's easier than ever to speak online with Japanese people or even semi-competent AI models at this point.
any pointers as to where i might do that? google is genuinely terrible these days.
There are plenty of Japanese web forums, and Japanese people on Western services like Twitter or Discord. As for the AI thing, you can local-host your own model, or, if you're a normal person with a life, use Duolingo and GPT.
i have gptplus. does it really actually work well? It can barely answer accurate questions about video games or movies, so i assume it is not great for learning language.
It's not as good as a person and speaks in sterile HR-speak, but I guess it would be a decent enough synthetic substitute if you just wanted to drill speaking in the language and no one was around to to it with you.
"it's hard" is just another way of saying "it's too time-consuming" which it is considering i interact with japanese stuff once in a blue moon
there are fan translations for all the new games. PLEASE dont buy any of western releases, they dont deserve money as they gave them to company that deliberately stalls releases for YEARS.
> PLEASE dont buy any of western releases, they dont deserve money as they gave them to company that deliberately stalls releases for YEARS. I'm not the biggest NISA fan on the planet, but this is just untrue. NISA has given us Zero, Azure, Reverie, Nayuta, and Daybreak in a span of the last 21 months. 4 Trails releases and 1 spin-off game release between September 2022 and next Friday is a much snappier release schedule than Trails has ever had before. Yeah, they got Zero and Azure out because they built on Geofront's work, fine, but that's still a lot of games in a short amount of time. I understand that everyone wants worldwide releases at the same time as the Japanese releases, but that isn't something Falcom will do, as they don't share game scripts until after the Japanese release of a game, unlike every other studio on the planet. I'm okay with waiting, personally, because the games have been worth it for me. We'll probably get Daybreak II this time next year, and we'll only be one game behind Japan at that time.
[удалено]
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/). This is not a formal warning.
Don't know what game this is, but I'm avoiding it. Localizers like that get the cold shoulder.
Japanese creators never cared about the translation or localisation work so now you have people doing the localisation work that have taken it upon themselves to not do their job correctly at the same time. It is doubly worse than mistranslations that are never checked in a SNES game. It comes off as Japanese companies just taking American consumers for granted.
I think it's more where they check if things have complaints and they don't see any complaints from many woke localizers, and get tricked into accepting them. But that still means I shouldn't give my money to such mindless activity. They either need to understand the problem or they'll have me buy the Japanese version as a last resort.
> Japanese creators never cared about the translation or localisation work so now you have people doing the localisation work that have taken it upon themselves to not do their job correctly at the same time. This goes triple for Falcom. If you read the history of Falcom localization, particularly of Trails games, you might come to the conclusion (as I have) that Falcom spent years deliberately trying to sabotage the western localizations. Only Xseed knows for sure, but Falcom has historically never given a crap about anyone outside the Asia region. They are a Japanese studio that makes games for a Japanese audience. Their games are localized by NISA because NISA has the best resources available to grow sales, not because NISA is a faithful localizer.
Or.... cold steel.
This is a pretty easy localization to make accurately, even if you don't want to use Japanese honorifics, which you might not want to, since this isn't a fantasy world that is necessarily meant to represent Japanese characteristics. In the original, a rough translation of the original two lines is, "I don't mean to make you feel bad, but how would he liked to be called, by a Mr. or Ms.?" It's that simple. Since their first acquaintance is a business one, you could easily use the English words like those and just rewrite the rough translation to feel a little more natural in English. Van literally asks Katoru if he'd like to be called "-kun" or "-chan," with the former being a mostly male calling and the latter being a mostly female one. More so than the idea of asking pronouns probably not being a thing in a fantasy world like that where the traditional gender norms of the real world aren't as rigidly set anyway (there isn't the same history of sexism in the Kiseki world as there is in the real world) and the way the developers set up the dialogue, asking third person pronouns just isn't a thing in Japanese because they are used so rarely and have so little effect on Japanese communication. Primarily we use third person pronouns to simplify the way we feel about GROUPS of people and not one person in specific. It's very rare that you wouldn't just use that person's name (which is why honorific suffixes are a big thing) to the point that second person pronouns are often considered rude and unnatural to us and this tends to rub off on third person pronouns so that the many times when people use them it is with the intent to be rude and offensive. These nuances of culture can't be just wiped away. The game was originally written in Japanese. Even if the world created only has vestiges of the original language used to create it because of the influence it has on the developers, it should still reflect that. Van isn't speaking that formally here, but he's still trying to be polite and it's more offensive that they can't translate that correctly than anything else. This is reflected by the fact that after being shocked Katoru admits that he's often misunderstood at a glance and Feri thinks that even he was mistaken as a girl at first. It underpins that gender is not the issue here, because just casually brushes it off after an initial reaction and Aaron's thoughts after that even confirm that. People in Japanese correct each other or ask to be referred certain ways to reflect the way they feel about each other's familiarity primarily, but this doesn't have anything to do with pronouns and has everything to do with levels of politeness. Politeness is important in Japanese grammar, where as count and gender or even subjects in sentences are not referenced nearly as often in English or a romance language. People need to realize there is not one monoculture. Before there was ever a discourse about this type of thing, Japanese people have been intentionally calling people by disrespectful language in order to tease or belittle for literal centuries and it has little to do with the modern concept of respecting or not respecting how someone views themselves and more to do with baked-in societal norms of class, status,familiarity and hierarchy,. This entire scene is about access to different levels of society that are normally not granted to them and all of the dialogue reflects the theme of status and hierarchy. This is more important to East Asian societies than it seems to be in the West, hence why you see it be a theme in countless games made by those countries and it is important to reflect the culture that created the game, not to transplant into your culture, which is just selfish imperialism. While it is true that Van is trying to clarify what an androgynous character is, the underpinnings of that are politeness and formal expectations in a rigid world of norms among business/military/government relations, not him trying to respect a personal identity of how somebody wants to represent themselves. I hate it when smooth-brained localizers argue that it's necessary to make it feel natural. The dialogue can still feel natural and yet reflect that it comes from a different language. Read Russian, French, German, Spanish language novels translated into English and you often can tell very easily what the country of origin, even if it's set somewhere else, like a Nabokov novel for instance. For some God-forsaken reason, it's only East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean where translators seem to want to erase every single bit of culture from the original and transplant it with something else. This idea that East Asian languages and culture are too "foreign" or "stilted" or "unnatural" in English essentially just reinforces that there's something "wrong" with them that needs to be fixed. No, people are well aware these ideas how important politeness, structure and hierarchies are in Asian societies and even if you don't translate the exact words, remnants of the culture behind should still be left behind in the same way you don't just erase chav slang from British thugs, flirty speak from French or Spanish romantics, or Russian epithets from mobsters.
Yeah, it's like, how hard is it to just localize it to something like "I'm not sure how I should address you" or something similar? I came up with that immediately, and it's a *far* more effective translation of the *sentiment* being shown. Ironically, the way they phrased it actually ends up sounding *disrespectful,* if anything. But then, whoever translated this obviously doesn't have much in the way of respect for *anything,* not even themselves, so maybe that's where the real problem lies?
> But then, whoever translated this obviously doesn't have much in the way of respect for anything, not even themselves, so maybe that's where the real problem lies? It should also be noted that localizing a trails game is not the same thing as localizing most other games. Trails games are insanely text heavy, and it is a ton of work to localize and because there is so much work to do, sometimes, localizers get lazy or the work isn't completely checked. A standard trails game has more text than the Harry Potter novels, all 7 of them combined. Also more text than the Lord of the Rings, all 3 novels, combined. Daybreak is reported to be the most text heavy game out of all of them. NISA's track record is admittedly not great, but Cold Steel III, IV, Zero, Azure, and Reverie were all fine, localization-wise, although Reverie had a lot of typos and stuff in it, it was still mostly fine.
> it's only East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean where translators seem to want to erase every single bit of culture from the original and transplant it with something else It's easier to get away with. If you try to do it with something like Spanish, there's a large population of bilinguals who will call you on it. If India ever started producing large quantities of media Westerners really wanted to watch, you would see the same discourse spring up around Hindi.
Try the non-english version. Surprise! We need fan-translations of localized games now.
Lolcowlizers
What the fuck is this? I want none of this shit in my games. This is not a question that any sane person would ever ask. I honestly hope the Trails fans are going mad right now. They need to patch this shit out immediately.
The face of the guy asking this is very fitting. He is dying of cringe and sadness.
This should be pointed out to the Japenese dev/publisher
Nobody talks like that. The real world doesn't talk like that and it never will which is why this shit is immersion breaking.
Good fucking lord, not falcom man. One of the few devs whose games I love to death and will buy day one. Fck you NISA, I can only hope it doesn't become even worse (which it will). Man, can't even enjoy games without them introducing their politics.
NISA's been trash for years, they tried to 'own' the faithful localization crowd by fucking up a translation and claiming it was literal.
NISA has sucked since at least ps2 times, I still remember how they butchered Ar Tonelico 2, my advice is to avoid anything by them.
Damn. I wish my younger self had known that going into Dangan Ronpa. I was lucky to play the original Project Zetsubou version of DR1, read the Birdman(?) translation for 2, and I was legit excited to see things get ported over to the US. It wasn't until V3 that I started to see quite a bit of the nonsense due to what happened with Angie and Gonta. Fan translators have been rather reliable in that regard, so I'm thankful. I'm always afraid of the fan translators putting their own sentiments over the original meaning and text, but that hasn't been the case so far unless I'm ignorant.
Fan translators are usually reliable because they are doing it out of passion and love for the work.
Well, I guess I'm stopping at Cold Steel 4.
As someone used to be a Japanese translator and was interested in playing the trails series, thank you for convincing me not to catch up in English.
There’s no way that was in the original script.
Japanese companies should be braver to cut ties with woke localization companies, because they're actively degrading the quality of their original products. And I'm pretty sure there are based localizers who would enjoy the extra work.
I miss XSEED
Lol this is because Hatsuu an ex xseed These games localizations weren't better then than they're now Most Estelle lines in Sky were fanfiction in comparison with jp script
God I hate how they essentially gave her a whole different personality in the localization.
Yup. People call out localizers now but Xseed also went off the rails with the conversations.
You telling me Estelle dialogue is so different from the official ones in english it's a completely different personality?.... Sheesh... now I'm curious how bad it is and if I can find any examples...
Oh fuck off! Really!? Just pumped through the first 6 games and loved them to pieces...
So aside from historically being shit, NiSA are now also woke? Has anyone ever tried informing Falcom of this? Are they aware of localizers butchering their source material going all the way back to Xseed?
Yeah, that's a no for me, dawg.
What the response should be: "Why do you care about which pronouns to use for me? When speaking directly with me, won't you simply call me by name or refer to me as 'you' 99.9% of the time? The pronouns are only relevant when talking about me in the 3rd person, which means I likely won't be part of the conversation. So I ask again, why do you care?"
"Why? Are you going to be talking about me behind my back?"
Ya know I was looking forward to this game. Now, it's one of those extremely deep discount games.
For fucks sake. I love Trails in the sky and Trails Of Cold Steel, so it's really sad to see that they are fucking up this series with this bullshit. No mentally sane person actually speaks like that in real life. I hope that perhaps someone makes a delocalisation patch for it, though I am not holding my breath.
Not/playing
hahaha and you waited years for it. Glad i already finished all Trail games with fan translation that were actually accurate.
I want to say not even 6 years ago, this would be such an insult no matter your identity.
If you are talking to someone directly, or if someone is obviously male or female, why the hell do you need to ask for pronouns?
Barf.
I keep saying it,but its only a matter of time until JRPG's are next on the chopping block. Wokalizers and SoyEnix can move the needle in Japan.
fml now even falcom is being infiltrated
"I was wondering if you think the earth is flat, or you've accepted our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."
Fuck. I have it pre-ordered. I know the localisation sucked for years now but Falcom is basically the only developer I'm willing to trust with overall making great games. Ys 8 is masterpiece.
Buy it in Japanese and use the fan translation. Its pretty good and doesn't have weird shit in it
You know, this would have been hilarious if those guys had beards and were dressed in flannel.
Add another one to the Ignored list. Japanese devs really need to get some English speaking Japanese employees to check for shit like this.
Trails is my favorite JRPG series of all time too :(
nobody normal asks the pronouns
That one is a hard one. In JP Van asks if he should use "-chan", ie refer to Quattre as a girl, so basically the translation is correct, it just sounds cringe as hell.
Honorifics aren't equivalent to pronouns, besides there are japanese tropes like bokukko
Considering the situation, ie Van has no idea if Quattre is a girl or not and he decides to confirm, here it is meant as equivalent of asking his gender. So, basically translation omitting honorifics would be: "Not sure if I should refer to you as a girl". So, pronouns phrase is not wrong, it's just been beaten to death and cringe as shit.
Yeah, no chance in hell we are getting someone asking "are you a girl?" in [current year]. "I was wondering how I should be referring to you" is fine enough. No one, absolutely no one asks another person their pronouns outside xitter
>No one, absolutely no one asks another person their pronouns outside xitter Oh how I wish this was true
> "Not sure if I should refer to you as a girl". yeah that would've been a much better translation
Hmm, if only there was a way to ask someone if they were a BOY or a GIRL without falling into HR legalese.
Yeah, it's really cringe and also when someone asks "what are your pronouns" the don't really care about what you are only what you want to be. It would've been much better if he said "can I call you mista" if the proper translation doesn't matter.
That's title, not pronoun.
Correct me if im wrong japanese senseis, but isnt -chan used as a way to show that you find a female friend endearing? so in this case, the localization would still be wrong.
Yes, it depends of context, so it may even be seen as despective. But I'm sure some localizers on x are already typing why pronouns is the correct translation because reasons
-chan can be used for male or female, it doesn't matter. It's just a term of endearment for somebody who is lower in social standing than you. Not class or wealth or anything, just socially, usually younger. Typically it's for women or young girls.
[удалено]
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/). This is not a formal warning.
Maybe they shouldnt ommit honorifics in the first place? Did they aim this localization for 12yo EOP Timmy that can only speak in slangs and brainrot language, that they can't even understand something as simple as honorifics for this clearly anime JRPG game meant for people who loves the Japanese culture? Even in OP case, just do the Pokemon thing; "Are you a boy or a girl?" that's it. Using "pronouns" on this context is just another wokecalizer lingo.
> Maybe they shouldnt ommit honorifics in the first place? In my opinion: they shouldn't. I much prefer to have honorifics and some things like nicknames from Randy and Na-chan just don't work without them. But that's not on NISA, but Xseed. Xseed started omitting honorifics in the Sky and Cold Steel, and NISA kept doing it to keep consistency. Would it surprise me if NISA ommited honorifics, had they been responsible for the series as a whole? No. But currently that direction is not on them.
[удалено]
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/). This is not a formal warning.
Glad to never buy it
I’ll be honest, sometimes in Japanese games I actually wonder the same thing. Especially final fantasy. They really like their femboys.
according to steamdb it only sold less than 10k: [https://steamdb.info/app/2138610/charts/](https://steamdb.info/app/2138610/charts/) so a nice flop for the studio
That might be western fans buying the Japanese version of the game and using a fan translation patch to play the game, if that's only sales in the west. The game doesn't release until Friday, July 5th.
well there ARE the console ports so its hard to say.
This is a little off topic but.. is there a Japenese word for "I" ? I'll see the subtitle say something like "I'm going to use my strongest attack!" but in spoken Japanese language, I hear the character always say their own name as if they're saying "Sakura chan is going to use strongest attack" in speaking about herself.
There are several words for "I," but you usually don't use them unless you need to emphasize that you're the topic of the sentence. What you're seeing is a little complicated, but as I understand it, characters talk like that as an indicator that they're childish. It's impolite to use "you" to refer to someone; instead you speak their name. E.g. "Is this Mr. Tanaka's?" instead of "Is this yours?" Kids will often refer to themselves by their name because they haven't really learned how to use pronouns.
watashi? I dont know japanese though, this is from my anime knowledge
Personal pronouns are a little weird in Japanese. So there are three words for I, watashi, boku, and ore. The first is usually used by women, the second is rather gender-neutral but can be used by boys mostly, and ore is almost exclusively for men. There is also a habit of people using their own name as their own pronouns or I. I've not seen it much outside of child characters in anime or as a joke. Such as Dio uses his own name in place of I. I doubt it's that uncommon for people to speak of themselves in the third person in Japanese. It's a very different language to English, it rhymes accidentally and commonly, and has three different alphabets. It's also funny that the word please is commonly sewn into most sentences. They also have a lot of leftover things from the feudal era and Shinto beliefs that leak into everything. Source: several hundred hours of subbed anime.
>So there are three words for I, Technically 4 , there is watakushi too.
Okay good to know. I feel like that one can really blend in with watashi if you're not listening close enough. I'm not claiming to know Japanese fluently or anything, I've just picked up some basic phrases over the many years. Watching a bunch of Korean shows now, I realize I know almost nothing about the language besides how to say thank you and counting to three. I probably should learn both languages, since that's where all the good content is coming from.
Yeah its fine. Anyway actually in total i think there is about 6 most commonly used "I" s you can hear in anime. The ore , boku , watashi then there is Jibun , atashi(equivalent of ore but for girls) and uchi (effectively equivalent of boku but for girls)
Here's all of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns#List_of_Japanese_personal_pronouns I've heard atashi, uchi, and watakushi used in addition to your list.
Thank you, I will add it to my Nippon knowledge.
[удалено]
Comment removed following the enforcement change that you can read about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/m3yo65/enforcement_update_and_hard_removal_of_a_topic/). This is not a formal warning.
Ah okay gotcha mods, I didn't intend to break any rules and since it was neutral and not really offensive, will keep this is mind for the future, crazy that admins do this to you.
Imagine being so fragile that you actually expend mental energy caring about this. Y’all are hilarious in the fact you don’t see your own fragility and weakness
New user breaking Rule 1 - expedited to permaban.
If I were to pay for Trails games, what would be the cut-off point? Still remember kinda fucking myself by starting with Cold Steel 2 and being overwhelmed right at the tutorial sewer, but people have assured me I should still give the series a try, if I like turn-based RPGs.
Best to start from the start, but if you want a decent cut off point then it's one of these: Trails in the Sky (oldest) Trails from Zero Trails of Cold Steel 1 Trails through Daybreak (newest)
Aight, thank you.
I wouldn't recommend going with Zero or Daybreak, Zero moreso since a major part of Zero's story is the culmination of a certain character that was first introduced in one of tbe Sky games, and a lot of Sky characters does show in the Zero series and you might be losing a bit of a context there. Daybreak have less of an issue wit this but it does have characters that were first introduced in Sky and Cold Steel and it does somewhat continue the character arc of that same Sky character present in Zero. I'd say the two cleanest starting points would have been Sky (the very beginning) or Cold Steel (which starts with the least amount of intersecting series characters) - and I would want to move from Cold Steel to Zero first after the first two Cold Steel games and start Sky after Cold Steel 3. Reverie is **not** a starting point. tl;dr two best options: * Sky -> Sky SC -> Sky 3rd -> Zero -> Azure -> CS1 -> CS2 -> CS3 -> CS4 -> Reverie -> Daybreak (the "correct" order) * CS1 -> CS2 -> Zero -> Azure -> CS3 -> Sky -> Sky SC -> Sky 3rd -> CS4 -> Reverie -> Daybreak (the "alternative" order which I think will spoil you the least) Protip, take your time and do not do all of them consecutively. They are very dense games and will 100% burn you out.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation on how to approach the series. And don't you worry, friendo, I learned my lesson with turn-based RPGs back in my teens, when I tried playing through Final Fantasy games back-to-back, and I ended up speeding through IV, not doing Interlude or The After Years, and then falling off VI once I realized I doomed Shadow to death. Nowadays, even though I find myself enjoying my time with turn-based RPGs more, I still try to play one or two games from a different kind in-between. Especially when my tastes and preferences have been so refined, a TBRPG that might not have aged well (either mechanically or performance-wise) could require a slower pace and a refreshed palate.
Good. I can add this to the list of games to never buy.
Not the first time a Trails game had bad localization. One reason I haven't bothered with the series. I do think though some have been retranslated on the pc via fan patches.
Now it bites us in the back that english is so dominant. The game doesn't even has german as an alternative to english, and i can't speak nor intend to learn japanese, just to avoid the american woke translation culture.
cry harder