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Once again Steve and I found ourselves delayed in delivering an episode. What can you do with too adults that struggle to make even every other week happen? Hopefully we won’t be seeing this become the norm.

Regardless of gaps of time, Steve and I were both surprisingly down on this episode’s game of World of Final Fantasy. In fact, I was kind of stunned at how little we spoke about in the hour-long span of time. Even now there’s plenty more I can think of to discuss, primarily involving the game’s localization and why I’m glad SEGA’s upcoming game Judgment will offer separate subtitles for English and Japanese voice. I’m no expert Japanese linguist, but I know enough key words to catch differences in the translation based on the English subtitles. Tama’s constant insertion of “the” where it doesn’t belong is an example of needing to adapt a speech quirk that has no equivalent in English (concluding every sentence with “-desu”). The character’s unconventional speaking style is key to them and even the root of many jokes, so the English localization team had to come up with something similar.

Far into the game you meet a ...we’ll just call it a Penguin Princess. She has grown to distrust and despise men because they keep hunting her down, hoping to snag the rare jewels that her tears turn into. She inevitably starts falling for Lann, but she tries to hide it and often runs away insulting him. In other words, she’s a tsundere. There’s one moment in Japanese where Lann grasps her hand, shaking it and saying “Thank you so much!” The Princess blushes and starts to get flustered, panicking. The context makes less sense in English if you’re not familiar with the tsundere trope, and therefore the localizers chose for Lann to shout “I love you!” instead. A change that I can understand, but one that still feels awkward when you have the Japanese language on and he very, very loudly shouts “arigatou gozaimasu”.

It’s for this reason I am incredibly impressed with SEGA’s effort to provide two sets of English subtitles, even though it has been quite common for anime blu-rays for a while now. The English dub is often changed to try and match the lip syncing as best as possible, meaning dialogue may need to be truncated or changed as much as possible. This isn’t an issue with Japanese dialogue, though, and therefore having a more precise set of subtitles is preferable and even the standard. My DVDs of the original Fullmetal Alchemist series changed the subtitles based on the spoken language, and that was over ten years ago.

That said, I’m not claiming translations are always better when they’re more literal. Janet Hsu goes into great detail the difficulty of localizing gags and humor in the Ace Attorney series, and Legends of Localization is a phenomenal website to read about these efforts more in-depth.

Do you have any thoughts on World of Final Fantasy? Send us an e-mail with your thoughts, or reach out to me on Twitter, and maybe we’ll read them on the show.

Opening theme music by my buddy Brandon, a.k.a. Fallen Prophecy.