Translation

It's E3 season, which if you don't know, means there are a lot of video game announcements and trailers and the like coming into the wild at the moment, and good lord am I excited about it. There have been so many new games I've been introduced to in the past couple games, and while not all of them, there are so many that I want to play. Unfortunately, most of them won't be coming out for months, and some of them may not even come out for years. So while I'm incredibly hyped right now, by the time they come around, I may not be nearly as excited, and it may be revealed that they aren't nearly as good as I thought they would be. But for the time being, I am super excited for all the new games I'll get to play.

Which makes it kinda funny that I've been spending a good deal of time recently playing old games. Older rpgs, of course, because that's how I roll. And funnily enough, older rpgs - even from just about ten years ago - are vastly different than rpgs today. From the way they play, to the themes they cover, and even to the very words they use. There was a fascination back then with writing dialogue with characters in the accents that they would give. Westerns used a lot of a-apostrophes, like "Ma' an' Pa' were gonna tell ya'll 'bout da' dog." Fantasies would talk about "Yonder hills will lead ye to thee." Things that, while cool at the time, make it painful to read now.

But frankly, if you got that kind of translation, you were lucky. More often than not, rpgs were made in Japan, and the translators who worked on bringing the games to America were... less than stellar. Even for some of the most popular games of all time, like Final Fantasy 7. People love the story in that game, but good lord, is it translated terribly. "This guy are sick," is a literal, word for word line from the game. And of course, the infamous "All right, everyone, let's mosey." Which, out of context, may not seem that bad of a line. Except, in context, that's being said by a genetically altered ex-military soldier as he is leading his companions into the core of the planet as the cave is collapsing around them, so that they might fight an alien-fused super soldier with the power to destroy the entire planet. "Mosey" is perhaps not the ideal word.

Translations like that were sadly pretty common and accepted, though why exactly that was I'm not entirely sure. I suppose the language barrier just wasn't quite as broken down at the time, which goes to show how much progress we've made in just a few years. Now a days, if games aren't translated to the exact word, people throw hissy fits, as has happened in many recent Nintendo games. Of course, sometimes that's warranted, while others... Not so much.

But I'm not here to point any fingers.

At Fire Emblem.