Translations of Steel: 6 Things That Bug Me
Tags: Localisation, English, Videogames, Translation, Japanese

Fuga: Melodies of Steel has been out for about a month now as of time of writing on basically every platform that plays modern video games and if you haven’t played it yet, I recommend you do so. Not just because context helps with everything I’m about to write but because it is genuinely a pretty good game made from a clear place of passion and I would like to make that clear from the off before I whinge myself inside out about it especially since there is a non-zero chance someone from CyberConnect2 will actually read this, embarrassing me even further.

Very brief plot synopsis for those who haven’t played the game, because it is important that you have some context for what follows. Fuga is a game about twelve children (the oldest main cast member is 12 years old) whose families are taken as prisoners by the local equivalent of invading Nazis, the kids find an abandoned giant tank in a cave and faced with no real alternative are thrown into the middle of war against their wills. The tank also possesses a towering comedically oversized cannon that can be fired to obliterate a tough boss battle, the catch is that it costs a party member’s life to use. War, sacrifice, separation of families and the weight of murder are your premise here. Sounds fun, right?

Brother, I crave violence.

Well, it is! I like this game, it reflects talented artists, designers and writers making a very earnest game about difficult and unusual subject matter conveyed via mechanics that are unconventional for the JRPG genre it resides in. It’s a highly ambitious outing for CC2’s first self-published game that gets more right than I think it gets wrong to deliver a game that is quite memorable. I wouldn’t have written this if I wasn’t still thinking about it.

It is also a game that’s playing with a mediocre English localisation.

Not a bad localisation, crucially. A mediocre one. There are no major accuracy or technical issues, nor does the localisation interfere with any part of the gameplay and it doesn’t struggle with any of the wordplay, it’s just a little flatly written. Part of my motivation for writing this is that Fuga’s English script represents the type of localisation quality that isn’t likely to get a lot of discussion or analysis from either side of the usual localisation discourse. It’s neither a Ys VIII level shitshow:

ワカル～

Nor is it a very bold localisation like NEO: The World Ends With You that takes a lot of liberty with literal accuracy in service to the overall tone and style of the dialogue:

The former gets a lot of talk as it sparks outrage from interested players and the latter also sparks outrage but from a particular subset of Twitter gremlin who wouldn’t recognise a good turn of phrase if it was beating their ass in the QRTs.

Fuga’s localisation represents neither of these extremes, it is a serviceable but not very spicily written translation plagued with a lot of the usual foibles of slightly stilted J to E translations and if the above paragraph didn’t give it away, I tend to prefer localisations that have the confidence to make bolder edits for the benefit of a breezier read in English. This style of localisation is safe, but ultimately prevents the game from reaching the hearts of international players.

Good advice for life and localisation.

English is my first language, so that was the first language I played Fuga in and while I still enjoyed it overall, I came away without the character writing making a very strong impression on me. But on a subsequent playthrough, I played with the Japanese text on and I found myself having a much better time, characters came off as having a stronger “voice”, subtleties are expressed clearer and more efficiently and my overall opinion of the writing improved afterwards.

I found this to be a shame, because most English speakers who are interested in a game like Fuga are not likely to have the skillset necessary to enjoy it in both languages like I am boldly claiming to be able to do, since, for personal context, this is all Opinions. I’m an Englishman and my Japanese is self-taught and hardly fluent, I’m merely a bilingual player with an interest in the topic and the unfeasibly large ego necessary to attempt to posit how to better translate Japanese to people who doubtlessly understand Japanese better than I do.

This preamble is too long, so let us now get into petty localisation grumbling!!

Contextually Weird Language Use

As established, the main cast of Fuga are children, with the oldest being 12. Kids are difficult to write in fiction because eloquent word usage sounds bizarre coming out of the mouth of a fictional nine-year old, restricting the writer’s options for natural dialogue.

On that note: