How do localization for the Japanese market

As you may have already heard, Shovel Knight finally crossed the ocean and reached Japan! We are very pleased with this jump. We spent a lot of time to make localization interesting and smart. Wait, what is localization? This is the process of translating the text and adapting the game to the local market. We work with excellent experts from 8-4 to ensure the highest quality of localization. Today we want to talk about the most interesting changes that we made to the game so that the Japanese players really like it.

History

But before we begin ... let's have a little history lesson! Once upon a time, the localization of games was the Wild West. There were no standards or rules regarding what was acceptable for adaptation. Sometimes developers created absurd and typos full of translations. Sometimes developers put so much effort into creating a whole new series of games .


Bad translation of Bubble Bobble The


Japanese Wonder Boy game, which, when ported to the NES / Famicom game Adventure Island. The game was divided into two independent series.

(Note: it turned out that Wonder Boy turned into Adventure Island when porting from arcade machines. We messed up, because porting and localization are often interconnected when porting from Famicom to NES. We apologize for your mistake!)

Such inconsistencies made a lot of interesting things in the localization of games changes. With the release of each game, developers learned exactly what needs to be changed. In addition, due to NES restrictions, many changes were required when transferring games from the Japanese market. For example, there were problems with font complexity, technical limitations, or game design, and this realization came after the game was released. We will consider only a small part of the examples of changes made to the games at that time, so that you can understand the reasons for the modifications we made in Shovel Knight for the Japanese market.

Before you read our story, you better listen to a specialist, Clyde Mandelyn: http://legendsoflocalization.com/ . He writes amazing articles (and books!) About the most famous localizations of games and about the changes made after the release of games in Japan.

Common changes in the localization of Japanese games for the North American market

Obviously, many small or large text changes occur during localization as a result of translation difficulties. But we are going to show how the graphics, sounds and gameplay of the games that you could see in the NES / Famicom era changed.

Graphics Changes

Of course, usually one of the biggest changes in a game is the launch screen. Sometimes it is completely replaced, sometimes simply removing the Japanese text.





In those days, NES often used sprite replacement. Often, the logic was that players might not understand Japanese-specific sprites, such as food:



Or North American locators might think that Japanese characters or sprites would not be attractive. The following is an example of the Power Blade, also known in Japan as the Power Blazer. In it, the main character is made "cool" and not "cute."


The truth known to everyone in the 80s: any game will be sold if it has Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Sometimes these changes were made to make the gameplay more understandable:


Wow! And I did not know that there was an enemy!

Super Mario Bros. 2 (known as Doki Doki Panic) in Japan is the case when the Nintendo of America made significant changes to localize the game. This is a great example of how modifications were usually made at the time. They turned non-Mario into Mario!



In some cases, the developers decided to change the sprites so much that they became animated! Below is an example of how a single change made the gameplay objects really stand out:


Maybe these plants can be pulled out?

Sprites could also become less or more complex. Or they were simply changed to improve the Japanese version. Here is an example of this type of change from Mario 2:



Animations sometimes change due to differences in performance between Famicom, NES, or Famicom Disk System. Here is an animated sprite (actually a background tile that seems animated) from Zelda 2, which was removed from the NES version because NES could not work with VRAM like FDS:


Wow, now I believe that it really water!

Change fonts

Fonts often have a large number of changes. Creating a game in Japanese was difficult due to the fact that the standard character set (kanji) was almost impossible to put into the small amount of memory that NES could allocate. Kanji can contain thousands of characters (in a regular newspaper there can be more than 2500)! To get around this problem, sometimes a smaller set of kan characters (up to about 100 characters), or a much smaller set of English characters, was used in games! English is common in Japan, so it didn’t make the game completely unplayable, as you might expect (especially considering the usually small amount of text in games for NES. Here are some examples of text on the channel for NES / Famicom:







Here is an example of using English in Zelda's Famicom version:



Notice the difference in fonts. NES used a standard 8 × 8 font, so the text for the North American market was changed to familiar to players. You can also notice that all letters are uppercase! This halves the number of characters required. Shovel Knight uses the same principle.



In cases where the readability of the text was very important, the developers invested more resources to create sophisticated text. The following is an example of how Final Fantasy for NES overcame the lower case barrier:


Oh, much more pleasing to the eye.

You may notice how strange the letter in "g" in the word "king" looks. It became so due to the fact that in games for NES / Famicom there is a place only for characters 8 × 8 pixels. The letter “g”, when spelled correctly, violates these boundaries, so the symbol is simply placed above. This is another reason why it is so difficult to display kanji on NES / Famicom. Due to the complexity of each character, it is almost impossible to draw them in 8 × 8 pixels. But there were times when developers managed to pull kanji on NES / Famicom. Look at Faxandu:



As you can see, the font is much larger than the standard size 8 × 8 due to the complexity of kanji. In Faxanadu, the size is doubled: blocks of 16 × 16 pixels are used (where characters remain the size of 14 × 14). On Super Famicom / SNES, developers had less freedom, so kanji fonts often had a size of 12 × 12:

Sound

Not only the graphics changed, sometimes the localizers of the games changed the sounds associated with the gameplay objects.


They went even further and changed even musical compositions. Sometimes this was due to the difference in hardware between Famicom, NES and Famicom Disk System. Or, as we said earlier , this happened because of the difference in cartridge technology. Check out the differences between Castlevania 3 soundtracks in different versions:

Gameplay

And finally, sometimes the transition from Famicom to NES affected even the gameplay. The game could become easier or more difficult, glitches that were caused by differences in equipment were removed from it, or the developers simply tried to make the game more interesting. Here are two rooms from Zelda into which the authors decided to add bats!





In addition, in the Zelda version for Famicom, opponents of Pols Voice could be defeated by sound, but there was no microphone in the NES controller, so they were defeated by arrows:

Shovel Knight Localization Changes

Therefore, when we started localizing Shovel Knight, we wanted to recreate some funny differences between the regional versions. We even tried the “reverse” localization process. This meant that we wondered what the Shovel Knight game would look like if it were first released in Japan. However, we had rules regarding changes:

1. We wanted to maintain the integrity of the gameplay.
2. We did not need significant changes that would make players regret that they did not play the original version.
3. We did not want to do what is traditionally considered poor localization.

For us, this meant the absence of typos or bad English, all that could reduce the quality of the game. In addition, we did not want to change the game too much! And finally, the level of localization should be excellent by modern standards. But we wanted to add some interesting details. Therefore, we made minor corrections, which as a result became significant differences!

Graphics Change

The launch screen has obviously remained the same. We wanted to match what could be expected from a Japanese game of that era, that is, a Japanese text along with an English logo:



After that, we made changes to static sprites. In the picture below it can be seen that with an increase in the level of health, Gastronomer can sometimes randomly serve onigiri (rice bun).



In addition, the Midas coin now has a hole, which makes it look like some Japanese coins:



The design of the statues in the Champions Hall has been changed.





We also made minor color changes. In particular, the types of the Wizzem and Iron Knight palettes are changed as follows:









Recent changes to static sprites have been made by reworking the portraits of the characters of Reize, Baz, Polar Knight and The Enchantress. We tried to make their art style more anime.













After that, we decided that it was time to make some static sprites animated so that they showed all the power of Famicom! First, we decided to animate the grass in the Plains episode:



For the dragons (green and blue), we first created sprites with many animation frames for their flight, but decided to trim them because they were not like sprites with NES. But we returned the animation in the Japanese version!





We changed the design of the fountain in the village and animated it with streams of water.





And the last change in graphics: Shovel Knight sleeping near a fire blows out his nose with bubbles.

Change fonts

The font needed a tricky solution. We wanted to use kana characters because they are more specific to the era and limitations of NES. Most Japanese players, on the other hand, would rather play a kanji game. Kanji can be considered a nostalgic return to retro style, in addition, it was widely used on Super Famicom. However, a kanji would require reworking all the text fields in the game, because we created menus, dialog boxes, etc. under 8 × 8 font characters. Therefore, obviously the easiest way would be to use cana. And after much deliberation ... we decided to make both fonts!

The game was officially translated into both alphabets and supported switching between them on the fly:







As you can see, we chose a 12 × 12 pixel size for the kanji font. This allowed us to get closer to the fonts on Super Famicom.

Notice also that we left the interface text in English. We thought that at that time it was common to use English in the interface, so we decided to stick to it:

Change sounds

Here we have changed not so much. We have already gone dear Famicom regarding music and added a VR6 chip . Therefore, we decided to change just a few sounds:

• The sounds of Gryphon's death and Bubble Dragon's death swapped.
• The Fire Wizard (and Shovel Knight's fire stick) uses the sound of fire, not magic.
• When fairies bite a character, other sounds are played.

Additional cheat codes!

But we did not stop there! We decided to add some more details. Remember the cheat code X & BUTT? (Note lane: it replaces some of the words in the dialogs with Butt, that is, “ass.”) Unfortunately, “ass” is not the funniest word in Japan, so we came up with a different replacement scheme. Along with replacing the text, the cheat code also includes two graphic replacements, which in the main game seemed to us to be overkill.

Carrots are replaced with Japanese daikon radish:





Gold coins become vertical and more like coban coins .





In addition, we made this special Japanese cheat include localization changes in all languages. But if you don’t want to use the cheat code, you can switch to Japanese at any time to see all the changes.

thanks

We hope you enjoyed this short excursion into the history of our Japanese localization. Translation of the game is a difficult job , and we hope that as many people as possible will see how much love is invested in the release of each game. You should try playing when the changes for the Japanese market come out!