Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is a great action role-playing game marred by a shoddy localization. Following fan outcry over grammatical errors, inconsistencies and typos, NIS America announced today it’s doing the whole thing over again.
In a letter addressed to “All Customers of Ys VIII,” NIS America president and CEO Takuro Yamashita acknowledged that the localization had not reached an acceptable level by the company’s standards, and an internal investigation was being held to discover how it occurred as well as ensure it doesn’t happen again. More importantly, the company is having the entire localization gone over again to fix the existing problem.
As for Ys VIII itself, we will have a new translator and editor go over the entire localization to fix grammatical errors, typos, inconsistencies, and also to take a fresh look at the dialog and characterizations. For the script, where necessary, we will re-translate and re-edit the game including updating voicework to reflect these changes.
That’s some pretty substantial bending-over-backward to make players happy right there, but an appropriate response given the scope of the flubs and fumbles made in localizing the eighth game in the venerable role-playing series to English.
One of my favorite examples involves a place named the “Crevice of the Archeozoic Era” in Japanese. It sounds so mysterious, doesn’t it?
Here’s the English version:
Not only did this place already have a perfectly good English language name, the translators opted to translate “crevice” as “big hole.” Big hole.
Along with poor translating, localization errors also led to food recipe names being swapped, leaving players confused over which buffs were received when eating in-game meals.
The images in this post are all derived from a gallery linked on the Reddit page for fans of Ys developer Nihon Falcom, which organized a write-in campaign aimed at letting the Japanese video game maker know how poorly North American publisher NIS America had botched the localization.
Yamashita said the company plans to offer the results of the re-localization as a free download to PlayStation 4 and Vita players next month, with the delayed PC version launching with the updated translation.