@“antillese”#p89971 Funny coincidence, I saw the Star Ocean 1 remake was on sale for Switch the other day and snatched it up on impulse. I usually don’t go for that shonen manga high adventure feel in RPGs so much anymore, but I felt a thirst for something with sprites on prerendered backgrounds… still need to properly start Live A Live too. And Nier Automata. And see how much farther I can get in Disco Elysium before its politics irritate me into submission. And that’s before I play through Tactics Ogre all “ogre” again (:projectile_vomit:) next month…
Good news is, it doesn’t seem like I’ll have much time to be disappointed by _Persona 5_ in the near future.
@"Syzygy"#p89972 Even the most sloppily subtitled Japanese films I’ve seen have got nothing on some of the torturous sentence constructions I’ve encountered in just a few minutes of _P5_. I’m sure the Japanese text is not literary genius, but this script is just rotten with idiomatic Japanese grammar and so on that simply does not cohere in the English language at all - in ways that the mandatory economy of film subtitling make it actively _harder_ to do. It’s not a sloppy, low-effort translation; it’s clearly a great deal of effort being committed to a very wrongheaded direction, which imo is arguably an even worse experience.
Of course degrees of literalism versus interpretation in translation are subject to personal taste and aesthetic debate, but I’m going to go ahead and say that when your translation actively _obscures_ rather than _elucidates_ the meaning of simple dialogue, you’ve crossed a barrier from a particular aesthetic choice into _actively failing_ as a translation: c.f. my comments on _P5_’s vague pronouns, passive voice, literally-recreated Japanese sentence structure, etc. often requiring multiple reads and mental decodings for an English speaker to parse basic information that a Japanese audience experiencing the work in Japanese would find self-evident, simply by way of linguistic norms and cultural context that a good translator should take into consideration beyond just the exact words on the page. And the fact that all this is being done, not for high-minded literary prose filled with translation-defying cadence, wordplay and allusions, but for fucking generic animu dialogue you can find in any Shonen Jump series, just makes the technical wrongheadedness of the entire approach that much more egregious. It’s not really excusable imo.
@“Syzygy”#p89985 I’m not going by the examples cited on that website you linked - I think some of the blatant errors were actually fixed in the Royal edition. I don’t remember if I screenshotted anything, but what I’m referring to is a bunch of material that’s very clearly word-for-word translated in a way that’s not technically incorrect, but turns English-language flow and cohesion into a nightmare. Not to the point of incomprehensibility, but just clearly beyond what a good translation should facilitate. If I go back to the game, I’ll grab examples.
@“2501”#p90017 Royal may present different problems from what I remember but I think it‘s more a case of the characters in P5 are supposed to sound smart/clever, and what the translators/editors have in common with teenage fansubbers isn’t so much that they're translating from Japanese as it is that the only way they know how to make a character sound smart is to give them really dumb showy vocabulary words and awkward syntax
one thing worth mentioning about Persona 5 is that… it‘s not like the original Japanese script is terribly engaging or well-written either. i tried playing that stupid game in both languages, got to the fifth-ish dungeon in both, and was equally annoyed (but in different ways) by both versions. yes, the translation is a travesty, and yes there was an opportunity there to elevate what was already basically trash-tier writing, and that opportunity was not taken. but honestly @2501 it’s not worth your time unless you really love that battle system (and it is a good battle system).
“I don’t think it’s wrong to bring light to evils which can’t be judged by law!”
I’m sure this is _exactly_ what the equivalent line says in Japanese if you translate every word literally, but what a nightmare of a sentence it is in English! So many negatives! Check out that passive voice! Truly inebriated syntax! What a pointlessly convoluted, comprehension-muddling way to express a perfectly simple thought! (“We should expose evils that the law can’t judge!”) And this is entirely representative of how the localization script is written all the way through. (And no, it’s obviously not exactly inspired dialogue to begin with.)
@"whatsarobot"#p90024 There is a certain vibe to these games that’s appealing - the aesthetics, the battles, the “hangoutitude” of them - but yeah, this one’s quickly reminding me how badly burnt out I ended up getting on the interminable _Persona 4 Golden_ and why Modern Atlus isn’t to be trusted. Should probably go back and get a better ending on _Nocturne_ if I need some Press Turns in my life.
Today I published my review for Scorn, echoing and articulating some more a couple of the thoughts I already shared here a while ago. Here's a translation of the bottom line.
>
Scorn has value beyond an entertainment product. It‘s a fantastic opportunity to explore some topics, like why we elevate certain games in which its themes and narrative motifs appear so completely disconnected from their perfectly cushioned playable core, and in which the very idea of the existence of any friction between the player and the experience is treated as the most abominable of taboos. Also why, when presented with the chance to play something really committed to its vision, and where all the playable aspects are found in a strict regime of coherence perfectly aligned with the rest of the elements, the response is rejection and criticisms at the most surface of levels. I take Scorn as a flag nailed at the side of a particularly steep slope, a place where the mainstream rarely risks entering. I don’t know how time will treat this game, but in any case, its mark will be there, as a testimony of its bravery or its foolishness. Perhaps it is more important to be liked less, but in a more insidious, pervasive way. Who loves you, will make you cry, they say, and Scorn is willing to love you a great deal.
Well, it’s 10:30pm and she’s been playing it since about 10:30am when she woke up, excepting the time between our kids getting back from daycare and going to bed (which was early today since they both seem to be sick). I have no idea if I’d like this game, but she sure does love it! This also does remind me of how we got into Civilization several years ago.
My wife is now so into Crusader Kings III that she had me play it last night while she watched (I'm sure some people do this regularly, but we don't). This dang game is pretty good! It's not like Civilization but it's also not unlike it, in terms of the feeling it gives you as a player. You're slightly overwhelmed with choice and there's never a good time to stop playing, so you end up playing for many, many hours in a row.
I'm going to avoid buying this game for myself because I have actual things I need to do. But, man, this game has the potential to be a life-ruiner.
I started playing Disaster Report 4 Switch this evening and I have mixed feelings. I can tell that it‘s going to be something special once I get further into the game but it’s been a frustrating first hour talking to everyone and trying to trigger something to progress the game. That first hour was spent just in the very first area figuring out what I could even do as much as it was talking to strangers.
That however I can get over but I can't get over just how badly it performs on Switch - wild framerates, heavy juddering with every camera rotation, screen tearing; it all adds up to a near migrainous headache after an hour and I feel like it's going to sour the experience if I have to force myself to limit myself to a half hour at a time lest I need to lie in a dark room to recover.
@“LeFish”#p90228 it is horrible on ps4 as well, one of the worst optimised games i‘ve seen in some time and just another in a long example of smaller japanese devs failing to adjust to “AAA” game table stakes. that said, there’s some good stuff in there, and disaster report has never been the most even series anyway.
The performance isn‘t great on PS4 but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of it. Some parts in that game are absolutely fascinating.
I don't think it is necessarily devs failing to adapt though. I think that series has always prioritised implementation of ideas over performance and that's a valid choice. Some developers have the time to do both, some have to pick one. I think this obsession with performance that people have is insane and instead of devs failing to adapt, it is a lot of game likers failing to get a grip.
That said though, DR4 should never have come out on Switch because it sounds like the performance makes it almost unusable. That's a fair criticism but a 20fps PS4 is totally fine.
I cannot wait to see what the next one is. They're talking about it being open world and that could be delightful.
@“Chopemon”#p90248 DR4 should never have come out on Switch because it sounds like the performance makes it almost unusable.
On the Switch is exactly how I played it last winter. Had a great time but it sure was, uh, yeah kind of ridiculous like you said! I swear sometimes I could count the frames per second on one hand. Notably, going into the first person mode would wipe away whatever post-processing filters it was applying and suddenly it would run gorgeously, I'm talking full 60 fippage (or at least it felt like it in comparison), it was shocking what a difference it made. In my experience, it seems like that's where most of the bottlenecking is coming from, some sort of technical art trickery that never managed to get optimized. During this current Steam sale I bought the game for PC to try it out on decent hardware, but even if the experience is identical I'm still gonna have a blast running through the game again because it rules.