The Malgorian Blog

So, I guess this is what I get for letting NIS America off the boycott list lately.

I do still plan on picking up the recently released touhou game when I get paid but after that I think they're going back on the boycott list for a couple years.

My 100 dollars paid for -most- of a game that's apparently half-assed in localization. Since I bought the physical edition my disc will forever have that poor quality version unless I download (And redownload as needed) the god knows how large a patch which won't be available for another month.

They can give all the assurances they want but to me this smacks of "Get it out the door now so we can get paid faster. We'll fix it later."

This isn't the first time I've seen a bad translation by them - there have been rush jobs before that put a damper on enjoying the product offered. One example that springs to mind from the PS2 era is Ar Tonelico II. (Keep in mind that they were on the boycott list until only this year, and I put them on it back when the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game released, so finding examples of shoddy work is difficult in those years.)

I remember playing through ATII back in the day. (And in fact I have it in my lap right now as I type :p) It had at least 1 typo every 5 minutes of storyline. You want to know how you can tell it was a rush job? Every single grammatical error was something a spellchecker would fail to find. IE: Wrong version of a word (Too, To, Two), wrong tense of a word (had, has, etc) an extra word inserted for no reason at all (to to) or an outright missing word. I don't believe there were any actual incorrectly spelled words. Meaning nobody actually ran over the text of the game after the initial translation. They apparently ran it through a spellchecker and called it good.

The other thing was they introduced a game crashing bug to a particular boss. The crash didn't exist in the original version of the game. Essentially you fight that boss during the game a couple of times but the battle always ends before a particular boss attack is executed. (Thankfully.) After that, near the end of the game, that boss becomes an optional boss fight where each time you win the next fight becomes harder. If the boss gets to like round 3-4 then it does a special move - and the game freezes. If you can beat the boss in a couple rounds, no problem, but otherwise your shit out of luck.

Like I said a shoddy rush job. In one way it can be expected given the game was released in the winding down years of the PS2. Still if you don't want your rep tarnished don't fuck it up.

I loved ATII mind you but I would never give it a 10/10 ranking simply because of the poor localization attempt.

I haven't played Ys VIII yet - I'm still working on Mask of Truth after all. While they'll be "fixing" their shit job with a free download next month I'm tempted to start playing it asap just to see the level of crap first hand then I'll just restart the game after the patch is live and see if it's actually improved.

I will be extremely strict on the level of quality on the game after the patch is released however. They're already getting shit for a poor launch but I swear if I see anything screwed up after their second time I'll probably add an extra year of boycottedness to the couple they're getting from me as it is.

Yes. I know a game publisher won't give a fuck about some individual gamer boycotting their crap. They aren't going to miss the cash (Which probably shows why game publishers have such a horrible time budgeting their resources properly) but I'm certainly going to notice having the extra spending money for other things.

And that's the point.