61 Frames Per Second : ted woolsey

X-Blades and the Cultural Uncanny Valley

John Constantine — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Years of schooling in composition left me with absolutely no sense of proper grammar, structure, and only a passing familiarity with proper spelling, but I did come away with a good sense of how not to seem like a jackass in an opening. The golden rules: don’t open with a question and don’t start with a definition. These rules can be broken only when absolutely necessary. Like now for instance!

How many of you have heard of X-Blades?

For clarity’s sake, X-Blades is a third-person action game in the Devil May Cry mold and it looks like a parody of Japanese videogames that you might see on The Simpsons. It stars a young woman sporting knives, blonde hair, and enormous eyes/breasts. She wears some string and tiny scraps of cloth over her privates and kills monsters in a fantasy land where it is apparently always dusk. Her name’s Ayumi. Of course it is! It's a videogame so overfull on cliché that it can’t possibly be real. But it is, and it actually seems fairly inoffensive, a potentially good way to drop a few hours between games that you actually give a damn about. Thing is, though, every time I’ve seen screens or footage of X-Blades something has just seemed off. I know that isn’t the most journalistic statement in the world but there’s no other way to put it. It’s just wrong, off-putting, something rotten inside of its seemingly pure trope-soup.

The reason X-Blades seems so peculiar, I think, has to do with where it’s from. The game, despite appearances, isn’t Japanese. It’s developer, the appropriately named Gaijin Entertainment, is Russian. It isn’t that there’s anything specific wrong with X-Blades — well, maybe Ayumi’s ridiculous design — but that the game suffers from a cultural Uncanny Valley effect. It seems that, when one culture tries to emulate another’s game design, the result is repellant. Take Japanese attempts at the first-person shooter, like Coded Arms. Even beyond it’s questionable PSP control, it’s lacking in the feel inherent in Western FPS design. Or how about the long-forgotten PS1 RPG, Shadow Madness? Even with Ted Woolsey steering that ship, Crave Entertainment’s attempt at making a “Western JRPG” fell flat on its face.

This isn’t what you’d call a scientific observation, dear reader. But still good food for thought.

Related links:

TVTropes' "Woolseyisms"
Crossing the Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Are Starting to Freak Me Out
Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley

The End of Time and the Beginning of Fan Drama

Nadia Oxford — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:48:00 GMT

Recent videos of Chrono Trigger DS reveal the same game we aspired to marry thirteen years ago (has it been thirteen years? Holy crap, I could've done something useful like rear a thankless teenager) but the sharp among us have noticed...ch-ch-changes. Specifically, it looks like the in-game text has been altered a bit.

This means it's possible Chrono Trigger DS will be receiving the Final Fantasy VI Advance treatment. This treatment, by definition, aspires to keep the charm of Ted Woolsey's original translation, but will still fill out text that had to be cut because of space issues or censorship.

Personally, I'm not even sure what can be restored. The blossoming shitstorm has fanned my fascination for The Chrono Trigger Re-Translation Project, a project that's considered about as useless as using an umbrella to deflect a falling piano.

Unlike most fan translations, the Chrono Trigger Retranslation Project website doesn't open up with an animated .gif of Woolsey burning at the stake. Regardless, its existence rubs me the wrong way because it's so unnecessary. The Internet is a toilet bowl brimming with Useless, but this little turnpike on the Information Highway really just gets to me. Even though the project managers acknowledge that Woolsey did an okay job translating Chrono Trigger under the circumstances, this bit of smugness gets under my fingernails:

[S]ome essence of the game was lost or altered, given Nintendo of America's censorship standards and the inability of the game to hold all the original text when translated to English.

SNES-era RPGs were so gosh darn playable, but I think they also owe some of their longevity to great translation. Final Fantasy VI was dark and brooding and despite Woolsey's best efforts, I sometimes felt like I was out of the loop--and there were instances where the censorship dusted the in-game content as carelessly as kitty litter covers...you know.

But Chrono Trigger is a shonen game. A boy versus a great evil. Great story, to be sure, but lacking in depth. And that was okay because the game wasn't trying to be deep.

In other words, and this may be a tremendous shock, so make sure you're sitting down and clutching something, the Re-Translation project adds nothing to the original experience. Play the ROM or read the script. Woolsey didn't alter the game's "essence." It's like saying the dub of Dragon Ball Z changes the deep message behind the series.

(Hint: Please don't make yourself look the fool by saying the dub of Dragon Ball Z changes the deep message behind the series.)

There's very little in the new script that adds to the story like the translators claim. Who really cares if Magus(-sama) makes reference to the Black Wind, the Reaper, the Devil or Black Sabbath? It all kind of stews in the same pit of Hell. It'd be different if Magus' original English text suggested that he was opening a candy store instead of trying to summon Lavos, but that's not the case.

In fact, I think there's no question that Woolsey improved the script. Frog, for example, was supposedly turned into a "buffoon" by his "mangled" Olde English, which didn't exist in Japan. Instead, he was blunt and straightforward, going as far as to use insults from time to time. Oh good, games and anime need another forgettable swordsman who cares only for his own fate.

Admittedly, Woolsey did make a couple of grand blunders. The most famous one was the Guru of Time telling the player that someone close to the party was in trouble and to "Find this person...fast." When Chrono Trigger was released, we nerds were finding our first legs on the Internet and message boards filled up with speculation over who this lost person might be. I personally thought it was somehow connected to Alphador in the Last Village. Oh, wait...the Remaining Village. As it happens , it was just a severe case of the Oopsies on Woolsey's part.

So that sucked, but when you think about it, it's kind of an elegant blunder. It made the fandom talk and speculate; how many games manage that? Nobody's going to debate anything about Final Fantasy VII's "This guy are sick" line, except maybe to wonder aloud how much alcohol was involved in the translation process.

Woolsey admitted in an interview that he had to cut out story bits, but like your mom says, the proof is in the pudding. What's gone affects very little of the game. It's nothing against the translators; they had a project and they should be commended for sticking through to it 'til the end. But I personally don't get any use out of it, so I shall go play with my yo-yo and cup-and-ball now.

As for what was cut, it looks like we missed Ayla commenting on Marle's small boobs, adding generic anime humour to what was otherwise a pretty emotional event (the Rainbow Shell sidequest). I never would have expected Toriyama to crack a boob joke. My Chrono Trigger experience is officially unfulfilled.

Related Links:

The Chrono Trigger Port: Are You Excited or Disappointed?
OST: Chrono Cross
TVTropes' "Woolseyisms"

TVTropes' "Woolseyisms"

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:20:00 GMT

It's rare that we give much thought to the good men and women who turn our video game text from "YOU LUCKY ARE WINNER!" to something dignified. But where there are exceptions, there is the potential for small wars. By far one of the most controversial names in game translation and localisation is Mr Ted Woolsey.

Ted Woolsey translated many of Square-Enix's best-known 16-bit works, including Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI and Super Mario RPG. To give you an idea of how divided gamers are over this gentlemen, consider that Woolsey hasn't done any substantial translation work since the death of the Super Nintendo but his name alone makes people jump up and down like testosterone-driven baboons.

TV Tropes has a long and rambling Wiki entry about Woolsey, his followers and his haters. For the sake of a quick crash course, Woolsey was (in)famous for adding his own voice to his translations. This "voice" gave us something to smile at in the place of Japanese puns we couldn't understand (except for purists who can't understand why we don't think sound-alike sushi name jokes are funny). His voice also added a good deal of depth to what was, for most of us, an epic story. Final Fantasy II US had an okay thing going with illegitimate moon brothers or whatever, but Final Fantasy III US--or Final Fantasy VI, if you prefer--took on themes that were unheard of and still go largely untouched by RPGs today. Woolsey had to convey Terra's identity crisis, suicide, unwanted pregnancy and the friggin' Apocalypse while keeping the game text family friendly.

Oh, and he wasn't allowed to make references to anyone dying, even though Kefka remains the only Square villian who killed people like bugs for the sheer joy of it.

Woolsey was especially grand at balancing his own jokes with the original source material. Working Designs' games, as well as some fan translations, often slash and burn the Japanese story for the sake of a cock joke. Excessive swears is usually a good indication of translators taking things a bit far. "Kuso" is an all-purpose Japanese curse that shows up everywhere, but it's relatively mild ("Damn" or "Shit", depending on your mood). Things rarely get raunchier than that. Contrary to popular belief, Japan is aware of which games and shows are meant for children, and it acts accordingly.

By the way, Final Fantasy VI Advance did an excellent job touching up Woolsey's translation while keeping its friendly ghost alive. I recommend it because Woolsey was forced to cut a lot of the game text due to space constraints. Admittedly, there's some stuff there you could probably do without seeing...like Emperor Ghestal's suggestion that Celes mate with Kefka to produce magic-infused progeny for his new Empire. Go ahead and take that one to bed with you.

Related Links:

Know Your Final Fantasy IV Trivia. It Could Save Your Life.
Would You Play a Final Fantasy VII Remake? Hmmm?
Gaming on a Train: Final Fantasy IV