Prepare Rune Factory Making games for a worldwide audience is a pretty tough job. After all, these are big games with all sorts of events. The combination of life simulation and RPG elements means a lot of text. To help understand what that means Rune Factory 5 and its characters, Siliconera spoke with Localization Director John Wheeler and Assistant Localization Director Lori Snyder. After all, XSEED noted in its first localization blog that there are 1.5 million in-game Japanese characters between the script and the system text.
Jenni Lada: How familiar with Rune Factory series is you before you start working on localization
because the Rune Factory 5?
Lori Snyder: I’m a huge fan of the series — I enjoyed it Rune Factory game since it was first released more than 15 years ago! I have played each title to some degree and am quite familiar with the lore/story of each series Rune Factoryit was a big help when we were working Rune Factory 5!
John Wheeler: I played countless hours Rune Factory and Rune Factory 2and I’ve been working as a project manager for new content in Rune Factory 4 Special after participating in XSEED Games. I’m familiar with the series, but I can’t compete with Lori. She handled the localization of the flashback art book contained in
Rune Factory 4 Special limited edition.
Localization process interval for Rune Factory 5 take?
Snyder: We started receiving localization materials, like character info and initial text files, around February 2020. As the game is a massive effort to localize with over 1.5 million Japanese characters and over a month of voiceovers to match, it took approximately two years to complete the localization for this title from initial notes to our final release.
How closely did you work with the development team in Japan?
Snyder: To provide the best Rune Factory localizable, we’ve worked very closely with the developers, with the localization department at Marvelous in Japan serving as our liaison. We’re often asked for feedback on certain aspects of the game, such as how same-sex marriage is implemented and how the game’s main plot rhythm will be received by Western audiences. In fact, while the generation of design documentation is usually done on the developer side, for the implementation and localization of same-sex marriage, the XSEED side was asked for help with potential design documentation to These new features could be included and the developers were able to use it as a reference for same-sex marriage in the final game.
Among the Rune Factory 5 marriage candidate, Fuuka is a bit unusual because English is not her first
language. What challenges did this pose for localization?
Snyder: One challenge for Fuuka was that we wanted to make sure that her language didn’t alienate her from the player or the rest of the cast. In Japanese, she speaks with very simple “gau gau” sounds that we feel won’t work in the English version. Simple growls will be redundant and will not help the player connect with her as well as other marriage candidates.
Adrienne Beck, one of our translators for this title, suggested creating a functional language for Fuuka, and our team helped advance the language to the point where it has a huge word list. vocabulary and grammar. However, another big challenge after establishing this language was keeping it consistent, so as the time to ensure localization quality approached, team members had to keep an eye on Fuuka’s language as well. as English text so it remains consistent for all of her. conversation. She has a lot to say in her language, so we’ve got a completely separate text correction checklist just for her!
Is it harder to find “voices” for some characters in Rune Factory 5 than others?
Wheel: As Lori described, Fuuka’s character “language” is the animal that presents the most time-consuming challenge, but I’m excited to see how fans have reacted to it so far.
Aside from Fuuka, the character we were the most harsh with during the localization was Captain Livia. She has a unique way of speaking Japanese that ties into her character’s backstory and we spent a long time discussing how to properly capture her voice in English in a way that kept spirit of the original but natural sound.
What Rune Factory 5 Character’s dialogue is the most difficult to identify and why?
Wheel: I started translating the main story, and the character I had the most trouble with was the bandit Oswald. He has a distinctive speaking style, somewhat reflecting the performance of Chafurin, his voice actor in Japanese, which is difficult to reproduce in English. (Chafurin’s delivery is so iconic that voice actor SungWon Cho immediately recognized him when he heard the reference files for Oswald’s recording.) Oswald’s final dialogue is interesting in English. , thanks to the efforts of our editors.
Rune Factory 5 allow same-sex relationships with marriage candidates. How does this affect localization and gender-specific events?
Wheel: The development team has implemented unique text for anything that needs to be updated in Japanese, and in general we can use gender tags — special localized programming tags that can insert a word like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” depending on the player’s character’s gender — to tweak English further.
One event we discussed a lot while planning the same-sex marriage text was a Priscilla romance where she (spoiler alert!) asks players to take on the role of a prince. in a skit she wrote. We were concerned that reinforcing these traditional roles would feel unnatural, but the scene itself makes fun of those roles — when Hina tells Julian he should play the princess — and in the end, It feels completely sweet regardless of whether the player chose Ares or Alice. It’s one of my favorite events in the game.
Compared to the previous localizations you have worked on, how would you consider the difficulty Rune Factory 5 compare?
Snyder: While I’m in Rune Factory 5 slightly smaller than the other key members of the team, I would say this is the biggest project I’ve worked on to date and it presents some of the biggest challenges I’ve worked on at XSEED Games hitherto.
My role in Rune Factory 5The localization process mainly involved the in-game script and voiceover, but the script itself took until summer 2020 to complete, and the voiceover alone took a month and a half. !
Then my main goal in the LQA (localization quality assurance) process was to check all the voice clips to make sure they fit the context of the scenes they were used in and that too. took quite a while to test and implement! A lot has happened in the past two years for Rune Factory 5 alone, but at least I can say that I have learned a lot from the experience!
Rune Factory 5 available for Nintendo Switch.
