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This Week in Games - Quests of Mana

I love the .hack games' conceit of your party members being other players, making some of them unavailable during certain stretches of the game. But in the GU titles, this unfortunately works against it: you rarely have the characters you want available. The IMOQ games worked around this by giving you a ton of characters to play around with, all with their own unique personalities. You've got fewer folks to play with in GU, so even Piros the Third is barely around when you want him. What a shame.

And then there was the tragic Visions of Mana, whose studio was shut down by NetEase and Tencent the day after the game launched. While it's still available on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam, there's no Switch port and probably won't ever be one.

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- Dragon Quest XII: speaking about Square-Enix, there's been a lot of debate about the state of the company and if it affected the development of DQXII, but I believe is one of those things that most people believe their speculations to be the truth, but the thing is that, in my opinion, there wasn't a lot of concrete information about DQXII's development aside from some vague comments from Horii, I can sort of believe that maybe Yuji was influenced by some of the other games made for S-E like FFXVI and maybe wanted to appeal to a more international audience, but I guess the pandemic and the passing of both Koichi Sugiyama and Akira Toriyama made him decide to change the tone of the game, we probably won't never know how the original Flames of Fate was going to be, but just comparing its logo to the Beyond Dreams one kind of tells the tone was probably very different.

I guarantee you this was 100% not the case, especially FFXVI as you don't tell Horii what to do and could care less about "the market." That man does what he feels like, oblivious to what whineos on Reddit caterwaul about.

Well yeah, after reading some information about it I can accept that it was mainly due to Horii's own decision, but there's a lot of discussions in various forums, social media and YouTube who claim the decision came directly from Square-Enix, or that is a response to the success of Expedition 33, which makes even less sense.

English localization for DQ has basically one job, so a phoned-in subtitle does not give me hope for eventual quality of the rest of the script. DQIX's English release was notably delayed for around a year just because of the sheer volume of wordplay that needed to be conveyed. I get that simultaneous worldwide launches typically come with some tradeoffs in overall accuracy, as the source script is often finalized very late in production with not enough time left for the adapted versions to check for context or consistency. (I like to point to Tales of Arise's entirely made-up English script for the final dungeon that completely buries crucial foreshadowing for the ending.) On top of the the production restart, I get the feeling DQXII is not being done any favors by the new global approach. I'd really like to be wrong on this.

The Mana series is underrated. In a time where JRPG battles were almost exclusively turn-based random encounters, this was one of the few that pioneered real-time overworld combat. While I still personally prefer turn-based, I don't miss random encounters at all. Especially in a game like Xenogears that has a bunch of platforming sections in it. You'd think Square would've understood those don't mix after making Super Mario RPG.

Maybe we're going to see some smaller scale remakes (at least compared to the Final Fantasy VII Remake series) and remasters for games like DQ, FF and NieR.

And they are all wrong. There is a rule at SqEx: you don't tell Horii what to do. You let the man cook, because he's the one with the keys to the cash cow.

It's got issues (you can't attack diagonally, but enemies can),

Even Yūji Horii described her as someone "nobody in their right mind would choose to marry.

The issue with GU, and this is even more prominent on the re-release due to them condensing some things down, is that its more sandbox-ish elements that the first line of games had, got toned down a bit so that the storyline could be a lot more structured and guided. It's ultimately a difference where INFECTION feels like you legitimately could be playing an online game and it's hard to tell if the other avatars are real people or not, but then on GU, you're kinda clearly experiencing an anime story set to the theme of an online MMORPG. And there's a lot less stat-management & inventory burning happening to a point that GU feels a lot more like a traditional anime action game from that era.

I mean, there are certainly issues with some of SE's localizations on a corporate level (like how an inconsistently-applied age-bump in Bravely Default's global version accidentally turned Tiz into a child-murderer), but there wasn't really anything dramatically altered with XI (a while ago, granted) besides the occasional name being radically different (i.e. "Camus" becoming "Erik"). Japanese is a much more lyrical language by default than English, where you have to work at it a little to not sound rubbish. (While I concede that some people will use that as an excuse to make alterations they really don't need to, that's a discussion for another time entirely.)

When I was younger and most games were single-player/not online, this actually added to the feeling that these were people with real lives and I was experiencing a real MMO. Lol I guess it's an idea that worked well for its time, but pitted against today's norms, can be annoying.

I get that simultaneous worldwide launches typically come with some tradeoffs in overall accuracy, as the source script is often finalized very late in production with not enough time left for the adapted versions to check for context or consistency. (I like to point to Tales of Arise's entirely made-up English script for the final dungeon that completely buries crucial foreshadowing for the ending.) On top of the the production restart, I get the feeling DQXII is not being done any favors by the new global approach. I'd really like to be wrong on this.

I actually do hope that is a sign the localization for Dragon Quest might be getting fixed after so long.

It always strayed way too far from the Japanese script so if it ends up being a lot closer to the Japanese script I'm sure a lot of people would finally be happy. While other Square-Enix properties have their own localization quirks Dragon Quest always stood out as being the black sheep of just how much localization and rewriting they did to that series to basically erase any kind of Japanese or anime tone to it.

but there wasn't really anything dramatically altered with XI (a while ago, granted) besides the occasional name being radically different (i.e. "Camus" becoming "Erik").

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Even Yūji Horii described her as someone "nobody in their right mind would choose to marry.

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At least you have an option we have to put up with Maribelle’s bullshit in VII.

Also I loved My World, My Way! It was such a fun concept! I would also love a game that's a much more expansive version of that concept that includes more dialogue and character interaction too, because despite the fun character there wasn't a ton of time to see her interact with the world in that aspect.

I dunno, the past few Dragon Quest games have had worldwide releases, and they've done fine. The Erdrick Trilogy weathered that pretty well, especially since those games added a ton of extra stories and characters to the originals (so it's not like the process was "easier" by way of just using an older script). And Dragon Quest VII Reimagined was also a wholly-new script.

People have all sorts of standards for good translation though so it's unsurprising that people have varied opinions.