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Final Fantasy's Lost Translation, Greatest Hits 81

Posted by simoniker from the fantastical-naming-headache dept.
nixon66 writes "You may have seen the 'lost' Final Fantasy game, the Japanese Final Fantasy II for NES, debut in the U.S. as part of the recent Final Fantasy Origins PlayStation re-release, but interestingly, Square did try to localize the game much earlier. Lost Levels has a new feature up about the abandoned translation of Final Fantasy II for the NES back in 1991. They talk with the translators, Kaoru Moriyama and Ted Woolsey, about the factors that led to Final Fantasy IV for SNES being called Final Fantasy II in the States." Elsewhere, RPGamer reports that four SquareEnix PlayStation 1 titles have just been re-released as Greatest Hits for a $19.99 price point, including Final Fantasy Chronicles, Final Fantasy Anthology, Vagrant Story and Xenogears, and they clarify: "Final Fantasy Anthology includes Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy III), while Final Fantasy Chronicles contains Final Fantasy IV (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy II) and Chrono Trigger."
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Final Fantasy's Lost Translation, Greatest Hits More

Final Fantasy's Lost Translation, Greatest Hits

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  • Why does it matter? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @02:26PM (#7682438)
    The Fan translation by Neo Demiforce was done well as was FF3.

    The translation community has had these games for years. Why it makes "such a story now" lands a question mark on me.. unless Square paid slashdot for advertising.

    • Re:Why does it matter? (Score:2, Informative)

      by nixon66 ( 163089 )
      Because this was an original Square translation that never saw the light of day. It's not a fan one (which has better English and is more polished) but done internally and never unleased to the English speaking world till Square came back and did a re-translation for their Origins release.
      • To me, "polishing" means they make it politically correct along with generic nationalization. The ripped FF4 a new one, and took away much of the nuances of
        FF6.

        On FF4, not one mention of "death" could be told. It was "off this world" or somesuch pap. Cid was much more true to form in the Japanese, as he cussed a bit when it made sense. And that's not to mention they ripped out the whole developer room because of the "Porn Mag".

        I'm not some sort of fanboy or somesuch tripe. My main point was "What's the bi
        • You're familiar with how the Japanese and American versions differ and you don't call yourself a fan?
        • The developer room, IIRC, wasn't removed because of the inclusion of the "Porn Mag." It was removed because the US translation of the game was based on the Japanese rerelease of the game as "Final Fantasy IV Easy Type," which removed the developer room, as well as making numerous tweaks to the game engine, removing a slew of battle commands, and generally accounting for the majority of the (non-graphical) changes between the Japanese and US iterations of the game.

          And I think you have FF3 and and FF2 confus
      • naive or naive ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-v, na-) also naif or naif (n-f, na)
        adj.

        Showing or characterized by a lack of sophistication and critical judgment: "this extravagance of metaphors, with its naive bombast" (H.L. Mencken).

        n.

        One who is artless, credulous, or uncritical.

    • Re:Why does it matter? (Score:3, Informative)

      by dasunt ( 249686 )

      [Karma Whore]

      DemiForce Final Fantasy (and other) translations [parodius.com], or, for other games/parties, why not try Zophar's collection of translations [zophar.net]?

      [/Karma Whore]

  • The author seems a bit surprised that you can play the game from start to finish in the form it's in, which isn't too odd, as the localization is just editing text areas normally, not program code.

    It's nice the other two-packs are greatest hits now, as they were hard to find for a while.

    It is a pity that FF3 will probably not see US release ever. A two-pack with it and Secret of Mana would be nice.
    • Had FF3 seen a US ported release, it likely would have been with Front Mission, Makaitoushi SaGa, or Romancing SaGa - unfortunately, the Japanese WonderSwan Color port of FF3 was canned, so yeah, it's exceedingly unlikely for now.
    • Yeah thank God on the Greatest Hits. I didn't wanna pay 60 bux for Chronicles, like the few places I could find it were charging.

    • Re:Interesting little read (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kyouryuu ( 685884 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @03:40PM (#7683145) Homepage
      Yes, but in the bounds of a cartridge-based format, translation is not quite so simple. Japanese rarely translates directly into English without difficulty and in order for it to make sense, translators often have to stylize the text for that specific region. Things that this tick off the ever-critical otaku and ultimately put Woolsey at the butt end of their insipid wrath.

      It can take more space to elaborate on such things, but don't forget - RPG text boxes are of a specific size, there are significant memory constraints, and there is a ton of inconsequential dialogue that also has to be translated.

      The art, at least back with cartridges, was in making the whole thing fit together in a fixed space, yet still get the same point across. Of course, with CDs and more recently DVDs, it doesn't matter so much now.

    • I'm surprised you think FF3 won't come over here. I mean, they've re-released the all the other pre-sony FFs over the past couple of years, why not 3? Also, I saw on the magicbox [the-magicbox.com] not to long ago that FF3+Secret of Mana is their next project once they finish Front Mission First. =)
  • and they clarify: "Final Fantasy Anthology includes Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy III), while Final Fantasy Chronicles contains Final Fantasy IV (originally released in North America as Final Fantasy II) and Chrono Trigger."

    I'm more confused than ever... I'm going to create my own language, so that they can translate all these buggers in order and I won't have to put up with this. Until new games come out at least...

    • Re:Clarify? (Score:3, Informative)

      by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 )
      It's not all that bad. Basically, Final Fantasy IV was released as Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy VI was released as Final Fantasy III. When Final Fantasy VII came out, they decided to use the original titles for that and all future releases, which lead to the US finally getting FFII and FFV, as well as the remakes of FFIV(II on US SNES) and FFVI(III on US SNES) with their original titles.
  • So when is there going to be a distributed computing project to computer the number scheme between the releases of the US and Japanese versions of the game? Frankly I'm just confused. (doesn't usually take much)

  • The Rom? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jpmoney ( 323533 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:07PM (#7683492)
    Anyone else notice the ROM linked to at the bottom. That can't be very legal even if the game was never officially released...

    • Re:The Rom? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by musikit ( 716987 )
      from the looks of it, the rom looks like the prototype version of the FFII that square was originally going to release but abandoned. which means (i donno but could) that some of the text is in Japanese or doesn't make sense in english.

      • Re:The Rom? (Score:3, Informative)

        by TheRedEye ( 731695 )
        Or gee, maybe it's the exact version referred to by the article and the screenshots, which explains quite clearly that the game is complete and playable, with goofy Engrish.

  • Lost LOST Final Fantasy Game (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fan site FFCompendium.com has details (translated from an RPGamer image) of a Final Fantasy game that went into immediate development following the success of Final Fantasy IIIj in Japan. This was tenatively going to be called Final Fantasy IV and actually be on the Famicon, but it was abandoned and the true Final Fantasy IV was developed for the Super Famicon instead. Quite some interesting details, it looked like they were really going to push the envelope with this and the internet community now dubs i

  • Lost in translation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @04:56PM (#7684113)
    Admittedly the game industry was different in the past than it is today but, why do so many games never seem to cross the Pacific Ocean?

    Asia gets an American PC game like once a year (Koreans are still playing Counter-Strike and Starcraft while Americans drool over upcoming Half-Life 2 and Doom 3). Vice versa, American rarely gets the non-ultra-catered-mainstream console game from Japan (Vib Ribbon, we recently got Dance Dance Revolution like 3 years late, and FINALLY Final Fantasy II and III for the NES)

    • Re:Lost in translation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @08:52PM (#7686053) Homepage
      Theory 1: The American gamer is very different than the Japanese gamer.

      This theory holds some weight. While DDR was a worthy title to bring over, there are many somewhat inferior dance games that did well in Japan yet are flailing in US arcades. Would a Dating Sim fly over here? Or an Air Traffic Controller sim? How about a game where you chop vegetables? Some of the games released in Japan just lack that kind of fantastic escape from real life that American gamers crave. And what about American games based around Basketball, or the endless run'n'shoot games? They still sell in Japan, but hardly as well.

      Theory 2: Translations are a pain.

      This one also holds weight. Many american games are created with 8 bit characters in mind... Designers would make bitmaps out of fonts and use that in game, with special spacing and formatting. Cramming Japan's significantly longer characters into a fixed space may not be practical, especially if the designers gave the text bank a fixed size. Likewise physically cramming english into a Japanese textbox is difficult, as while english is a slightly faster spoken language, it is a much longer written one. And you can forget about fitting anything else into a native chinese textbox.

      Theory 3: Developers won't do it, publishers are afraid.

      When you push 80 hours a week to make the perfect game... polish it, craft it, love it... you generally don't have the energy or desire to go back and do a translation. Publishers handle them for this reason, and publishers exist to hedge risk. If a game is released in one market, a foreign publisher will generally not pick up the tab until it is obviously a hit. Counterstrike fits this bill nicely. Savage did not. Publishers have such a backlog of hits waiting for translation that they can pick and choose, and they choose the winners.

    • We did get DDR, not late but chopped up song wise. None of the NA DDR releases have had anywhere the number of songs in the Japan version, due to licencing. It's well known that licencing of songs is a big, sweaty, nasty bitch. That's my DDR Max 2 was delayed in Canada -- licencing!

      As for FF3 for the FAMICOM, it has never been released in North America. Origins gives you 1 and 2, Chronicles adds 4, Anthology gives 5 and 6, and FF 7, 8, and 9 were already on the PS1 -- 3 is not listed because it was nev
  • I've searched a few online game vendors, including EBGames, Best Buy, and Amazon, and none of them have Xenogears. If it's in stores today, where do I get it?
    • Looks like the Greatest Hits versions of Final Fantasy Anthology and Final Fantasy Chronicles are widely available (I saw them in my local Best Buy today, for one), but the other two new Greatest Hits much less so.

      Someone on a GameFAQs board said he saw Xenogears at his local Target, and VideoGameDepot seem to have it in stock [videogamedepot.com], but I guess it's just in the very early stages of shipping out, and may not make it to some bigger B+M stores because it's PlayStation 1, and relatively obscure to boot - boo.
  • We never managed to get a transaltion of Chrono Trigger for the PS, never mind Chrono Cross. Trigger was one of the best RPGs IMHO made, while I would have loved to play Cross.

    Square actually gives us an even worse deal than USA gamers, even though there shouldn't be a problem with the language...

  • Final Fantasy Anthology & Origins (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Karplusan ( 731780 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @10:47PM (#7686765)
    I still think it great that a game made originally in 8-bits 15 years ago, is now capable of being played on one of the most modern consoles (PS2). Not only does the game still exist, and still have some of the odd quirks, or secrets, and a bit of originality, but it has now become a greatest hit. As for Anthology, I still think FFVI was is the best in the series. When it came out on the PS1, I liked the cinematic sequences, the art, and the cancel button doubling your walking speed. But I was annoyed with the loading time involved. I wonder why the SNES was able to show Sabin's Bum Rush attack with enough FPS to almost put someone in Epileptic shock, yet on the PS1, you barely notice the flashing... Though I am concerned about one thing, one of the greatest things was the music CD that came with the original Anthology. I wonder if the Greatest Hits version will have the audio CD?
  • I remember hearing [newandusedvideogames.com] about FF Anthologies being one of the first noticed games not to work properly on PS2

    I hope they fix the bug in Anthology so that it works properly on a PS2.

    • I recall that Final Fantasy Chronicles had a glitch in the first shipment of CDs, causing it to load only about 1/5th of the time. I should know, I have it sitting at home. It's a BITCH to play it.
  • There's a reason why it never crossed the ocean.

    The battle system COMPLETELY broken.

    1. Every single enemy in the game is either too easy to be bothered with or will kick your ass instantly - there's NEVER an intermediate, even with bosses.

    2. The "no exp" system means that in order to grow your characters, you actually have to force them to stab themselves with their own swords in order to build their stats to even decent levels. Nothing is more hilarious than getting into a battle of imps, killing all

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