(Before anything else, please keep this a no spoiler thread! We'll be going through the entire game, so we'll cover any moment that you want to bring up.)
Hi all, my name is エル＝サッミー, and I'd like to welcome you to this thread.
In case you aren't familiar, Illusion of Gaia / Gaia Gensouki is an action-adventure game in the vein of 2D Zelda. It was the sequel to a game called Soul Blazer, which itself was something of a spiritual successor to ActRaiser, with all the games sharing a number of motifs and themes. Illusion of Gaia was developed by Quintet, published by Enix in Japan, and published by Nintendo elsewhere.
This particular game is special to me because it was the first one that I ever cared about on the basis of its story; it was the first time that I walked away from a game and felt that a message had been communicated to me. The game was originally written by a sci-fi novelist named Ouhara Mariko (personal name second), who touches on a number of heavy themes. Perhaps as a result of the involvement of someone who writes for a different medium, it's rather storyboarded and has a lot of quiet cutscenes for an adventure game.
I had occasionally heard that the game's translation was bad, so one of the things I wanted to experience when I decided to learn Japanese was to try to see the game's original text for myself. But I'd also like to share that experience. Overall, I don't think the localization was inept at all. It made a variety of small changes which are probably just a matter of taste, and there was a lot of mincing words to get around Nintendo's strict content regulation at the time, but I can't promise that this will be dramatically different from the original game. Putting aside my emotional connection with the material, in terms of getting a resultant product that you can't get elsewhere, I've considered that it might have been better for me to have retranslated the game's sequel - that one eventually got into strange territory that I can imagine might have difficult to understand even in its native language, so I figure a strong translation is particularly important there.
The biggest benefit I personally got from doing this project may simply be that I was engaging with this game in a totally different way than one normally engages with games. In order to translate a game, you have to experience it in a very granular way. It's as if I'm trying to peer into Ouhara Mariko's thoughts as she was writing this script. I have to think about how every line contributes to the themes of the story, I have to think about how she wanted me to feel about the characters; these are the things that I'm tasking myself to communicate when I'm trying to translate each of these lines.
Just as I've gotten to enjoy a deep dive into this game, I think you might enjoy trying to engage in it the same way. So I'm hoping that with this preface, I can help guide the discussion in this thread in that direction. I want the thread to feel like a book club. As you read the story, overthink it. Be analytical. Be cerebral. Don't worry about coming off as pretentious or saying something stupid. If this game is fueling the thoughts in your head and you're committing them to your posts, then I can feel like this thread is a success.
You might be wondering why I didn't release this as a ROM hack. I actually think this might be a relatively easy one to do since you might be able to just crack open one of the English versions in a hex editor and pop much of the script in. Aside from just being too lazy to do that, there are a few reasons I think this is better. The biggest one is that I am absolutely not an expert. I'm probably going to get some things wrong, and I'm definitely going to run into things that I don't understand or aren't totally confident about. Rather than giving you a bad translation and pretending I know more than I do, other members can ask questions or post corrections here so that readers can see those too. I'm also not going to stress too much about being understood because, again, you can as for clarifications.
I'm also hoping that this will be a good way to experience the game for those who haven't played it before.
I should thank the people who helped me with this, whether it was sharing their input or just letting me taking a dump in their inbox. And I would also be remiss not to include a shoutout to our very own Learning Japanese community. If you ever want to find a couple of Francophones who know all this language stuff far better than I do, that's where to go.
One last thing before we start. Every update in this thread will come in a set of two posts. I'll try to threadmark everything to make it easier to navigate.
The first post in the update will be intended for those of you who haven't played the game before. I've edited the text a little to be more readable and to get the feel a little more in some places. I've also tried to use more guesswork to cover the areas where I'm not very confident about what I'm reading. This should hopefully feel like you're experiencing a new localization.
The second post will have a video to accompany the screenshot playthrough, but it will also have a rawer annotated version of the update. This is the version before I edited it for English readers, so it better reflects how I, as a native English speaker, am trying to make sense of I'm seeing. It's also going to be where you're going to see the additional notes that I'm jotting down about the text, although a large amount of those notes will be "I'm not sure what this is".
Anyway, I've said a lot, and we have a long way to go. Without further, let's begin Gaia Gensouki!
UPDATE: I've updated the large videos to include subtitles. You can view them on the following playlist; just turn on closed captions.
www.youtube.com
Hi all, my name is エル＝サッミー, and I'd like to welcome you to this thread.
In case you aren't familiar, Illusion of Gaia / Gaia Gensouki is an action-adventure game in the vein of 2D Zelda. It was the sequel to a game called Soul Blazer, which itself was something of a spiritual successor to ActRaiser, with all the games sharing a number of motifs and themes. Illusion of Gaia was developed by Quintet, published by Enix in Japan, and published by Nintendo elsewhere.
This particular game is special to me because it was the first one that I ever cared about on the basis of its story; it was the first time that I walked away from a game and felt that a message had been communicated to me. The game was originally written by a sci-fi novelist named Ouhara Mariko (personal name second), who touches on a number of heavy themes. Perhaps as a result of the involvement of someone who writes for a different medium, it's rather storyboarded and has a lot of quiet cutscenes for an adventure game.
I had occasionally heard that the game's translation was bad, so one of the things I wanted to experience when I decided to learn Japanese was to try to see the game's original text for myself. But I'd also like to share that experience. Overall, I don't think the localization was inept at all. It made a variety of small changes which are probably just a matter of taste, and there was a lot of mincing words to get around Nintendo's strict content regulation at the time, but I can't promise that this will be dramatically different from the original game. Putting aside my emotional connection with the material, in terms of getting a resultant product that you can't get elsewhere, I've considered that it might have been better for me to have retranslated the game's sequel - that one eventually got into strange territory that I can imagine might have difficult to understand even in its native language, so I figure a strong translation is particularly important there.
The biggest benefit I personally got from doing this project may simply be that I was engaging with this game in a totally different way than one normally engages with games. In order to translate a game, you have to experience it in a very granular way. It's as if I'm trying to peer into Ouhara Mariko's thoughts as she was writing this script. I have to think about how every line contributes to the themes of the story, I have to think about how she wanted me to feel about the characters; these are the things that I'm tasking myself to communicate when I'm trying to translate each of these lines.
Just as I've gotten to enjoy a deep dive into this game, I think you might enjoy trying to engage in it the same way. So I'm hoping that with this preface, I can help guide the discussion in this thread in that direction. I want the thread to feel like a book club. As you read the story, overthink it. Be analytical. Be cerebral. Don't worry about coming off as pretentious or saying something stupid. If this game is fueling the thoughts in your head and you're committing them to your posts, then I can feel like this thread is a success.
You might be wondering why I didn't release this as a ROM hack. I actually think this might be a relatively easy one to do since you might be able to just crack open one of the English versions in a hex editor and pop much of the script in. Aside from just being too lazy to do that, there are a few reasons I think this is better. The biggest one is that I am absolutely not an expert. I'm probably going to get some things wrong, and I'm definitely going to run into things that I don't understand or aren't totally confident about. Rather than giving you a bad translation and pretending I know more than I do, other members can ask questions or post corrections here so that readers can see those too. I'm also not going to stress too much about being understood because, again, you can as for clarifications.
I'm also hoping that this will be a good way to experience the game for those who haven't played it before.
I should thank the people who helped me with this, whether it was sharing their input or just letting me taking a dump in their inbox. And I would also be remiss not to include a shoutout to our very own Learning Japanese community. If you ever want to find a couple of Francophones who know all this language stuff far better than I do, that's where to go.
One last thing before we start. Every update in this thread will come in a set of two posts. I'll try to threadmark everything to make it easier to navigate.
The first post in the update will be intended for those of you who haven't played the game before. I've edited the text a little to be more readable and to get the feel a little more in some places. I've also tried to use more guesswork to cover the areas where I'm not very confident about what I'm reading. This should hopefully feel like you're experiencing a new localization.
The second post will have a video to accompany the screenshot playthrough, but it will also have a rawer annotated version of the update. This is the version before I edited it for English readers, so it better reflects how I, as a native English speaker, am trying to make sense of I'm seeing. It's also going to be where you're going to see the additional notes that I'm jotting down about the text, although a large amount of those notes will be "I'm not sure what this is".
Anyway, I've said a lot, and we have a long way to go. Without further, let's begin Gaia Gensouki!
UPDATE: I've updated the large videos to include subtitles. You can view them on the following playlist; just turn on closed captions.
Gaia Gensouki / Illusion of Gaia re-translation
(Update: you can turn in closed captions to view translated subtitles.) Accompaniment for Gaia Gensouki re-translation project, posted at ResetEra. Try using...
www.youtube.com
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