Final Fantasy V - The Fifthening

[Nandemoyasan]

Now for something right, straight, wholesome, and military. Men! And Women! And Women Who Dress Like Men!

They said they didn't want to translate all that text and that Western Audiences would have thought it was too complicated but let's be real; it was the Cross-Dressing Pirate Captain... And they just don't wanna open that can of worms.

But it's amazing!! I love this game. It's everything a SNES Final Fantasy game ought to be. If you took Final Fantasy I-III, and just pumped it full of awesome, Final Fantasy V would be the result. Though, I do have to recommend that you not judge it by Erin Ellis' well-intentioned but absolutely dooferific GBA script (which the Steam PC release copies 1:1...among other problems with it). There is a lot of seriousness in this story, and it gets practically depressing and bleak at times (not to the level of FFVI or VII, but that feel is definitely in the story). The Ancient Library's theme music alone is haunting enough to pull the game out of doofer territory, but then (again) the GBA soundtrack is horrendously borked.

If you can read Japanese, play the SNES original. If you can't, play a fan translation.

Don't play the PSX version from Anthology. Just... it's better to avoid FF Anthology. Trust me.

We can Five if we wanna. We can leave your friends behind. Cuz your friends don't Five and if they don't Five, then they're ... no friends of mine!

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Erin Ellis' well-intentioned but absolutely dooferific GBA script

Can you elaborate?

 

[Nandemoyasan]

Can you elaborate?

Sure.

I'll just give a couple examples, because I'm far from an expert and also because FFV is like 20 hours long.

Example #1: Faris the Pirate Captain has just declared that the Princess of Tycoon ought to fetch a good bit of money for them, after Lenna (said Princess) has revealed that that is in fact who she is.

Bartz's response, in Japanese is, "Yamero!"



Google translate renders this as:



I am presuming that this is the "young male tough guy" version of "yamete" which I guess is more of a juvenile and/or feminine way of saying it. Basically just "Stop," but it's forceful, like "Oh no you didn't."

Ellis renders this as:



Dooferific.

Example #2:

There is a specific catchphrase which Bartz (the main character-ish character) repeats before each boss fight begins. In Japanese, this phrase is "Kuruzotsu!!"



This has a Kanji and three Hiragana in it, so I'm not 100% sure that Google Translate is reading it right, but it gives me:



The Anthology Release rendered this as "Incoming!" and the classic RPGe fan translation, "Stand guard!," that is, "Get your swords ready, this thing's gonna try to kill us!"

Ellis renders this phrase a number of different ways, but the most common is apparently in my next post because I can only attach 5 images.

 

[Nandemoyasan]

"Uh-oh-here it comes."

The reason I call Ellis' script "doofy" is that a lot of the time, it tries to be cute, and ends up making the characters talk in ways that nobody would ever actually say, and that aren't really that interesting to read, is what I'm getting at. It's goofy, silly, kind of dumb, and it detracts from the mood of the game as I had come to understand it over the years.

It doesn't even really work as satire; it'd have to be funny for that. It isn't humorous so much as ridiculous.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I see what you're saying. I think I appreciated the localization because I did find it amusing more often than not, particularly when it poked fun at RPG tropes.

I can see why you might not, but I would add that -- even to the Japanese audience -- FFV was considered more whimsical and, at times, downright silly than any other mainline title in the series. And FF is a series known for mixing whimsy with all that heavy stuff.

I mean, just taking a number of the plot elements of FFV on their face, it's hard to believe that the developers intended them to be taken too seriously. Pirates, for example. I would argue that most depictions of pirates or Vikings in Japanese media can be anticipated to have an air of whimsy about them that borders on silliness.

 

[Nandemoyasan]

I do think that Ellis' version goes just a hair too far on the whimsical side. There is a lot of what you might call "mature themes" running through FFV, and not the sort that have to do with the mouth down south or the horizontal mambo (the game is fairly oblivious to sex in general, compared with FF4 and FF7-Present). I mean mature themes like loss of a family member, depression, self-reproach, consequences of past decisions coming back to bite you, playing God, etc... not atypical stuff for a FF game, really. But among all the different FF games, this one needed to be a little "goofier?"

I don't buy it, myself. There's a lot about FFV that doesn't go along with that kind of presentation (but I don't want to spoil it all).

Basically, I can accept a FF game being *at times* silly. FFV Advance goes silly way too much for me. Kind of ties back into the Monty Python Sketch I started the thread by quoting. "Stop that! It's silly! You can tell those aren't proper keep left signs...and his hair's too long for a Vicar."