Final Fantasy XVI

[The Twilight Mexican]

The FFXIV lore/story team has noted that the ENG audience asks them way more lore and story questions than the JP audience does. Which has led to the FFXIV ENG localization being done a certain way, namely that the team leaves things that don't have to be specified just yet unspecified so the ENG lore community has more unknown lore to discuss.

Seems counterintuitive. =/

 

[Odysseus]

People like to speculate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Obsidian Fire]

So... when the story of FFXIV has to specify what is going on, it does so in the ENG text. But there's a lot of places where the ENG text is a lot more... obscure... than the other languedges FFXIV gets localized into when the story doesn't need it to specify things. To the point when the FFXIV ENG lore community gets to places where it's a case of "we don't know exactly what is going on here, but it's not too important to the story that we know what's going on either" one of the first things they do is look up the different languages because they're a lot clearer. Particularly German for some reason, probably because FFXIV is rated lower in Germany and so the overall tone/style of the German localization is very "kid friendly" with how stuff is explained.

What is basically going on is that the FFXIV ENG lore community loves discussing lore, so the localization team gives them more things to discuss by not giving them easy to find answers... While other languedges get easier to find answers since they don't discuss things as much. And yes, this has lead to some facepalming on the part of the FFXIV ENG lore community along the lines of "why doesn't it actualy say this instead of just implying it!!!".

The worst example is in Thousand Yawns of Toto-Rak in 2.0 when Lahabrea finds out you have a Crystal of Light. And in other languages, he tells you how people get Crystals of Light in the first place! Except in English for some reason, where how you get Crystals of Light is never really gone into in detail until Shadowbringers... where it almost assumes you, the player, already know how that works. Probably because you have six of them instead of the usual one.

You can basicly think of it as the game devs deciding that the people who like speculating should have more to speculate about. So the things they can speculate about (as opposed to things that should be made very obvious) are made even more obscured then they really had to be. So people can speculate about them.

 

[Odysseus]

That does sound kind of needlessly obtuse for not much gain

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Yeah, that's fucking stupid.

Obviously there are some folks who "like" to speculate. I'm thinking of the annoying YouTube people who put out a weekly video of random "theories" like FFXV ending on a time loop. You know, b.s. to generate views.

But I suspect what these devs have interpreted as "enjoying speculating" is instead a more pronounced desire for understanding the plot/setting. Not some bizarre gratification for dead-end speculation for its own sake.

 

[Wol]

Not bad for a dead franchise, am i right?

 

[Tetsujin]

Particularly German for some reason, probably because FFXIV is rated lower in Germany and so the overall tone/style of the German localization is very "kid friendly" with how stuff is explained.

That's not really true though. The game is rated 12. The US rating is T.

 

[Ite]

@Obsidian Fire is now making me believe that FFXIII in the original Japanese is exposited properly...

So let me get this straight, the assumption is that Western Audiences like needing fan sites open on our phones just to understand what’s going on or why we should care? And so “bland” but functional dialogue is replaced with jargon?

I blame George Lucas for this.

 

[Wol]

Now imagine how Bahamut or KoTR (I mean, the setting is asking for it) would affect his combos. Wings, beams of energy, multiple swords or a protective badass armor?

Really a great idea to create variety.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

That's not really true though. The game is rated 12. The US rating is T.

The observation about German localizations being much clearer is on point, though (see especially: FFXV).

I guess you Deutsche just don't like exercising your ~speculation~ brain muscles.

 

[Tetsujin]

The observation about German localizations being much clearer is on point, though (see especially: FFXV).

It certainly has nothing to do with ratings however

 

[LNK]

Now imagine how Bahamut or KoTR (I mean, the setting is asking for it) would affect his combos. Wings, beams of energy, multiple swords or a protective badass armor?

Really a great idea to create variety.

If they have KOTR, I can see it being similar to Noctis' Armiger attack

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

So, this drivel came across my newsfeed this morning:

https://www.fanbyte.com/trending/th...final-fantasy-women-has-me-cautious-of-ffxvi/

More of the "FF fails women now" stuff, complete with excuses about why FFVIIR and FFXIV don't count. I'll also add a hefty dose of misrepresenting FFXIV to this indictment.

I'm guessing the inevitable long-term result of this sort of thing will be "Western fans enjoy arguing that there aren't enough/the right kind of women in FF, so we need to release games with less women so they can have more of those experiences they enjoy when discussing the games with other fans."

 

[Lex]

It certainly has nothing to do with ratings however

It's probably just the language/ culture right? Not to generalise but my impression of Germans is direct, to the point, no bullshit. I absolutely love it.

 

[Strangelove]

@Obsidian Fire is now making me believe that FFXIII in the original Japanese is exposited properly...

having been playing a couple of hideo kojima games lately, i think maybe japanese games can explain jargon, in a way english games don't tend to, with furigana/rubi which are little annotations above or next to words that generally tell you how a word is meant to be read but also are used to explain meanings, etc.

so when metal gear solid talks about darpa, it might be written like 国防高等研究計画局 (defense advanced research projects agency) in the subtitles with 'DARPA' in small text above and the dialogue saying 'DARPA' (i just looked at a video from mgs1 and it didn't use that exact example but it does do stuff like that pls trust me). in death stranding when they say 'ka' and 'ha', in the subtitles it's written 魂（カー）[spirit (ka)] and 肉体（ハー）[body (ha)] so you know what it means even if you don't know ancient egyptian/haven't read yu-gi-oh. when they say 'dooms' it's written 能力者（ＤＯＯＭＳ）so you know a 'dooms' is someone with a special power right away. sometimes they have these annotations but the dialogue doesn't use them. at the beginning of mgs1 they have the japanese word for mission 作戦 annotated with the english loan word ミッション but the spoken dialogue uses the japanese word. sometimes it's just you look at a word and you're like

and my favourite from the mgs2 playthrough, where the dialogue says 'baka' and the subtitles annotated it with 'solid ivory'.

ffxiii didn't do exactly this, but sometimes the subtitles will be written differently that the spoken dialogue. when the dialogue says 'pulse' the subtitles say 下界 (lower world) so you have an idea of what it means. 'sanctum' is 聖府 (something like 'holy government') and pronounced like the regular word for 'government' so even if you just have the word with no context or exposition you still get a sense of what it is. it still has stuff like 'fal'cie' and 'l'cie' which need an explanation so it did get some of the same criticism from japanese fans about it throwing these terms around ('cie'th' is シ骸 which is 'cie corpse' and pronounced like a common word for corpse so that's a bit more invocative of the meaning than the english one, although in ff type-0 and ffxv it was written シガイ and i think ffxv calls them 'daemons'?). later ffxiii games would say the loan word for 'chaos' カオス and write it in japanese in the subtitles 混沌, but i don't think カオス is that unusual a word that it needs specifying so this is probably just a stylistic choice.

 

[LNK]

So, this drivel came across my newsfeed this morning:

https://www.fanbyte.com/trending/th...final-fantasy-women-has-me-cautious-of-ffxvi/

More of the "FF fails women now" stuff, complete with excuses about why FFVIIR and FFXIV don't count. I'll also add a hefty dose of misrepresenting FFXIV to this indictment.

I'm guessing the inevitable long-term result of this sort of thing will be "Western fans enjoy arguing that there aren't enough/the right kind of women in FF, so we need to release games with less women so they can have more of those experiences they enjoy when discussing the games with other fans."

I'm all for "checking boxes," but jeez, that article was horrible.

Lunafreya is still one of my favorite characters

 

[Obsidian Fire]

@Strangelove That's a lot closer to what I'm talking about. FFXIV is... weird... in that a lot of the "lore" terms are made in English first and then back-ported into JP afterwards. The bulk of FFXIV's dialogue isn't voiced either, so everyone pretty much just compares the different subtitles to each other. So if one set of subtitles can get more stuff across than other sets...

 

[Odysseus]

I'm all for "checking boxes," but jeez, that article was horrible.

Lunafreya is still one of my favorite characters

If you add characters just for the sake of checking boxes rather than because you actually have ideas for them, the whole thing ends up being shallow anyway. Final Fantasy has always made great use of its leading ladies, they never just feel like they're there for the sake of it. That article is in really bad faith.

 

[Strangelove]

@Strangelove That's a lot closer to what I'm talking about. FFXIV is... weird... in that a lot of the "lore" terms are made in English first and then back-ported into JP afterwards. The bulk of FFXIV's dialogue isn't voiced either, so everyone pretty much just compares the different subtitles to each other. So if one set of subtitles can get more stuff across than other sets...

i thought it was weird that people would only log on like once a month or something, but now i understand

they are spending the rest of month in their dialogue comparison spreadsheets

 

[Wol]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1308032444805844993

 

[looneymoon]

Just looking at the image WoL posted - How many games in the PS5 showcase had trailers that did prominently feature women in them?

I know Tres' point about Shiva being a named character was a little facetious. That said, if I were completely new to FF/video games and saw a cool blue magic elf lady playing some sort of key role, then I'd say she definitely counts.

I am glad we hold the FF series to a higher standard with this stuff than CODBLOPS but like... the female representation argument only really holds water with FFXV imo, which doesn't account for the entire decade (unless you're talking about its development time ). The article then talks about loving Vanille... so I'm a little confused I get the author is trying to tap into a feeling of the writing being weak for numerous entries in the PS3/PS4 era, but I think there are more foundational issues at play there.

The dish is still in the oven right now. Sure it looks a little bland at the moment, but we honestly don't know how much spice they added until we try it

 

[Tetsujin]

It's probably just the language/ culture right? Not to generalise but my impression of Germans is direct, to the point, no bullshit. I absolutely love it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

It's so odd that people are getting all up in arms about a game they barely know anything about yet, and posting specious arguments to justify their absurd... I was going to say "outrage", but I cba to read/watch all this analysis of a four minute trailer, so let's just call it "opinionated negativity".

I mean, if you don't like the look of it when it comes out, don't buy it. Seems simple.

 

[Lex]

It's so odd that people are getting all up in arms about a game they barely know anything about yet

This is literally our entire fandom and has been since the very beginning, sorry to say

No matter what they do at any point (be it a trailer, the game itself) a fairly large number of people will be pissed off. It's the double-edged sword of the variety they've provided in the past. So much marmite.

 

[LNK]

If you add characters just for the sake of checking boxes rather than because you actually have ideas for them, the whole thing ends up being shallow anyway. Final Fantasy has always made great use of its leading ladies, they never just feel like they're there for the sake of it. That article is in really bad faith.

Sorry, I didn't mean it as simply checking boxes, and that be it. I just didn't really get that authors complaint of the women that's been used in the last 10 years. It seems like they just wanted something to complain about.