Hey Seb - that is who you are, isn't it? ;) -

Am I the only person who believes that this trend has gotten completely out of hand and is catering a bit too much to the people who clamor for the "original Japanese"?

Take Xenogears. I don't have a beef with the main characters' names, as they were already printed that way (even in the original Japanese manual). But the gene that Krelian is studying in Elly is obviously a direct Romanization of "ouroboros", standing for infinity (in katakana, the word would be written u-ro-bo-ro-su, being the literal pronunciation when dealing with Japanese language, which uses no dipthongs). Square's translation team has it as "urobolos" (which is direct Romanization, given the fact that the l and the r sounds are blended into one - think Ryouko as pronounced in the Tenchi Muyo subs).

Another example of inconsistency was that the salvage city "da-mu-zu" was translated as "Thames", but the crucifixtion site "go-ru-go-da" was translated as "Golgoda" (not Golgotha as it was obviously intended to be). Moving on...

It gets worse. I look ahead to Final Fantasy VIII, and see that the direct Romanization trend is really going too far. We have characters whose katakana would be written as ri-no-a and ze-ru, which to me would come out as Lenore and Zale (in Japanese, the "e" sound sounds like our A, as in a-b-c...) But for some bizarre reason, even in the Japanese print media, right there in English, their names are printed out as Rinoa and Zell, names which I have never heard assigned to any living human with those spellings. (Don't even get me started on how "su-ko-o-ru" sounds nothing like "Squall"...)

Tying back into Xenogears, we look at Final Fantasy VII. I won't even go into how FFIVish the translation was there (oh, for the good old days of Ted Woolsey...) Take the scene in which Cloud is a vegetable in a wheel- chair. He is babbling something about a broken mirror, and a million shades of light (or something to that effect), then at the end mumbles "ze...no...gi...as..." This is the katakana spelling of Xenogears (ze-no-gi-a-su), but seeing as how the game was obviously being developed concurrently during FFVII's process... were the US translators really *this* uninformed?

To give modern Square credit, the translation of Parasite Eve was relatively error-free and entertaining (except translating Nicks as "Nix", but that's pretty much the only error), but this is the only case in all the games they've released here for the PSX so far.

Working Designs has the right idea here. For instance, Lunn's name in the original Japanese (of Lunar 2: Eternal Blue) was ra-i-na-su (which sounds suspiciously like Linus). As Victor Ireland said in a Usenet post from 1996, "Rainus (which sounded like Linus) seemed a bit too weak. 'Lunn' sounded like a butt-kicker." And for as easy as FFVI was (IMO), as mentioned earlier I really wish Woolsey hadn't been let go; I enjoyed FFVI's translation immensely, and have been otherwise begrudgingly used to Square's lousy translations.

There are many more examples, but I think I've covered the biggies. I realize that not everybody is going to agree with me, but it's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. Your thoughts?

- Navaash Fenwylde