Ham

Enjoy???

One of the reasons why I work really, really hard to provide what's hopefully natural-sounding dialogue in my localizations is to help players recognize and embrace the intellectual foundation underpinning what might otherwise be dismissed as naively sincere premises or themes. A consequence of the legacy of slipshod translations in Japanese media for decades is that it's historically misrepresented creators' capacity to create thoughtful, contemplative material worth probing at a deeper level. As a translator, I always feel that it's imperative that I write material that invites such engagement from foreign players, even if the original Japanese may, at times, have rhetorical or argumentative weaknesses for any number of reasons, which it often does. The point is, if I don't take the material seriously as often the first English speaker dealing with it, I can't expect players overseas to take it seriously, either, and at that point, I've effectively failed the game and its developers.

This is doubly true with "anime" games, by which I mean, not necessarily just licensed games, but ones which derive their storytelling techniques and dialogue style/rhythm from anime. If not handled carefully, especially in terms of cadence, such material, no matter how smartly crafted the Japanese might otherwise be, can be liable to being divisive among people who don't otherwise actively consume a lot of Japanese media and have built up that insight about how characters, themes, etc. tend to present themselves. A lot of foreign media publishers, especially anime licensors, don't invest in the time, money, and talent to achieve that extra polish because they feel that the existing audience is large enough that a translation that's good enough for those people is sufficient and that may be the case from a fiscal ROI perspective for mainstream genres. But anything with less penetration gets kneecapped even worse than usual by such an approach because such translations fail to bridge what might very well be vast genre literacy gaps between native Japanese and foreign audiences.

But when you do put in the effort to write translations that intellectually respect and embrace that sincerity, it pays off. You might never get everyone on board for the ride, but at least you're being creatively honest in conveying that work's fundamental identity and giving the people open to engaging genuine reasons to care. I saw it in people's responses to my dating sim LPs, games that have been dismissed overseas for decades as being indulgent fluff, and I'm lucky and grateful to see it in their responses to my professional output, as well. It will eternally be a point of pride that my team and I on Tales of Arise got as many people to care about that story and those characters as we did for a game that for many people comes from a franchise that's the epitome of "anime" games. We only got there because we respected the material we were handed, we did the work, and we spent a lot of long nights over the course of years crafting a translation that strove to make the characters sound both intelligent and heartfelt in equal measure. Knowing that premise and those plot points, it's very easy to imagine a world where that game was given less care and thought in its translation and got written off as "just" another well-playing anime game like so many other Tales installments.

Looking at the group of writers who worked on Forspoken and seeing how they pretty much all come from film or, at least, very film-influenced backgrounds, it's not terribly shocking that the game maintains the particular affectation that it does. I won't say that there isn't a market for it when that sort of writing clearly sells to a mass audience elsewhere, but I think it, like so much other mainstream western media, makes the mistake of regarding sincerity as intellectually vapid and too soft to be capable of making a point when it's sincerity that makes any good material relatably impactful in the first place. And the thing about sincerity is, sometimes it's clumsy and dopey in how it presents itself because people tend to be clumsy and dopey creatures when being sincere themselves. We aren't always eloquent or refined in the moment and a very quick way to rob a work of any sincerity is to, in some ways, let writers go about their job a little too professionally and compose material that's relentlessly polished in a marketable way. It's not to say that game writers shouldn't strive to iterate upon their work and refine it before delivering, of course. Sincerity can be elegant and smooth when it matches the personality of the character and the tone of a scene or a work. But elegance and smoothness by themselves are no substitute for sincerity.

made with canvas, runs in your browser, looks like shit, etc etc you get the gist. i'll put it up at some point.

I kind of want to let that one scroll by on its own b/c it's mostly about game design and the like,

but I feel like I have some Thoughts on this that approach it from a different angle

I quietly feel like there's something else very fundamental that distinguishes sonic and mario

and it's that sonic and co are Characters
and mario and co are Mascots

there is, I feel like, a fundamental difference here. Mario doesn't have Thoughts or Opinions. He isn't going to beat up his enemies to a song that screams about how independent he is and how he hates cops or etc. Mario is a conceptual hole in the world that emits "Woo, Hoo, Wahoo" noises and the general hope is that you, too, feel "Wahoo" in response. Mario will never feel more-specific emotions that require you to empathise with him¹ or consider his perspective on things, because his goal is, as much as possible, to be an inoffensive contextless shape. Mario is merely the vehicle through which Mario Gameplay may manifest. He has no meaningful traits beyond that.

It is for this reason, I think, that when people call themselves Mario fans they are almost never referring to the character himself. There is nothing for fandom to seize onto there. He is a slippery surface upon which emotional attachment can gain no purchase. People instead tend to latch onto the gameplay, which, obviously, is generally considered to be very good and polished.

What's interesting about this is that I think it creates an almost completely opposite situation from Sonic, whose gameplay is ethereal and changes wildly from game to game. To be a Sonic Fan in the modern era is to either pine for a very specific set of 2-3 games - usually either Sonic 2-Knuckles or Adventure 1 and one or two other 3d games - or, more often, to be invested in Sonic as a setting and a set of characters and the gameplay is merely a facilitator for you spending time with that cast and that Energy.

I wouldn't think it would be especially difficult to be a Sonic fan who has never played a sonic game, given the almost completely unbroken chain of TV Adaptations and comics that the character has seen over the last few decades. And that's kind of the core thing - when the Mario movie was announced the big question I saw a lot of people asking was "what would it even be about?". No one has ever asked that question about a Sonic adaptation, because the answer is obvious. It's about sonic and co doing Sonic The Hedgehog Things, which is a concept that Sonic can have because the vast accumulation of media Sonic is in is not about Finding Ways to Express Sonic Gameplay - I've heard Sega is actively hostile to attempts to do this in non-games media - and instead is about Finding Ways To Express Sonic as a character, as a cast, as a world.

There's a world where Sonic media tried to be something more like Mario and simply throw 90% of everything out with every new iteration, but someone or someones at Sega are actively opposed to that idea and so every new form of Sonic media comes with at least a bit of the baggage of the old - even the relatively isolated Wii Black Knight/Thousand Rings games, explicitly written as one-offs, couldn't resist incorporating characters like Blaze who had very specific and loaded character arcs across previous work. And this stuff adds up. Every cameo, every glimpse of that broken moon from Sonic Adventure 2 in a later game.

Which all is to say, where Mario is intentionally smooth and ungraspable to make it easier to simply place him contextless into a new world, Sonic is pocked with the marks of a thousand different attempts at saying Something with him, at preserving his past iterations, at re-re-re-examining the increasingly growing cast of core characters. You could argue the results of this are incoherent, and perhaps they are, but this kind of fracturing is perhaps where fandoms thrive the most, because The Ability To Interpret is absolutely core to fan works. This is the kind of media-production style that creates thousands of tempting little spots where fans can build their own little headcanons, and I think this is core to why fans are so eager to play in that space. There's nothing more welcoming to fandom than a blank space that screams to be filled. And there's just so few of these in Mario - they're more like endless, forbidding chasms - and most of the ones that exist were created during the Gamecube era when, I assume, Miyamoto was busy in the bathroom for awhile and couldn't get out in time to stop the dev team from creating E. Gadd and Rosalina.

So this is all to say that, yes, I think gameplay definitely plays a role in the major differences between how sonic and mario express fan-creations and fangames, but I think The Goal Of This Character Existing might actually be the core expressive element that informs that factor - because those goals don't just inform narrative and characterization, but game design goals too, right?

Or at least that's what it seems like to me.

¹ The one exception to this I can think of is Fludd's death scene in Mario Sunshine, which is notable for being an incredibly out of place scene in an out of place game, as far as series tone goes.