Ryusui

One thing I feel strongly about is, if you enjoy video games, you should play old games. Especially if you're a zoomer or a millennial like me, you should play games that came out before you were born.

This isn't me being like "the games I played as a kid because those are the GOOD games", like some kind of nostalgia freak. There's a lot of modern games out now that are legitimately fantastic, and do things that those old games could never do. There's just value in knowing what path games as an art form have taken over the years.

Video games have their own art history, and as far as I'm aware, this is largely ignored in the broader conversation about them. Often recommendations to play old games are pushed back against due to being "clunky and ugly", and by modern standards that's kind of true, but I think it's not fair to dismiss them off hand like that. A good understanding of the games that inspired your favorite modern games can help you appreciate them more.

Diablo* was a game I played a lot as a childe, and one I revisited as an adult. One of the main differences between my first playthoughs and my more recent one was that I had been introduced to the roguelike genre, and more specifically Nethack. Suddenly I became aware of direct lines of inspiration from Rogue in Diablo**. It gave me a new appreciation for Diablo's*** mechanics that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Also play games made in flash, because those have been far more influential than you'd think, considering how completely out of the mainstream conversation they are.

I just think video game history is as important to the medium as art history as is to paintings or whatever. And it's kinda sad that this older stuff gets neglected, even if it's for reasons I understand. Also this is a way for me to indirectly encourage more people to play games I love, that they might ignore otherwise

It's a fairly controversial take within the world of game localization, but coming from the Japanese>English side of things, my advice to new translators for years now has similarly been to study up on Japanese game history. Like, don't just play games in Japanese, as in, ones you could voluntarily play in English instead. I mean get into the weeds, actually study the games and genres that have impacted devs and players here and continue to inspire them, because I can assure you, if you're only sticking to the portion of Japanese game history that was deemed sellable enough to bring overseas, you're missing out on wide swaths of trends and conversations that have taken place. Not only is it just intellectually enriching in its own right to do those deeper divers and see what Japanese games have gotten up to over the years when they're only talking amongst themselves, but believe it or not, your work will suffer at times from that lack of fluency. Not necessarily catastrophically so or on every project by any means, but more often than you would think and in some surprising places, speaking as someone who moonlights as an editor and proofreader on games myself.

I know that sounds daunting because where do you even begin? And that's completely fair and by no means is my own knowledge ever going to be as complete or exhaustive as a native expert's! Ultimately, it's about maintaining that state of mind of continuous education so as to avoid complacency and assuming you ever know truly everything there is to know about that part of the industry. My suggestion is just, pick a direction that's always interested you, go explore that, and then let the tangents guide you from there. In my case, I started with a series of pachinko-themed RPGs because I just so happened to notice one of my favorite developers was in their credits and was just too damn curious to not find out what the hell they were doing on something like those. At any rate, it's a journey that'll sincerely pay dividends over time, but one that's best undergone organically in order to maintain that momentum long-term.

But if I had to give advice on more specific things to study in Japanese games? Study old PC games, both the non-smutty and the smutty variety (really). Study game libraries for consoles and handhelds that never left Japan. Study the RPGs from celebrated development houses like AlfaSystem that never saw the light of day elsewhere. Study old arcade games like Tower of Druaga that inspired developers to turn single-player games into communal experiences. Study newer arcade games like Gundam Extreme Vs.¹ that have established new kinds of multiplayer and how cooperative games can be played and structured. Study adventure games in all their wild permutations. Study novel games, both visual and especially the sound ones that came before them. Study character raising games. And, yes, study dating sims and how they repurpose familiar mechanics to different thematic and emotional ends. You knew I was going to tell you that much, right?

There will always be more to study; I've been seriously engaged in this work for over a decade now and I'm still constantly finding plenty of stones left unturned! But if you want to help these games put the best foot forward that you possibly can when it comes time to translate them, then you owe it to them, their developers, their audience, and yourself as both a professional and a creative person to put in the time and truly learn them, where they come from, and what they're saying and to whom. Many of my colleagues would advocate for a more balanced approach and I'm not saying you should feel the need to do such extensive exploration completely at the expense of engaging with anything else. Obviously developers are inspired by plenty more than just the games in their immediate surroundings. At the same time, being a complete jack-of-all-trades only benefits you so much if you're not going to actually work in all those trades and I think it's high time we as a professional more widely consider that those of us who intend to specialize in this as our primary medium perhaps need to spend those skill points differently in order further advance our art and best advocate for our games and the wider Japanese industry.

1. I know the last couple of these games have gotten localized, but it's still making this list because it's a subgenre of fighting games that's slowly taking root overseas and the paradigms such games are built on are unique enough that their playability to foreign players can very much so hinge on how knowledgeable you personally are about those mechanics and their overall design philosophy.

For a little more concrete direction, here's also five developers whose libraries overall I feel will do a lot to expand your fluency into the history and design language of Japanese games:

• Nihon Falcom. The granddaddy of Japanese RPGs, especially action RPGs. They might not have been the very first to the scene back in the 80s, but they've been continuously at it longer than virtually everyone else, including even Square and Enix. Many, many roads in Japanese games ultimately lead back to their work; the original Dragon Slayer in particular is about as foundational as they come to many of the most popular, beloved Japanese series of all time like The Legend of Zelda. Stubbornly prolific on PC even as that well was drying into the 2000s and still putting out meaningful stuff to this very day, they're a quiet titan in terms of sheer legacy. (I may be a little professionally biased about their latter-day output, but the next time someone says to you that nobody is doing The Epic Fantasy Novel Series equivalent in RPGs, go scream to them that Kiseki exists and if they claim it's "small-time," tell them it sure ain't throughout Asia and hasn't been for a long time.)

• Chunsoft. Did you know when these people weren't putting out Dragon Quest games left and right, they laid the foundations for console roguelikes and novel games, two of the most ubiquitous genres in indie games today? It's true and they left a big impression on people in their heyday! Go play a Shiren the Wander and go play one of their sound novels and you'll see a developer planting very compelling seeds that would only truly bear fruit 20+ years later while still making some masterful early examples that stand the test of the time and are deeply informative among Japanese developers working in those spaces today.

• Human Entertainment. You might only know them as Suda 51's first port of call in the industry, but there's a good reason he found himself there. Provocative and experimental, both thematically and mechanically, you might not always actually enjoy playing their games, but they'll stick in your memory for a long time, whether it's the moody Twilight Syndrome series, the bold faux Titanic simulator Septentrion, the prototypical open world adventure that is Mizzurna Falls, and plenty of others. This was a developer that was constantly challenging what could be depicted in games in the first place, often breaking things first and fixing them later, leaving behind a body of work that pushed the envelope wide open and has stayed open long after its demise.

• Japan Studio. Okay, so this is more of a publishing label more than any one developer, but in the way people identify popular indie publishers as having a certain identity through the games they put out, so, too, did Sony's internal label that they used to publish hundreds of Japanese games, many of which went unlocalized. It's more widely understood these days that the PlayStation was originally more of a product of Sony Music rather than the mothership, but it's a truth that extends beyond mere corporate politics. It factored into the very identity of the platform in its earliest days and how they courted third-parties. PlayStation the Sony Music entity published games in Japan like a music label, not as a conventional game publisher, an approach that helped give it and the PS2 such huge, diverse libraries. Just bring up a list of their Japan-only stuff, throw a dart on the board, and go nuts.

• AliceSoft. You don't need me to tell you that the history of eroge in Japan runs long, deep, and PC-centric, so I would feel remiss if I didn't include at least one developer from that side of things, let alone one so institutional. Their output, as with most anything to do with eroge, is absolutely a matter of taste, but if you want a starting point to explore why Japan has had such a prosperous history of adult games for nearly the domestic industry's entire existence, you could do worse than to look here. And if you think eroge has always equalled visual novels all along, AliceSoft's output in particular will quickly teach you that it's long incorporated other kinds of games as well, and quite successfully at that.

There are plenty of other developers and publishers that other people would build such a list around and those candidates are perfect valid, too. You can't talk about visual novels without talking about the doujin scene and people like Kinoko Nasu and Ryukishi07 and the series and studios built up in their wake. A thorough exploration of galge requires a look at Red Company's output, both when they took the lead with games like Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, as well as when they worked in collaboration with giants like Sega to produce mammoth games like Sakura Taisen. Anybody who follows me knows just how much more there is to dating sim history than the few games lucky enough to get popular YouTube essays. And needless to say, there's plenty to examine within the libraries of the biggest of iconic companies like, indeed, Sega and Konami. My intent isn't to prescribe one narrative thread of Japanese or a way to approach it, but simply to underscore that the heritage is richer than you may well appreciate, even if you work in the industry like me. Like I wrote in the other post, just pick one of those threads, any thread at all, and keep following it. The rest will come with time and you'll emerge from the experience enriched and inspired.

This thread that I honestly completely forgot about is surprisingly doing the rounds again today a decent amount, so since it's getting some attention, I figured I'd throw one last addendum onto here while I still can, or at least easily.

I realize I never really clarified what it is about my particular opinion that makes it contentious in Japanese-English localizer circles, so let's talk about that a little specifically. Conventional wisdom says that if you want to get good at translating Japanese entertainment, you should actively consume works across a variety of mediums, not just your specialty, if you even have one like I do, which is actually fairly rare. And I agree with this logic to a point. Obviously, Japanese game creators are influenced by plenty more things in the world around them than just other games. You can hardly walk five feet in a game without tripping over a thinly disguised Jojo pose, for instance. Similarly, it probably won't surprise you to hear that plenty of games pepper their dialogue with Gundam quotes and references, even the distinctly non-Gundam ones.

Where I differ philosophically is in how much one should balance those sorts of studies: if you're a dedicated game translator like I'm lucky enough to be and especially if you're working in genres with minimal mainstream exposure overseas, I strongly feel that you owe it to your games and audiences to be most fluent in Japanese games, their design language, and their history above everything else. Period. Do Japanese games reference stuff other games? Obviously. But as this side of the industry approaches half a century in age, guess what most Japanese games are going to be in conversation with most often? Other games, and especially other Japanese games.

As an editor and a proofreader, perhaps the most frustrating thing I find missing in a lot of other game translators and especially newer ones is a demonstrable lack of deeper fluency in the medium they're choosing to work within. A number of Japanese games and franchises that are globally popular today have foundations in unlocalized games or even entire genres of games and even if a translator otherwise has the linguistic chops to correctly parse the material at a surface level, it's common for them to either miss a crucial piece of underlying context influencing how a game plays and presents itself, or to at least fail to bridge that gap and surface that information for foreign players themselves. That lack of deeper genre literacy makes a lot of localizations of Japanese games needlessly less accessible to foreign players and the final English products suffer for it, both in terms of playability and then critical reception by extension. These sorts of factors are why I very, very often go out of my way to write more detail tutorial text in particular for Japanese games than the source material innately offers. We can't nor should expect foreign players to be as fluent in these games as native Japanese players and I believe it's on us to be that conduit to empower players to gain those insights and be able to catch up through things like word choice and structure, material that's written cognizant of those original influences and how much non-Japanese-speaking players are likely to grasp or not as it initially exists.

Like I said elsewhere, that sort of studying has to be constant and has to continue for as long as you work in this field. There is always more stuff to catch up on and putting in the time and effort can only make you a better asset on localization projects the longer you keep it up, even if you don't always personally enjoy the games that you're examining. In a field of translation where direct access to the original writers and development team can be scarily scant when it comes to asking questions, this, I've found, is the best, most reliable way I've found by far to still be able to translate things confidently and deliver a localized game that can stand on its own two feet and be enjoyed on its own merits.