And also somehow I'm shocked by the amount of adult content in these games every fucking time even though I know it's there. 'Adult' in the 'it talks about sex' connotation of the word. It's the cultural barrier! An American game would have exactly this much violence, character death, and complicated questions about leveraging human lives and what parts of society are worth keeping/what's worth killing for, but all the sexual innuendo would e handled way differently. The Japanese have a very different culture in that regard! With the cute characters and my American expectations it always seems surreal to see the sexually aggressive female characters or the casual innuendo that even the heroes and mentors can toss out if you want, since in the American game, the innocent protagonist or his admirable mentors WOULD NEVER. Humor and flirtation are not heroic traits in the states lol
Y... ye. Suikoden 1 was much like final fantasy 1 in that they THOUGHT it was their last game and went absolutely whole hog to shove all their dreams in it. When the ps1 came out they knew they wouldn’t sell any copies unless they overhauled the game for the brand new system and they desperately wanted people to play their swan song passion project and it was accidentally fucking BRILLIANT because that meant it was one of the first good games on the ps1. A firestorm in Japan, huge success, almost unheard of stateside because they hadn’t expected success and hadn’t planned a translation at all, if memory serves (it might not). And I know when we did get an eng release there were not a lot of copies, it’s pretty hard to find today. Darling happens to have a, like, 20 yr old copy that works because it was her favorite game. I happen to have a ten year old ps2 I treasure because it was my first system. And so I played Suikoden in 2018. Life is weird. And those translations is S1 and S2 are adorably not great, I feel that Konami just never believed it could be popular with their English-speaking audience and made a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time the series was popular enough for big eng releases they were doing later games, so you can find s3 and s4 with relative ease even though their predecessors are better and harder to find >u<
Caveat that literally all of this info is word of mouth lore from old gamers who remember this stuff but time warps memory etc
Having played a lot of other games from the period, they honestly aren't that much worse than a lot of what was coming out at the time. Even FF7, which was a couple years after S1 and one of the most expensive and hyped-up games in history, is full of things like "This guy are sick" and "Judge" translated as "Jersey." Video game companies in general wouldn't start actually regarding well-written localization as a priority until... probably 2000 or so? IIRC Vagrant Story was one of the first video games where the localization quality really got attention as a point in the game's favor. Suikoden's translations weren't good, but in the era of "You were almost a Jill Sandwich" almost nobody's were. I do always have a soft spot for "...googly goo" and that one time in S2 where somebody betrays you for one line because the translators messed up a command code and replaced Jowy's portrait on one of his lines with someone else's, though.
Yeah, 90's RPG translations/localizations were just lacking in general. S1 was kind of stiff and dry but it did the job.
The completely unremarked-on talking cat that says "Sonya..." because the translator misread ンニャ (nnya) as ソニャ is still my favorite translation error of all time.
I really assumed I had to find someone named Sonya and bring them to their cat because I was already so used to Suikoden bullshit
Me: -sees cat in a village street- hey baby!!! cat, staring right the fuck at me: Sonya me: fuck. Ok -turns around and starts hip checking open the first door I see to ask these random rural farmhands where Sonya is because I assume she’s gonna be down for revolution, based on the recommendation of her cat-
https://rabbitandbearstudios.com/eiyudenchronicle/ https://www.ign.com/articles/suikoden-spiritual-sequel-eiyuden-chronicle-hundred-heroes https://rpgamer.com/2020/07/eiyuden-chronicle-interview/ ExcUSE me WHAT
