Game Translator’s Notes 7. Aki Phoenix.

In the last post, I promised a story from our translator about my work on our third official game – Phoenotopia: Awakening. Here he is, in fact. At one time, we gave Stopgame a key to the Switch version (the game at that time was incredibly hardcore, which unfortunately/fortunately was already corrected with patches) and in return we received an excellent review.

Exactly 2 months have passed since this note was written. During this time, the release on Steam was postponed, which gave us time for additional proofreading, which is nearing completion right now, as I finish this sentence. Happy reading.

So here it is. Official projects. At some point I noticed that the work is most effective when you translate not one game, but two. You can alternate them. When you get tired of working on one (and in almost any game there is so much text that at some point it becomes boring), you get distracted by another and vice versa. If you think about it this way, rest is just a change of activity. And so, while translating one game, you take a break from another. Profit!

In my case, the first of two projects is naturally Xenoblade, and the second changes according to circumstances. And for the last couple of months its place has been taken by one of the official projects. In early September, this place was taken over by a game called Phoenotopia Awakening. From the very beginning, when it became known that we would be engaged in its official translation, I had a vague feeling for some time. It’s like I’ve seen her somewhere. Just recently. Hmm… That same day I remembered – well, of course, she was in the direct message… this is an exclusive of the switch that was in the direct message… wait… I’ll be official (!) work on a game that is exclusive to the Switch (!) and which was shown in direct message (!).

– Liz,” I tell my wife, https://playcrococasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ “I will participate in the translation of the game from the direct message.”!
– Cool. What is direct?
– Oh, that’s it..

In short, I (and all of us at FaceOFF) were very excited. So screwed up that I almost couldn’t believe it. Moreover, in addition to the nice pixel graphics of the game (a platformer close in spirit to Zelda II), we were faced with an incredible amount of text to translate by the standards of a platformer. 650Kb of pure text or 10k lines. No, of course, this is not the largest game in terms of volume. In the same Xeno there is more than five times more text. But for a platformer this is a pretty impressive amount. Especially in comparison with the previous platformer, which we translated officially and in which, let me remind you, there was only 15Kb of text.

In addition to the fact that the text was interesting (more on that later), it was correctly and very detailed. This was the first translation in which we were sent a full-fledged loc-kit, containing not only the text, but also explanations for almost all its fragments, it contained images, a world map, etc.n. Who says this phrase? Well, there it is, everything is signed. What is the speaker’s gender?? You can see it in the comments to the dialogue. What did the author want to say with this joke?? Here’s an explanation (seriously). I understand that this is exactly how it should be in translations. But when working with unofficial translations, you often don’t even dream of such luxury. Here everything was done to make life easier for translators. And from this alone it became pleasant and easy to work on the game. It was possible to concentrate on conveying the style correctly, rather than piling up something universal that would suit both a male character and a girl. And in those rare moments when something was still not clear, you could ask the developer directly for advice. Just a fairy tale.

At the first stage, we sorted out items and abilities. There are a little more than 200 of them in the script, and from them we began our acquaintance with the world of the game. Already from the descriptions of the objects, an interesting backstory of the world and the plot of the events of the game itself began to be revealed to us. The world has experienced a serious shock, and high technology and the feudal system, golems and lasers are mixed in it. You know, right from the start it was felt that the creator of the game wanted to make the world interesting. And during the translation process, we realized that he managed to make it alive, real, breathing. But let’s talk about everything in order.

As soon as we finished with the objects (and this fragment took up approximately 6% of the text volume, you remember that I count everything), it was necessary to divide the remaining plot text between all the translators. It’s worth noting that there are four of us doing this project. Three translators and an editor. And we decided to divide the entire volume of the text equally – a third for each translator. It took me a couple of hours to divide those 10k lines into fragments, read the summary of the game in order to distribute the lines so that there were no obvious inconsistencies between the translators. This condition is not mandatory, but according to the experience of past translations, when each translator takes the entire fragment, it becomes easier for the editor to bring slightly different stylistics to something unified.

And the work began to boil. Since the translation of items went with a slight slip, I expected something similar from the translation of the main text. Then it suddenly became clear that almost every fragment of the text was written in the original so soulfully that, translating phrase by phrase, you don’t even notice how you finished the next segment. The text has many funny moments, it is juicy, rich, and the characters of the main characters in the game are laconic, but memorable and pleasant. I always liked that in translation you seem to be participating in excavations, research that reveals the secrets of the game world, but here it was incomparable. In short, the text of this game gave me extremely positive emotions, and, perhaps, of all the games I have worked on so far, it was the most interesting. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so – the other guys agreed with me, they liked both the content of the script and the game itself.

Speaking of the game. There are games that are driven by a good plot, lore and characters. And the gameplay sags and you wait for it to end and open the next plot fragment. So here it is. This game is not one of those. In parallel with the translation, I started playing it on the switch, and its gameplay drew me in just as much. Last week I finally beat the final bosses on my 15th attempt. Phoenotopia Awakening took me 30+ hours to complete and I only found 43% of its content. The authors put so much love into this game and surprisingly there is so much content, good content, that it took a place somewhere next to Hollow Knight in my chart. Seriously, I’m surprised that there isn’t a lot of buzz around this game, that it isn’t being discussed on every corner like the aforementioned Hollow Knight, since it has potential on almost all fronts, if not all (I did say it has great music? No? Well, she’s great there too). Of course, I play much less often now and new games are increasingly passing me by due to lack of time, but after completing Phenotopia I was left with the feeling that no other game this year has evoked so many pleasant emotions in me.

I finished my translation segment back in September. I kept waiting to finish my third, but in the end I felt not satisfaction from the work done, but a slight sadness. Like when you finish a great game and realize that you won’t experience such emotions from playing it again. I wanted to continue working on it, which our texture designer very succinctly expressed in the following comic:

That’s how things are. For those interested in the game, I will leave a link to the Steam page and a link to the full soundtrack.

By the way, we have a lot of interesting things being translated, so if you want to follow the updates, we are waiting for you in our group. Have a nice day, take care of yourself and.