Niahak's Place

Here I thought Wild Arms: Alter Code F would be the worst example of a recent game that has an unintentionally bad translation.

Then I picked up a copy of Breath of Fire 2 for GBA. I’d heard a vagary or two, but nothing specific, and I don’t own the game for SNES, so I figured I’d grab it and play through it on a plane or two sometime.

The game itself is fairly good (though hard to read on my original-model GBA). The engine is solid, runs fairly fast, and all that. Music’s a bit repetetive, but there’s only so much that can be done on GBA anyway.

That’s where the good ends. I’m painfully aware of what the problem is; they translated without expanding the script, so they had huge space limitation issues. Same thing that happened with me and Jesus, with two major differences; they didn’t significantly reword to save space, and it’s a professional translation.

As a result, the translators occasionally use line breaks as a sentence-ender (which I made sure to avoid), and bother with periods about half the time. Plot is better-done, but townspeople talk is bad.
It’s like if I were to write

sort of like this

But you never know if

I’m ending a sentence

I’m enjoying the game other than that, but I wince every once in a while when I see something particularly bad.