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Diaryland

I Start Fires!

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2002-11-18

Piggy's specs were nicked at: 10:53 a.m.

As I get older, my patience starts to dwindle and I can't swallow people like this.

No, it's not due to his whacky site layout or the fact that websides dedicated to the subject of "This is my life, here are some pictures" went out about eight years ago. This fellow belongs to the classy Gentleman's Club titled "Rip Ted Woolsey's Heart Out of His Chest, Suck the Marrow Out of His Bones."

Ted Woolsey, for those of you whose video game dawn began with a little buzzing box called the Playstation, used to be a major translator for Squaresoft back in the day when FF ran the gaming soup kitchen in Geektown. He translated Secret of Mana (in 30 days), Final Fantasy III (VI), Chrono Trigger, Mario RPG, and probably some other titles I'm missing. Rumour has it that Square wanted him to translate Final Fantasy VII, but Woolsey didn't want to move his family to Square's new studio in LA, because LA tends to kill.

The sheer amount of venom-dripping hatred for Woolsey on the 'net is absolutely astounding. We're not talking about, "I dislike Woolsey." We're talking about "Woolsey should be dragged into the street, shot, and thrown in a ditch to die like a dog with shit drying on its rump."

What beast of a man could raise such terrible ire? Did he swoop around the world on his magical polka dot gryphon after a hard day at work and steal innocent people's women and rape their cattle? No, he did much worse in the empty eyes of game otakous. He censored Final Fantasy III!

I suppose it wouldn't do any good to tell these little tin soldiers that Woolsey just has to follow orders. We didn't get stupidity like "Doom Gaze" and "Pearl" because Nintendo of America said, "We love religious references in our games! Let's put in an abundance!" and Woolsey said, "Oh no you don't."

So these Woolsey-eaters, who likely slept with their FF III US cartriges and its Satanic translation before the Internet made them brave enough to turn on shit and hate it pointlessly, have set out on a journey to translate the game "closer to its Japanese roots." Let's see. I've visted several sites dedicated to this project and aquired two patches with the "close" translation. Both dialogues are wildly different from each other in places. Other sites were launched Gung-Ho (hahaha) with many bold words in the first record entry, in which the update dates got further apart and finally tapered off altogether without a final product.

One translation, which I don't have a problem putting up because the owner of the site doesn't worry Woolsey back and forth like a dog with a bone, can be found here. You don't have to download the patch if you don't want to; there's a script up.

Read the script. What do you notice?

First of all, there's a lot more dialoge than in FF III US. This makes perfect sense; you can say a lot more in Japanese using a lot less space. In fact, I think it's safe to say that there's 40% more text going on in the script. How could Woolsey do such a rotten thing like omit text?

FF III was a cart game. Not a CD, not a ROM on a 60 gig computer drive. Carts were very limited in space, especially regarding a game that pushed its resources to the limit like FF III. And FF III was, many people have declared, a novel in a game. The big deal? Text takes up a lot of memory. And as I said before, Japanese is a very compact language. So something in the American version was just gonna have to go.

In fact, I think it's amazing how much Woolsey did keep. He scrunched words down to size and probably beat the hell out of his thesaurus. Some plot points did seem to vanish, but the general story is all there. Love it.

Second thing about the script is that Kefka sucks in the Japanese version. I'm sorry, but he does. He says "fuck" like a squirrel with Turret's Syndrome. This might just be a typical example of a fan translation putting words in characters' mouths, but I'm going to give Skyrender the benefit of the doubt because he swears on his dog's soul that the translation is as accurate as a translation can be. So for the sake of fun, Kefka in the FF VI Japan swears like a sailor. And it really detracts from his character. While reading his text, I felt like I was back on my grade 2 school playground, surrounded by children who warbled dirty words for the sake of hearing themselves swear. No longer was Kefka a good old plain madman. "Son of a Bitch" just isn't as fun as "Son of a Submariner."

As for the overall script, well, it's bland. Not the translator's fault. No, the FF VI script has the same saltless potato flavour of FF VII's translation. I can't even put my finger on what Woolsey did to make his games a pleasure to read, but I miss it.

But it's a grand debate. Do we want something that's zesty and quick paced, or do we want something more amateurish, plodding ... and un-censored?

FF III US did have its share of dumb, DUMB censorship. Like the characters being disallowed to say "death." I give Woolsey credit alone for the millions of variations he cooked up of muerto.

There was also the elimination of any religious references. This mucked up my gameplay quite a bit. "Pearl? What the hell is Pearl? And how could it possibly kill Edgar? I have him equipped in the all-powerful +255 Dark Satan armour."

Let us not forget certain story arcs being delfated. Like the text that appears before Celes takes her suicide dive in the World of Ruin. It says something about jumping off the cliff "perking people up." I was pretty sure that wasn't in the Japanese version for two reasons. One, who was talking? The ghost of Cid? And second, jumping off a cliff to perk up? WTF?

Speaking of WTF, when Sabin, Celes, Setzer and Edgar walked into the decimated Mobliz, the town stank of old death and pre-1997 Nintendo of America. As all good geeky gamers know, Molbiz was destroyed by Kefka and most of the adults died perished while trying to save their children. The only two adults left were Duane and Katarin, age 17.

If you put two 17 year olds together in a crumbling, dark, lonely world, they're going to screw. It's a law of nature. For more information ask your mommy or daddy what a Quebec Ice Baby is. Duane and Katarin shag, and Katarin catches pregnant. Nintendo tried to cover up by indicating they were married. Er, no. Why did Nintendo even bother is what I want to know. Maduin and Madonna humped in front of the Esper gate, and they weren't even of the same species. Maybe Nintendo meant to include a Shotgun Pete's in the Esper World but things didn't pan out.

So that's that. Please don't hurt Woolsey. Take me instead. And think before you feed him to the bears. He changed a few things, but the censorship was by no means his choice, and his translations were interesting besides.

I ask you ... bulb ... or parrot?