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Jan. 2nd, 2012 06:59 pmI grabbed the Humble Bundle 4 before it finished, and one of the things in it was the Nicalis remake of Cave Story! Yay. The new challenges and stuff are pretty neat (modulo a few bugs and an odd decision or two -- y u no missiles or snake in sanctuary rush?!), and overall it's a great clean-up of a great game.
But there's a big wart, which is that the English script is... pretty bad. There's this very distinctive rhythm to a literal Japanese -> English translation, and it functions as a big flashing "amateur hour" sign, and Cave Story + has it.
What kills in this case is that the actual amateurs did it much better! The volunteer-made translation patch for the original samizdat release of Cave Story was just fine! The dialog in the game is spare by nature, but every character had a distinctive voice, and any weird turns of phrase were for atmosphere or for their own sake rather than for want of a writer and editor.
If Nicalis didn't have the internal resources to write a good translation, they should have just bought republishing rights from the original patch volunteers. I don't know, maybe there was some good reason why they couldn't, but I'd have appreciated something; it's just embarrassing when the script in the paid version is inferior to the free one.
Okay, back to the writing. Missed that year-end mark I was trying to hit, but I'll be done soon. TAKKA TAKKA TAKKA.
But there's a big wart, which is that the English script is... pretty bad. There's this very distinctive rhythm to a literal Japanese -> English translation, and it functions as a big flashing "amateur hour" sign, and Cave Story + has it.
What kills in this case is that the actual amateurs did it much better! The volunteer-made translation patch for the original samizdat release of Cave Story was just fine! The dialog in the game is spare by nature, but every character had a distinctive voice, and any weird turns of phrase were for atmosphere or for their own sake rather than for want of a writer and editor.
If Nicalis didn't have the internal resources to write a good translation, they should have just bought republishing rights from the original patch volunteers. I don't know, maybe there was some good reason why they couldn't, but I'd have appreciated something; it's just embarrassing when the script in the paid version is inferior to the free one.
Okay, back to the writing. Missed that year-end mark I was trying to hit, but I'll be done soon. TAKKA TAKKA TAKKA.