Naruto: Rise of the Ninja

[Zeus]

This is a pretty damned good game, I'm quite surprised. It's far better than the straight fighting games we've been getting...and it's made by Ubisoft. That's a bit of a shock to me, I woulda figured it would take a Japanese company to make something like this.

If you're not sure how it works, it's a GTA-style game where Konoha is this big place that you can just explore and do either main or side missions in. The side missions are random stuff but the main stuff follows the storyline of the show very closely (I just beat Kiba in the Chuunin Exam 3rd round preliminaries) complete with cut-scenes from the show tossed in around your "fights" with a lot of main characters (I've already fought Kakashi, Orichimaru, and Kiba).

The entire town hates you in the beginning so you've got about 150 or so people walking around town with a symbol above their heads to indicate whether or not they hate you or are friendly with you. The more you complete side and main quests, the more people will be friendly with you. If they're friendly, they'll actually give you hints on what to do to complete your current mission, main or side (they really help with some of the side ones). Also, the more missions you complete the more experience points you get which you can use to learn new combos and jutsus (right now, Naruto only has the Sexy and Kage Benshin jutsus) for the battle scenes and you can even upgrade the power of the jutsus.

The battles scenes are a quasi-fighting engine sort of like the other Naruto fighting games except it's more based on using combos and building up your power to use your jutsus and even a "rage" mode where you attack but can't get hurt. Apparently you can even play through some parts of the games with other characters (right now you can actually pay 500 MS points to get Jiraya and Sarutobi as playable characters; yeah, like I'd pay for that) but I'm not there yet so I don't know how it works. Also haven't tried out the online with the leaderboards so not sure how that works yet either. I'm just going throught he main mode.

It's definitely a step up from the other Naruto games and I think it's great for fans of the series. Give 'er a shot. I haven't tried out the new DS one that's supposed to be along the same lines. It was made by Tomy the guys who made all those fighting games.

[Eric]

Oh did you get the Japanese voices?

[Zeus]

Oh did you get the Japanese voices?

I had the voices the day they came out, almost a month before I actually got the game. SOOOOOO much better

[Blotus]

Oh did you get the Japanese voices?

I had the voices the day they came out, almost a month before I actually got the game. SOOOOOO much better

B-but... he's a ninja-Ninja-NINJA! Buh-lee-vit!

[SineSwiper]

On a side note, has anybody braved through the later dubbed episodes to see if they've improved the voice acting, or at least the dialogue? I seem to remember that they really toned down (or erased) the whole "Believe it" thing because it was such a running joke.

Hell, at least they got some semi-decent dubbing with DBZ after the first season. Still sucked with some characters (Frieza), but it was tolerable.

[Don]

The whole 'Believe it' thing is a common thing in Japanese stuff that is supposed to give characters flavor. It's kind of like how in Chrono Cross all the character talked slightly differently because they never had time to actually develop any of them so that was supposed to be the characterization. It's one of these things that's better off not being translated. I noticed in the Chinese version they pretty much just never translated it to begin with because it sounds dumb unless you're looking at like the Japanese 101 fan translated versions.

Another good example would be in One Piece, when Luffy uses his moves it's always Rubber Rubber XXX in Japanese. In the Chinese version it's only Rubber XXX because doubling up the adjective doesn't make it sound any better in Chinese. I'm not sure if they keep it in the America version, but it seems like that Rubber Rubber XXX wouldn't sound right. A lot of wannabe fan translators still keep the double Rubber in the Chinese versions.

[Blotus]

I noticed in the Chinese version they pretty much just never translated it to begin with because it sounds dumb unless you're looking at like the Japanese 101 fan translated versions.

How would you translate various slurring, lisps, and accents into Chinese anyway? You may be talking about Naruto here, but let's say we're translating Harle's French accent into Chinese... or any other character's speech traits. Chinese text seems pretty rigid, as far as I can tell from the couple of years I studied Mandarin.

[Don]

In Chinese we usually play around the many way to say 'I' to distinguish things you mentioned instead of actually messing with dialogues. Part of being a good translator is knowing when to quit when you can't win. We actually have dialects for just about everything but even to most Chinese readers, a unique dialect would look like jibberish. Something like OP's "mmm-hmm-mm-mm-mm" (e.g. Luffy while eating) would be more comprehensible than some of the stuff I've seen before that's supposed to represent unique Chinese dialogues.

There is one pretty famous martial arts fiction book where the main hero has 3 female companion, and whenever the country bumpkin girl speaks, what she says is utterly incomprehensible. Now it works out in that case because every time she talks everyone remarks that no one actually has any idea what she's trying to say and she only has about 3-4 lines in the novel. But obviously it'd be pretty tiring to read if you've any lengthy dialogue like that. For example in Azumanga Daioh, Osaka speaks perfectly normal Chinese. Since she has a ton of dialogue in the story, this is a good decision.

Reading Chinese translation is a good way to see how to fail to translate. Dragonball's Vegata -> Dell is like one of the most egregious errors ever made, since aside from Goku/Gohan, there is not a single character in DBZ whose name means anything in Chinese, and yet they felt it was necessary to change the name of probably the 2nd most important character in the story. The funny thing is that since Taiwan/China are pretty close with Japan you will pretty much never have a case of any translation that's flat out right. But the attempts to try to translate something that's unique to Japan to Chinese often leads to things that are hilariously dumb.

[Eric]

The whole 'Believe it' thing is a common thing in Japanese stuff that is supposed to give characters flavor. It's kind of like how in Chrono Cross all the character talked slightly differently because they never had time to actually develop any of them so that was supposed to be the characterization. It's one of these things that's better off not being translated. I noticed in the Chinese version they pretty much just never translated it to begin with because it sounds dumb unless you're looking at like the Japanese 101 fan translated versions.

Another good example would be in One Piece, when Luffy uses his moves it's always Rubber Rubber XXX in Japanese. In the Chinese version it's only Rubber XXX because doubling up the adjective doesn't make it sound any better in Chinese. I'm not sure if they keep it in the America version, but it seems like that Rubber Rubber XXX wouldn't sound right. A lot of wannabe fan translators still keep the double Rubber in the Chinese versions.

Gomu Gomu, not Rubber Rubber, you're killin me here Don.

[Don]

You sounds like one of the guys that would refer to Sigma as Shiguma because that's how the Japanese do it.

[Eric]

You sounds like one of the guys that would refer to Sigma as Shiguma because that's how the Japanese do it.

I'm just saying.

[Don]

Here's another example of translation fun. Dai-no-daiboken is a fairly successful standard fantasy RPG manga. Like anything that involves fantasy, the main hero uses a sword and has to have cool names for his moves. The author puts all the moves in English, and unlike most Japanese he has a passing knowledge of English so it's not like we're working with nonsensicial English names. In the order of descending power, his moves are:

Giga Slash
X Slash
Giga Break

Giga here refers to Gigadin (sp?), a lightning spell from DQ. Since the moves get progressively more powerful, they also have to sound more powerful. X Slash translates exactly into Chinese and doesn't need to be modified. Now obviously like any manga, moves are learned from the weakest to the strongest. So the first move we know about is Giga Break. There is no one word in Chinese that exactly captures the meaning of "Break" that still sounds sensible as a move. The first attempt to translate Giga Break resulted: "Lighting bolt times one billion." Obviously this was a failure. So the translator probably sat down and think about what this move does. At that point in the story, it seems like it'd be the strongest move there is. So the eventual name chosen became "Heaven Breaker".

But of course, like everything that involves fighting, stronger foes appear and better moves are needed. The problem is that even in the land of flowery speech, there aren't many things that sounds more powerful than "Heaven Breaker", and there's no real way to embellish a rather plain technique like "X Slash". So you actually have a dialogue where the bad guy says the hero is doomed because he ran out of MP to use X Slash and can only use his Heaven Breaker. To make things worse, Giga Slash got translated to something like "Lightning Swiftblade" which sounds even weaker than "X Slash". And yet the translation is not from a lack of knowledge. Both Giga and Break do not translate easily into Chinese.

One of my friend in college is Japanese and he works on a fansub team for a while. The hardest part of translating is coming up with things that actually get the intended effect across while still being somewhat correct. It's especially tough when you're dealing with something that employs nearly nonsensicial terms. For example Fate Stay Night creates moves by combining unbelievably cool adjectives together. One of the key spells in its universe roughly translates as the Innate Bounded Barrier, and the game use it to mean 'really cool force field' and it's so cool that even though you have no idea what it does, you know by its cool name that it's got to be something that's really powerful. So what do you translate it to? He settled on "Eigenmonde" (or maybe it was the German version for world, I forgot) after consulting a few different languages because there are no words in English exotic/cool enough to represent the spell. Of course monde means world, which is no longer an accurate translation of the word 'barrier', but there are no words that represent a barrier that's exotic enough to be used. Another group settled on Egomatrix, which is also a pretty good choice assuming you think of the matrix as The Matrix.

Of course, almost everyone else just call it the Innate Bounded Barrier, and believe that's the right way to translate it, which is technically correct, but there is absolutely nothing cool about an Innate Bounded Barrier compared to either of the other 2 translations.

[Zeus]

And another thread gets hijacked.... :-)