Interview:GDC 09: Chatting with Nintendo’s Rich Amtower: Difference between revisions

!style="width:85%" align="left" valign="top"|It’s interesting. The localization process as a whole raises those questions over and over again. Like, if there’s a reason to keep Japanese in hte game, if there’s something about the setting that makes it appropriate to the game title, then we keep that Japanese in there. The development team comes to us wanting to make a title that’s designed for an American audience. Not necessarily for the pure Japanophiles, but for the whole American audience. They want the game to have the same impact for American gamers that it had for Japanese gamers; to get the same impact you need to have the language carried across so there’s no gap in understanding.<br><br>One of the songs, for example, uses audio cues to tell you how to do things. So that song had to be translated. And it was all done with the development team; they cared passionately how it was going to look in America. We went to Japan to do the voice recording with them. They just poured over everything we did to make sure it was appropriate for the game. And then we ended up sending all of our links back to Tsunku in Japan. He took care of all the recordings, so he got all of the vocalists. He put his stamp of approval on the vocals, sent them to us and we listened to them and were like “Yeah, he’s done this. He’s done this well.” So, I mean all of it basically got vetted through the development team, through Tsunku himself. All this stuff, all the way down the line, was designed to give U.S. gamers the same experience that Japanese gamers had.<br><br>We actually talked about whether it would be feasible to put the Japanese songs as an unlockable in there, and the team was really into the idea. But memory constraints on the DS cart made it not possible.