(More sprite stuff from yours truly. Although obviously Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were influences. Those aren’t throwaway characters either. One of these days I’ll flesh ‘em out.)

On topic, Final Fantasy V wasn’t officially released overseas until the turn of the century, years after its Japanese debut. Before this, fans fed up with waiting for a release date that looked like it would never come decided to translate it themselves, and post the patch on the internet for free.

What’s amazing is that they actually did localize the rest, so as to make any sense to an American audience. But translating a game is hard, and I’m guessing it was around the same time that they had to localize the main character’s names that they stopped giving a shit.

Now, while some purists still stick to the original translation, Square-Enix has long since been shamed into officially classifying the little guy as “Bartz” overseas. If you need a reason why, consult this week’s comic and the title of said comic. “Butz” was the literal translation, so I guess it can’t be helped. But the main villain’s name in Japan translates to: “Ekusudesu”. Say that out loud, and fast. Now remove the first and last “u”, as the Japanese language seems to have few words that don’t end in vowels and these are usually the first to go in the transition to English.

“Eksudes”. What word does that sound like? Let’s get some help from Dictionary.com:

ex⋅o⋅dus

–noun

1.

a going out; a departure or emigration, usually of a large number of people: the summer exodus to the country and shore.

Say it with me:

EX. O. DUS.

EXODUS.

The character himself is pretty 1-dimensional anyway, but his plans involve bringing all existence into a fathomless void. I’d like to see the RPGe original fan translators explain how “ExDeath” is supposed to make more sense. Looking at the original rom, you’d almost think Sakaguchi was nine years old.

Remember Cloud? Now imagine how seriously people would take Final Fantasy VII if he were named “Codpiece“. I understand there are some similar sounds, but these people just snapped Occam’s Razor clean in two and called it a day. This is the price we pay for fan-translations of unreleased games(a similar snafu utterly borks the big twist in Mother 3 as well). Surely the official material knows better, right? Even Final Fantasy XII knew to refer to his cameo as Exodus, and FFXII didn’t even know whether it wanted to be “Star Wars”, “Lord of the Rings” or “The Cure For Insomnia”.

Yet here we are in the year 2009, and both the Gameboy Advance port with the updated script AND Dissidia still call him that, based on clumsy translation by fans who didn’t know any better or didn’t care. That’s not just sloppy. That’s deliberately missing the point just to make an already stupid character somehow more ridiculous. Cardboard cut-out villains don’t have a lot going for them. My philosophy is, if he’s not that interesting, at least let the guy have a cool-sounding name.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.