Play Samurai Shodown Neo Geo Collection! The team at Digital Eclipse put a lot of work into this. To celebrate the release I'll share a thread about localizing Samurai Shodown V Perfect, the previously unreleased final Neo Geo game (more on that here: https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1265472772928462849). https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1288104528382791680

SSVP was released in 2020, but it's still a Neo Geo game, which meant we had to follow the rules and constraints of the original platform and game structure. because of this we had incredibly limited (text) character counts to work with.

For this game, you can have 16 characters (not words!) across, and 8 lines per cut scene. That's it. And the final character always gets deleted, so you only have 15 characters there. Now, in Japanese, you can do a lot with this, with kanji included. In English, not so much.

In Japanese, the writers really put nuance and a unique voice to every storyline, where Ukyo and Haohmaru have totally different ways of speaking, mannerisms, etc. But I'd estimate we had roughly 20% of the space to try to do the same thing in english. Here's an example.

Kusaregedo is one of SamSho's many tragic characters - turned into a demon because of the death of his wife, blocking out the fact it was he himself who killed her. In Japanese, he's got kind of a "tired old man" vibe to the way he talks, because he's tired of living.

Here's one of his cutscenes:
もう疲れたよ……火……」
飛脚の前から破沙羅は姿を消した。
あらゆる矛盾を受け入れよう。
全ての絶望を認めよう。
しかし捨てきれない感情があった。
未練。
それが全てであり、最後であり
「君の側に逝きたいんだ……」
As you can see, there's a lot there!!

In English, I managed this:
「ＫＡＧＡＲＩＢＩ，Ｉ　ＡＭ
ＴＩＲＥＤ，」　ＨＥ　ＳＡＩＤ，
ＩＧＮＯＲＩＮＧ　ＴＨＥ
ＤＥＬＩＶＥＲＹ　ＭＡＮ．
ＡＴＴＡＣＨＭＥＮＴ　ＴＯ　
ＴＨＥ　ＰＡＳＴ　ＫＥＥＰＳ　
ＨＩＭ　ＡＬＩＶＥ．「ＡＨ，
Ｉ　ＷＡＮＴ　ＴＯ　ＤＩＥ．」

I tried to impart some feeling and emotion, but you can see how comparatively little space there is to work with here. And in order to make the most of the space we had, we had to employ some little tricks from the old masters of localization.

For example, line breaks are "free." You can't break a word across them, but you can ignore a space. And since it's all monospace, a piece of punctuation automatically has some space in it, so you can use that to your advantage as well.

For example, I could write this:
ＳＯＧＥＴＳＵ　ＲＥＴＵＲＮＥＤＨＯＭＥ　ＴＯ　ＲＥＰＯＲＴ
"Sogetsu returned" is 16 characters, so the line will automatically break there. "home to report" will be on the next line without the need for a space.

And in my first example:
「ＫＡＧＡＲＩＢＩ，Ｉ　ＡＭ　　
ＴＩＲＥＤ，」　ＨＥ　ＳＡＩＤ，
I was able to ignore a space after the comma in the first line, because it's already spaced enough by the monospace font. I added a space after the 」end quote to pad that line to 16

If I had not padded it there, it would've stolen the I from the next line:
ＩＧＮＯＲＩＮＧ　ＴＨＥ
and would have looked like this:
ＴＩＲＥＤ，」ＨＥ　ＳＡＩＤ，Ｉ
ＧＮＯＲＩＮＧ　ＴＨＥ

So it was a constant delicate dance, making sure everything flowed correctly

Maybe this is too deep a dive on a specific subject, but it was impressive thinking about how folks used to translate games under these conditions back in the old days, and having to follow these conventions gave me respect for the localizers of old.

There's always a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on with game preservation, and if we do our job right, it's not obvious in the final project. For all our faults, we're always trying to get every detail as correct as we can within the constraints we've got before us.

Thanks again to the team, I hope you enjoy this story that finally, after 15 years, links Samurai Shodown V and VI, and carries on the legacy of Touru Sakurai, who wrote the excellent original Japanese text, and who sadly passed away before his words saw the light of day.

(p.s. earlier when I said Kusaregedo I meant Basara!! Oops!! I made the same mistake on retronauts, I confuse them all the time for reasons I can't explain)