RPGOne’s FF6: To play or not to play?
Originally published at The Second Dimension
Note: The original graphics for this review have been lost. If you have them, let me know.
One summer when I was a little kid, a swarm of yellow jackets decided to settle in the rocks near my house. Being young and dumb, the neighborhood kids and I proceeded to hammer at the rocks with basketballs and soccer balls.
The yellow jackets did not appreciate this.
I have a feeling this editorial will have similar effect on a minority of the gaming populace.
Three days ago, RPGOne released its biggest project since Dragon Quest I&II, the retranslation of Final Fantasy VI (FF6), released here as Final Fantasy III (FF3), as a joint project between RPGOne and Sky Render. This is a final release, though they do plan to release an update at some point.
I first heard of Sky Render’s efforts several years ago and commended him for his work – not because FF6 needed a retranslation, but because he was working on something he wanted to do and really putting his heart into it, and on this aspect, Sky Render, ChrisRPG and the rest of the team should be congratulated.
However, there’s another side to any project like this and that’s the release. With the 1.0 patch released only days ago, some players may be trying to decide if it’s worth going back to the old title they’ve beaten several, maybe dozens, of times in the past.
To be completely blunt: no.
I know, after the rave promotions you may have seen for this project and the banner that’s run at the bottom of Fantasy Anime for months, you may have been incredibly excited at the chance to play “Final Fantasy VI as it was meant to be.” Having played through an extended amount of this translation, I can firmly say this is not how FF6 was meant to be.
The most glaring issue with this game is its script. I know, it may be shocking that a fan translation to correct a commercial translation could come out worse than the commercial translation, but this one did and didn’t.
In 1996, having recently migrated to the internet from the old BBS days, I found a very cool group of people on the Final Fantasy Mailing List (FFML) which I was very active on. I was a good little netizen: I loved Squaresoft, vehemently hated everything not by Squaresoft, had a FF3 based nick and had beaten FF3 and Chrono Trigger over 40 times.
Imagine my shock when it was one day brought to the list’s attention that Ted Woolsey’s translation of the FF3 script could be, gasp, wrong. This really upset me and for a long time I was convinced somehow the Woolsey translation must be wrong or bad. Sites popped up listing all the “Woolseyisms” in FF3, and his work became something of an internet joke.
Having played this retranslation, I have gained a new appreciation for the work Woolsey did on FF3. Why, you ask? Because he managed to take a game as bland and dry as any later Squaresoft RPG and give it a soul – something I’d thought only God was supposed to be able to do.
If I were writing a collegiate paper researching FF6 as a text, Sky Render’s script would be the way to go. It is incredibly formal, devoid of fun and as rigidly close to the original script as one can possibly be.
It’s so rigid it doesn’t even bother to translate people’s rank from Japanese, something that’s normally standard in professional translations of movies and games. This means you’ll need to strap on your katana and drag out your kabuki robes as a clearly western man in clearly western armor is addressed by a clearly western army as “shogun.”
“I feel like Ben Stein is reading the script to me,” Elizabeth Moore, a Toronto resident, said.
“Some stuff was so literal in this translation it just made me not want to play it,” she said. “The characters seem so void of their personalities.”
Not a flattering comment for a game that has long been prized for its heart.
What’s worse, should you choose to compare FF3 and FF6, you’ll see that almost all lines convey the exact same meaning with only slightly different wording. And often times the new wording only serves to further ebb away at anything resembling personality the characters may have.
Aside from the script, the retranslation was deemed necessary because of changes FF3 made to monster names, items and menus. Certainly, this is the strongest argument for retranslation, though it makes one wonder why simply correcting the English game wasn’t a viable solution. Tools like Yousei’s FF3 Editor could have made such work a one day job.
“Frankly, I don’t see the complaint,” Erik Moran, a Novi Resident, said. “The only thing the FF3 translation had different was some skill names, balance changes and changes to dialog.”
“After reading retranslated dialog, the people who translated FF3 did the right thing. The way FF6’s writers just haphazardly throw curse words into the dialog is downright unnatural.”
While the full, new names are in the game, programming issues have made them pointless. Items and monster names in RPGOne’s FF6 only show the first 9 letters of any names – expect on the equipment and accessory screens. This means where FF3 said “Phoenix Down,” the new translation by RPGOne will display “Phoenix D.” Hardly an improvement.
The menu was also expanded to fit long words like “Accessory” and “Configure” onto the main menu. This forced all other text left, which with the addition of class names, makes the game look even more cramped than a WonderSwan remake.
“The character class names were interesting, but useless since we can’t change them anyway,” Matt Martinez said.
RPGOne also left in some of the options removed from FF3 to save screen space. “The missing option which enables players to customize controls holds the same as class names - useless,” Martinez said. “We lived with the controls as they were, and they were fine.”
Another technical issue with this game is the fonts. The released patch uses an extremely narrow font. A wider font version is available, but was not released since it doesn’t show all text. The font is incredibly narrow, averaging only 3 pixels wide per character. While it may look fine on a monitor, anyone with plans to play on anything less than a 40″ television is out of luck.
“The font looks real nice on ZSNES and that’s about it. It looks like garbage on the TV,” Moore said.
The tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno is being forced to read RPGOne’s FF6 on a 20″ television for eternity.
The item and menu font, by contrast, is an extremely wide, fixed width font set at 8 pixels per character. This creates a stark, unprofessional contrast between the infinitesimal item description font and the items.
In 1998, nobody would have batted an eye at such problems, but translations have come a long way. After such projects as De-Jap’s Bahamut Lagoon and MetalHawk’s Treasure Hunter G and even RPGOne’s Dragon Quest I&II, better font work should be expected of any project receiving as much hype as FF6.
Aside from the name changes and new script, it’s the same Final Fantasy you played in 1994, and possibly again in 1999 or 2002 – the years Square has released official translations.
“It’s a retranslation of a game that really didn’t need it,” Moran said.
On a last note, this project’s release was pushed back four months since the projected end of 2003 date. Compared to Working Designs, this may seem like lighting, but it makes one wonder what RPGOne did these last four months – the time was obviously not spent polishing up FF6.
The bottom line: it’s spring time. Go outside instead of replaying FF6 in a fugly font. Take up mountain biking or get a job digging ditches.
Virtually anything you can think of would be a more rewarding experience.