It's quite the task to localise a game. It's even more of a task to localise a narrative game. But a game like Disco Elysium, which contains around 1.2 million words, many of them complex political, psychological, and fictional concepts, it's probably near-impossible.
Nevertheless, it has been done. Developer ZA/UM has announced that the Japanese version of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut will be heading to PC, PlayStation, and Steam simultaneously on the 25th August, 2022.
Spike Chunsoft, a Japanese publisher and developer known for the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series of games, will be publishing the Japanese localisation of the game on both Switch and PlayStation.
It appears as though the voice acting will remain in English, with the text translated, as ZA/UM has done with other localised languages.
Do you want to learn some really specific Japanese vocabulary through playing video games? Is Disco Elysium a good way to do that? Let us know in the comments.
[source spike-chunsoft.co.jp]
Comments 9
I'd be curious to find out if the Japanese cartridge has all updates baked in.
I tried the game out on PS5 a few weeks back via Gamefly and kind of a thing where I could definitely see the appeal but I really was just finding it too meandering and like it was hard to care about anything with how little context the game gives you.
Spike Chunsoft's a good publisher to align with for something like this though. They've been pretty good about bringing things over on both sides it seems like, shout out to the work they've done in bringing over a gigantic chunk of the Science Adventure series to the west for instance.
wtf how is it near impossible?
That's a lot of translation from what I've seen of the game. I would do an audiobook version but that's more of a visual novel than a game to me and those aren't worth my time.
@KateGray Does this inspire wistful admiration for you, or horror? I'm curious! A while back, I read this article about early efforts to translate Western science fiction into Chinese, which came to mind here. You could probably teach a course about inter-cultural conceptualization in the case of this game.
... I am not going to make a comment about the depravity of disco here.
@LCampoy8 Have you tried it yourself?
It’s a great game, great to hear more people can experience it. And I’m here to celebrate the depavity of disco!
Neat! That means I'll be able to buy it on the Japanese eShop (and play it in English, of course)!
@CANOEberry both. It's both. I'm intrigued to see how Western philosophy and absurdist comedy translates into Japanese, but then again, I do not speak Japanese, so I have no way of knowing. And I'm fairly sure there's a lot of wordplay, which is ridiculously hard to translate. It's quite the job!
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