Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past – Official interview about localisation

If you’re familiar about Dragon Quest VII, you know that the original script is quite simply massive. Naturally, the script of Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past (the Nintendo 3DS remake) is as massive (if not even more) than the original. Localising it definitely wasn’t easy: in fact, it was such a daunting task that Square-Enix originally didn’t even intend to release the remake outside Japan.

Therefore, learning how the localisation team managed to make it happen, especially with the European languages translations on top of it all, makes for a pretty interesting read. If that’s something you would love to read, you’re in luck: today, Nintendo shared an official interview with Oli Chance (from Shloc Ltd.), who worked on the localisation of Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past.

This interview covers various topics, including how much work was involved in bringing such a massive game to the west, how the 2016 translation differs from the original one, the essential qualities of Dragon Quest VII they had to keep in the localisation, the colloquial touches in the translation, and more.

Here’s an excerpt:

The idea is never to poke fun at a given accent or dialect, but to enjoy what it can bring to our world, and how it can help us to tell the story in more ways than with just plain exposition. In the case of the people of Emberdale, the Yorkshire angle helped underline what was serious about their situation, but also gave us a way to add some lightness that was otherwise hard to bring to this oppressive, dark, volcanic region.

Click here to check out the full thing!