From LauncherWP: How the greatest Japanese RPGs of the ‘90s came to the West
When Sony’s first PlayStation console hit living rooms in 1994, it ushered in new ways for video game developers to tell stories: dazzling 3D graphics, pristine 2D sprite work, CD audio and vast troves of storage space thanks to ditching cartridges in favor of CDs.
The game’s writers, Soraya Saga and “Xenoblade Chronicles” creator Tetsuya Takahashi, had sky-high ambitions for “Xenogears.” They saw an opportunity for the JRPG genre to explore new themes, packing the game with religious allusions, commentary on Western culture and philosophical themes drawing from Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Among the hires was young American localizer Alexander O. Smith. In the midst of completing a classical Japanese literature Ph.D. program, Smith came across a job posting at Square’s California office, and with his future stretching before him, he decided to leave the program early with a master’s and started polishing his resume. While he’d been a gamer for a long time, Smith’s experience with JRPGs was limited, so he borrowed a PlayStation from a friend and rented “Final Fantasy VII.
“Oh, my god, what have I gotten myself into?” Smith remembers thinking. He questioned his decision to move to Japan to translate video games. “I was literally making more money at grad school,” he said, raising the issue of an industry that still undervalued the experience and effort required to localize games.
“During the dark ages [of localization],” Smith said, “I’m picturing a guy alone in a room, just cranking out words. No matter how good a writer you are, you’re not going to produce your best material under those circumstances.” With a string of Western hits on their hands, Square was beginning to recognize the value of high-quality localizations, leading to newfound collaboration between the Japanese creators and Western localizers.
“When you start thinking about it from that perspective,” Smith said, “it provides answers to a lot of questions debated endlessly by the fan base.” By the time Smith — the second White foreigner hired after Honeywood — arrived at the Tokyo office in 1999, he said he didn’t experience the level of prejudice. “At least not that I noticed,” he said. “Perhaps Richard paved the way for me, or attitudes, in general, had changed by the time I joined? I did startle a cleaning lady into yelping and fleeing from me when I walked around a corner, but I am rather tall.
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