I'm wondering if they're any Aksys employees hanging around that can explain what's up with Arc System Works.
For all of you just tuning in, I'll do a quick recap:
Arc Sys (not to be confused with Aksys) is the company behind Guilty Gear and BlazBlue:
Right now, the sequel to Guilty Gear Sign: Revelator, is about to come out.
Anyways, apparently Aksys, the publisher for Guilty Gear, just announced at a thing called Momocon, that there will be no English dub for the new Guilty Gear. At all. Apparently they're removing all the previous English voices.
Actually, stuff like this isn't new for Arc. BlazBlue came out with a bang with a great localization back in 2009 with Aksys. It was one of the few anime games that had a great dub. This continued with the sequel, Continuum Shift.
But then, Extend came out. The released a Blazblue 2.5 called Extend shortly after the original release. Well, shortly being a relative term: Extend released in the US a whopping 2 months after the Japanese version did, despite the original version releasing in the US less than a month after the Japanese version.
Extend was basically a DLC and balance update, with a little bit extra added to story mode. Oddly, Aksys was dropped from the localization and replaced with an unknown company called "Strangely Compelling."
The thing about Extend was that it had pretty much no quality control. The characters randomly break into Japanese for no apparent reason during the story mode. Dialogue has typos, misspellings, doesn't match with the dub...the translators leaving place holder lines in by accident....all on top of a poor translation. But hey, it's a fighting game. Except:
They didn't get all the same voice actors back; several characters ended managing the unique feat of having multiple voice actors at once. In battle. It was interesting watching Hazama talk in different voices.
But hey, it was a quick and dirty DLC update. Apparently, they just didn't have time to do it right?
Then BB:ChronoPhantasm came out. Well, this time, despite coming out 5 months after the JP release, there will still massive issues with the localization. Listen to this versus this:
(Note: I apologize for not being able to provide a better example; Chronophantasma lacked a sound test this time.) This time they couldn't even get the effects on voices correct.
Aside from that, the English version cut content, called "Library Mode" because it would have been too difficult for "Strangely Compelling" to translate. We had, once again, screwed up voice actors. And, poorly translated dialogue, and so on.
Arc Sys really cheaped out on the localization in the end.
Now, let's look at Guilty Gear: Guilty Gear sign had a passable localization. It wasn't really good, but it at least lacked most of the bizarre technical issues Blazblue suffered in the past and didn't cut out content.
The solution to this? Apparently they've decided to completely eliminate English voices in the new release. Sure, the dub wasn't great though, but this takes the cake. Especially since the game has a nice, long, movie mode...and the actual game portion already had most of the English lines done in Sign, anyways.
So, to summarize: Arc System works for their two flagship titles started off with doing proper localization jobs, and then for sequels cheaped out with some unknown company that can't help but put audio glitches, typos, unprofessional place holders, cut-content, an in some cases, untranslated dialogue, that makes even the most barebones localization look good. Now they're cutting the English dub out of a game that already had most of it's dub done.
That was a long recap!
So, are there any AkSys employees around that can possibly give us some perspective on what's going on here? I understand that GG is niche, but I've seen indie games that have better localization than what's been coming out of Arc. The cheapness of the localization seems to be on a whole new level! I would like to know if anyone has any first hand experience with this. Not being able to do QA, among other things, is pretty horrendous.
[Notes] While Aksys does not do localization for ArcSys anymore, they do still do the North American publishing, which causes confusion.
For all of you just tuning in, I'll do a quick recap:
Arc Sys (not to be confused with Aksys) is the company behind Guilty Gear and BlazBlue:
Right now, the sequel to Guilty Gear Sign: Revelator, is about to come out.
Anyways, apparently Aksys, the publisher for Guilty Gear, just announced at a thing called Momocon, that there will be no English dub for the new Guilty Gear. At all. Apparently they're removing all the previous English voices.
Actually, stuff like this isn't new for Arc. BlazBlue came out with a bang with a great localization back in 2009 with Aksys. It was one of the few anime games that had a great dub. This continued with the sequel, Continuum Shift.
But then, Extend came out. The released a Blazblue 2.5 called Extend shortly after the original release. Well, shortly being a relative term: Extend released in the US a whopping 2 months after the Japanese version did, despite the original version releasing in the US less than a month after the Japanese version.
Extend was basically a DLC and balance update, with a little bit extra added to story mode. Oddly, Aksys was dropped from the localization and replaced with an unknown company called "Strangely Compelling."
The thing about Extend was that it had pretty much no quality control. The characters randomly break into Japanese for no apparent reason during the story mode. Dialogue has typos, misspellings, doesn't match with the dub...the translators leaving place holder lines in by accident....all on top of a poor translation. But hey, it's a fighting game. Except:
They didn't get all the same voice actors back; several characters ended managing the unique feat of having multiple voice actors at once. In battle. It was interesting watching Hazama talk in different voices.
But hey, it was a quick and dirty DLC update. Apparently, they just didn't have time to do it right?
Then BB:ChronoPhantasm came out. Well, this time, despite coming out 5 months after the JP release, there will still massive issues with the localization. Listen to this versus this:
(Note: I apologize for not being able to provide a better example; Chronophantasma lacked a sound test this time.) This time they couldn't even get the effects on voices correct.
Aside from that, the English version cut content, called "Library Mode" because it would have been too difficult for "Strangely Compelling" to translate. We had, once again, screwed up voice actors. And, poorly translated dialogue, and so on.
Arc Sys really cheaped out on the localization in the end.
Now, let's look at Guilty Gear: Guilty Gear sign had a passable localization. It wasn't really good, but it at least lacked most of the bizarre technical issues Blazblue suffered in the past and didn't cut out content.
The solution to this? Apparently they've decided to completely eliminate English voices in the new release. Sure, the dub wasn't great though, but this takes the cake. Especially since the game has a nice, long, movie mode...and the actual game portion already had most of the English lines done in Sign, anyways.
So, to summarize: Arc System works for their two flagship titles started off with doing proper localization jobs, and then for sequels cheaped out with some unknown company that can't help but put audio glitches, typos, unprofessional place holders, cut-content, an in some cases, untranslated dialogue, that makes even the most barebones localization look good. Now they're cutting the English dub out of a game that already had most of it's dub done.
That was a long recap!
So, are there any AkSys employees around that can possibly give us some perspective on what's going on here? I understand that GG is niche, but I've seen indie games that have better localization than what's been coming out of Arc. The cheapness of the localization seems to be on a whole new level! I would like to know if anyone has any first hand experience with this. Not being able to do QA, among other things, is pretty horrendous.
[Notes] While Aksys does not do localization for ArcSys anymore, they do still do the North American publishing, which causes confusion.