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Square Enix sends cease and desist letter to FF Type 0 translation group

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Dark_castle

Junior Member
It's more the principle of the thing at this point. You've gotta be mad for a reason.

I mean, what other thing can I blame for me yelling at every pedestrian that stops to ask me for the time? Gotta have something.

Principle? You mean the notion of protecting one's intellectual property from potentially being monetized by others?

People are kinda stupid sometimes.
 
I've never really understood why translating something is costly? I mean I don't speak two languages but I feel like if I did it's literally just taking a sentence and rewriting it. How hard is that? I could translate a book in like a day. How many books is the text of this game equivalent to?

I worked on the programming side of localization on a game that wasn't particularly heavy. It required ~3 months of work which included fixing UI errors related to different font sizes, fixing game bugs that weren't caught for previous territories (or we allowed to slide for those territories), which also meant there had to be QA testing the game again, and there had to be localizers, and QA people to verify the localizations, and possibly artists for any textures that had text on them, etc etc. All these people had to be paid. The costs for a text heavy game like a JRPG are just multiplied.
 

Timeaisis

Member

Just read this. Great write up. Here I was ready to be ready to hate on SE some more, but in reality, this paints a pretty different picture.

Seems like this Sky fellow went around his entire team to release this thing early as a big "up yours" to SE. It sounded like they might have settled on some mutually beneficial agreement had he not done that. But, seeing as how Type 0 was to been announced for the west, SE didn't really have much other course of action at that point, since the patch was already out in the wild. If he had just waited a little longer this whole thing might have ended a lot better for both parties.
 

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
I worked on the programming side of localization on a game that wasn't particularly heavy. It required ~3 months of work which included fixing UI errors related to different font sizes, fixing game bugs that weren't caught for previous territories (or we allowed to slide for those territories), which also meant there had to be QA testing the game again, and there had to be localizers, and QA people to verify the localizations, and possibly artists for any textures that had text on them, etc etc. All these people had to be paid. The costs for a text heavy game like a JRPG are just multiplied.

Don't forget certification specific localization (i.e. SCEA and SCEE have different requirements for certain text), cert submission fees for each territory, submitting to the various ratings boards in each additional territory...never mind any additional QA work that could come out of all that.
 
Good read.

I'd have to say this Sky fellow is the main cause of a lot of the bad vibes going on here. The way this story reads he intentionally released the patch, when it wasn't ready, as a massive middle finger to SE and a way of purposely biting into the Western release's sells. (Something a real fan wouldn't do)

He knew it wasn't ready and didn't care what his team or anybody else thought. Kinda sad all around cause the way this reads SE was actually trying to figure something out and the so called 'fans' burned them.
 

Nice write-up.

Hmm.. I didn't know that Squeenix reached out to Sky under NDA whilst the translation was in progress. This changes quite a bit.

I didn't really see any missing text and/or untranslated vidoes throughout my two complete playthroughs of the game though, as Adam states in your article. It was pretty flawless in my opinion.

The following is a bit of an unpopular and selfish opinion, but in some way I can almost understand why Sky did what he did with regards to the translation, legal ramifications be damned. All those hundreds and hundreds of man hours from his team would've have gone to complete and utter waste if he had complied with Squeenix.
 

Renpatsu

Member
I didn't really see any missing text and/or untranslated vidoes throughout my two complete playthroughs of the game though, as Adam states in your article. It was pretty flawless in my opinion.
Legal quandaries aside I think it's pretty clear from playing through the game that the translation and programming that went into the patch elevate it into being one of the more technically proficient video game translation patches in awhile.
 

Stuart444

Member
I didn't really see any missing text and/or untranslated vidoes throughout my two complete playthroughs of the game though, as Adam states in your article. It was pretty flawless in my opinion.

Might not be 'messing text or untranslated videos' that people on the team were unhappy with? Could easily be punctuation or grammar issues or maybe some wanted to change the translation a little.

The other team members (based on the article) seemed to want it to be perfect/near perfect so I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to change, even the smallest things that casual players playing through the game/patch might not notice.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
Just noticed Sky has a Paypal donate button on his website. That's not cool, also.

So does Durante and we know he's the main reason we bought Dark Souls on PC such as some who went out and bought legit copies of FFT0 in order to rip them and play them on their PSP's or emulators on PC. It can go both ways but I really don't know all of Sky or Durante's doings. I'm merely pointing that out for some context.
 
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