I Can’t Shut Up About Final Fantasy IV DS: Translation Controversy

I warned you I wouldn’t stop jabbering once I got my hands on this game. Say goodbye to Handheld Age and witness the birth of Final Fantasy IV DS Age!

All right, I’m not that crazy. But just you wait.

As of my last bit of adventuring, I iced the Dark Dragon and turned Edward the sissy-boy into Edward the sissy-man. Now he gets to sleep in the beautiful kingdom of Troia while I bust my ass to build a ladder to the moon.

Some fan-types are miffed by the game’s re-translation, citing it as overblown and silly. I say, look at the source material.

Final Fantasy II/IV on the Super Nintendo had a pretty wrecked translation. Not much of anything made sense and the characters came across as fantasy storybook stereotypes.

Over fifteen years later we have Final Fantasy IV DS with a polished translation that makes sense and the characters come across as…fantasy storybook stereotypes.

In other words, it doesn’t bother me that Kain and Cecil talk like flamers. They’ve always been delightfully overblown. Cecil is conflicted about his oh so very dark past and Kain just wants to sleep with his best friend’s girlfriend (possibly he does when Golbez kidnaps her; there are fanfics my friends, oh are there ever fanfics). It doesn’t surprise me that there is a severe allergy to sentence contractions going around in the latest incarnation of Final Fantasy IV.

RPGamer mostly agrees with me:

“The DS translation takes the obnoxiously slangy, five-word-long-sentence filled translation of the GBA version and corrects it to something closer to the quality of Final Fantasy XII or Dragon Quest VIII.“

Whoa! I wouldn’t go that far. DragonQuest VIII’s localisation was pretty brilliant. Final Fantasy IV DS’s translation is certainly competent but no half-drunk king is going to grudgingly praise the heroes for being “duly expedient.”

I admittedly am interested to see where things go with the inevitable Final Fantasy VI remake for the DS or the DS’s future cousin. Woolsey’s initial translation gave the characters life and the Gameboy Advance remake fine-tuned the script. It would not do to have everyone suddenly talking like medieval wankers.

We shall see.

(Image copyright Square-Enix)