Here - > http://atlus.com/p4arena/
Not as cool as the Japanese site, but it'll do. There are some character bios and plot details on there, but nothing too exciting.
Game » consists of 9 releases. Released Aug 07, 2012
Here - > http://atlus.com/p4arena/
Not as cool as the Japanese site, but it'll do. There are some character bios and plot details on there, but nothing too exciting.
I don't understand why they can't just copy the exact same thing that's on the Japanese site, but in English. They tried to do a half-ass version of the Catherine Japanese site a while back but then it just changed to the Japanese version translated, which was naturally much better. Plus, hiding characters that have already been announced is silly.
@FluxWaveZ: According to the source code, the Japanese site is powered by some high level flash program while the English one is pretty basic version. Not sure how to say this but it could be that the USA side can't use what the Japanese side has due to transfer problems or maybe cost since Atlus is still limited to what they can pay for.
@metalsnakezero said:
@FluxWaveZ: According to the source code, the Japanese site is powered by some high level flash program while the English one is pretty basic version. Not sure how to say this but it could be that the USA side can't use what the Japanese side has due to transfer problems or maybe cost since Atlus is still limited to what they can pay for.
Yeah, I suspect it's this. There's probably some Flash licensing costs that they probably don't feel like paying more than necessary for as a small company and potentially even some other licensing issues for parts of the original Japanese content depending on how it's implemented. Then it would probably take time and money to localize the art assets and interface, parts of which might be tricky to do if they didn't properly prepare them for other languages ahead of time (it happens a lot more even in the modern game industry than you might suspect). My main point is that I bet people crunched a bunch of numbers, some of which we probably aren't aware of, and long concluded that just whipping up a basic page instead would probably be ideal. It might not be ideal, but at least they're not outright hurting game sales, either, from the looks of it.
If nothing else, just to put in perspective, Atlus USA's sites are better than what they used to be. Try visiting the official Pro Fishing Challenge page sometime to remember what conventional web design looked like circa eight years ago.
@Pepsiman: OMG, that Home button should be on the left side!
Anyway yeah, for what we got is still pretty good site. Also the game is coming out in like 3 or 4 months so I wouldn't want them spending time on a site for too long.
@FluxWaveZ: It still takes resources to Photoshop and otherwise translate stuff from the original language into a target one. That's all I was saying. Localization isn't a term that's just used for games and I meant it in that broader sense. And I bet in the case of somebody like Atlus USA where your staffing numbers are pretty small, it would be the same people translating any hypothetical sites in addition to their usual game duties. When you work in the localization department at a developer/publisher, your services as a bilingual speaker tend to also be rendered for services outside of just dialog and interface translation in games. And all of that's assuming Atlus USA is working under ideal conditions in terms of resources.
Put another way, I bet they know that their Japanese sites tend to be prettier and would probably bring those over if they were capable of doing so. What reasons they might have for not bringing them over aside from the ones already stated, I don't know, but they're not blind to what their parent company is up to, though.
@FluxWaveZ: The English sites as they are now are probably being taken care of by interns and the like, sure. But I wasn't talking about those sites. I was telling you about the potential workload involved in taking the original Japanese sites and keeping them structurally and visually intact in English, or basically what you'd prefer to see on their official sites. I do know that they maintain at least a translator intern or two, so at that point they might get involved, but the general principles of the rest of the process still stand.
Really, the discussion is all moot since I doubt they'll ever come out and say one way or the other why the English sites don't generally resemble the Japanese ones. I just thought I'd interject my own thoughts in the thread as a translator, but at the end of the day, whether that general knowledge meshes up with actual corporate practices in that regard is anybody's guess.
@Pepsiman: Oh, I know about the "Japanese site to the English site" issues now with those previous comments. I was merely responding to metalsnakezero's comment that made it seem that time spent on the site from Atlus USA's division was time taken away from the development of the game.
They've been updating the website and even though I think the Japanese site is aesthetically nicer, the English website isn't too bad, either. I particularly enjoy how you can go to any of the available character pages and click on a special in a character's move list to see a small video clip of how it looks.
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