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On Ramen and White Noise: Kiki Trick Preview Video Subtitled

As someone who's both a (hobbyist) Japanese translator and a gamer, the sorts of projects I like to take on when the two pastimes converge tend to skew a little bit strange and neglected, at least in terms of popularity. Whether it's literature, videos, or actual games, I tend to avoid the popular stuff not out of some stereotypical hipster dislike of the mainstream, but simply because it's already been done. Unless the existing translation has some serious errors or I can otherwise contribute new information in English, I usually find it to be a waste of my time to work on popular things, or at least to publish any work I might produce related to them. Instead, I like to work on stuff that not only is (at least relatively) obscure and lacking information, but I feel is worthy of better promotion and attention on a larger scale. I don't feel like it's quite a duty of mine to go out and translate things that nearly nobody aside from native Japanese speakers are likely to know about, but I take pleasure in at least giving people the chance to talk about new and interesting Japanese games by giving them information they can use aside from just guesswork based on visuals. It feels like it gives my skills at least some sort of purpose and reason to use them outside the academic contexts I'm usually confined to, although I'm hardly lacking in fulfilling work outside of that realm, either.

That's just as true as it always has been with the video for Kiki Trick embedded above that I decided to subtitle. You'll get the basic gist of the game and then some if you watch it and the banter between Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and longtime designer Yoshio Sakamoto, but it's basically a game that's all about how well you can apply your listening comprehension skills in unusual situations. It's a game that first caught my interest when I heard about it on the most recent edition of 8-4 Play, not the least because it's one of those rare video games that focuses on sound and not, you know, video. It's certainly not the first game to do that and it's not even the first game from Nintendo to have gameplay revolve so deeply around sound, but beings as sound design in video games is very rarely the crux of a game's gameplay, any game that does attempt to do that always has my attention. In this instance, there's still a lot of visual information to be had in Kiki Trick, too, but as you'll notice, it's used to enhance sound's place in the game and brings added variety to the minigames.

Of course, it's almost all but certain that Nintendo is never going to release a localized version of Kiki Trick outside of Japan. While the overall premise of the game itself is pretty universal and could be applied to virtually any language, the very fact that its design has to hinge on listening comprehension means that when Japanese was picked as the central language, the game was going to be designed explicitly around that language and its quirks. Indeed, everything from the game's title (as I wrote in the GB wiki, it's a portmanteau with an actual Japanese word) to even how you figure out the answers in certain spots (ie: when Iwata is referring to the beat of a sentence, he's explicitly referring to how words are deliberately, equally paced in the Japanese language) make the game intrinsically Japanese in a way that few games can really claim to be. Many of the actual minigames themselves would work fine in English if a lot of new content was generated for them in the same framework, but otherwise a conventional text and vocal localization is all but useless for Kiki Trick. The reason why I still translated the interview knowing that, then, is that I always feel that more information about a (probably) Japan-only game is always better than one, especially in instances where there might actually be something to like about the game. The game itself and its structure is probably more one trick than some of Sakamoto's other works like Warioware and Rhythm Tengoku, but as probably one of the very last Nintendo-published games in Japan this side of Rhythm Heaven Fever, I'm still certainly curious enough to pick up a copy and give it a whirl at some point. Nintendo has had a habit for a while now of sending off its hardware with games made by Sakamoto and his team, so if nothing else, it'll be nice to see how they usher in the end of one console before commencing work on the next one.

Hopefully this video is of use to those who might have been curious about Kiki Trick as a result of the Nintendo Direct conference in December. If you've got any questions about my translation work or any especially Japanese-centric linguistic aspects of the game, feel free to shoot me a question. Beyond that, this post has no real reason to exist other than to advertise my work and propagandize my general worldview about games. But that's also kind of the point when it comes to blogs on this site in general, no? Take that for what it's worth, I suppose.

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