Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 05

Is it That Time again?

Nothing stops the Endurance Run.

I have probably asked this before, but what is up with "THAT" in japanese media? I noticed it a lot in Persona 4 too. I think someone told me it's because Japanese language relies more on context so you wouldn't need to say what "THAT" is, so when it gets localised it seems really weird.

Well, my dreamcast is hooked up now. Time to dive into Shenmue again for myself. Like Dan, I beat this game when it came out and I can hardly remember any of it.

My mind was blown that Dan knew the latin com- means together. His knowledge of some things and ignorance of others blows me away, in a good way.

Is there a pending Quick Look for all the arcade games in Shenmue?

@alistercat: from my understanding, it's because the rest of the sentence is inferred. Like if you're in a shop you could just say "this." rather than "I would like to buy this, please".

There's an article about this exact thing in Shenmue: http://www.phantomriverstone.com/2016/09/unnatural-utterances-at-tomato.html

@alistercat: The way Japanese is said/written, it's usually best left -un-translated, as most Question/Answer types of dialogue are quite yoda-esque like "DO you know anything about X?" "About X, I do not know anything". It sounds weird to us, but in terms of the language it kinda fits. It's just most of the time the translator knows to keep the "About X" out of the english language conversation.

For a more related Shenmue example, it seems (without having access to it, or the Japanese language option myself), that the question is more "Do you remember anything about the the day the snow turned to rain?" with the answer "About that day (implied: that the snow turned to rain), I remember seeing a black car." which given the weird translation history of the game, may have been garbled up with many instances of "THAT day".

"Now we play the waiting game.......ah waiting game sucks, let's play Hungry, Hungry Hippos!"

Maybe we could make a list of all the things people wonder if they will ever find. We could check them off as we go. I haven't played this game so I don't know.

So far it's:

Feed the kitten(I added that one cause I'm worried about it) / even name the kitten (from@gregalor)

Find the zoom

Find the tilt(?) is this different from zoom?

Find a map/ find their way around/ not get lost (?)

Find/ use the hint system

Find all the great stuff in your room that is free.

Added from @EarlGreigh:

That they can go into the Abe Store

If Vinny will ever turn right at the phone booth.

From@capncrunch:

Try the flashlight they bought.

From@daro

Use Y to open the notebook

@lanerobertlane: He isn't an idiot at all, just it seems his stubbornness excluded him from a lot of experiences that help form general knowledge for most people.

i swear the music in the casino was the super sonic racing song instrumental lol

@lanerobertlane: @poke__egg: Thank you for the insight. In persona 4 it always seemed kind of like the person was being intentionally mysterious by not saying what "THAT" is and instead referring to it as "THAT" usually followed by the character asking what they mean by "THAT".

It feels like the kind of people in real life who will word their sentences in order to bait you in to asking them about something rather than just saying what they want to say, but I've at least given japanese stuff the benefit of things not translating to english well.

There's a podcast called the Allusionist that talks about word etymology, FYI guys

For a console that only had about 24MB of RAM, they really packed in a lot of detail to every area.

...So much detail it's confounding these guys trying to traverse it all! Kinda funny that, them being stumped by a 16 year old Dreamcast game's world, in an era when we have giant open world games the size of GTAV, etc, lol.

whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Can somebody tell me if they (and I) are missing something or if you fail the old lady looking for that house quest once you sleep for the night?

Yeah, it kind of makes you wonder what the game would've been like had it been completely developed on Saturn (rather than being started on Saturn and moved to Dreamcast as it was). I don't recall exactly where I heard/read about this (maybe this postmortem, but I can't watch it right now), but I seem to remember them mentioning that either the system memory or the limited storage of the GD-ROM format (or maybe both) made it necessary for them to come up with ways to compress/optimize the manner in which building interiors and whatnot were generated, since they're all different. It seems like they were really jumping through hoops to get something this ambitious to work on Dreamcast.

Alex "Let's not disect Latin right now..."

Vinny "Ahhhhhhh..."

Dan "I like doing Latin it's fun!"

Alex "I wanna find this fucking bar."

Vinny "Yeah let's do that but let's also talk about..."

The child won't give things up and the parents have to COMpromise.

I love hawgs

They're never going to find them are they?

Military Guy X Tom = OTP!

'Shipping' is literally the dumbest shit ever. Where does this term even come from?

Ugh.. shipping..

@mmarsu said:

RelationSHIP. That's it.

@dovah: Following on from exploring Ryo's room, I'm bummed that they haven't looked around the dojo, or even anywhere else in the Hazuki Residence.

Also, when they were killing time why did Vinny turn and run away from the stairs near the park in Dobuita? Moments like that are frustrating to watch.

I need my Fanfic

its a shame how bad the video quality is for these videos.. Maybe Im just used to it running in an emulator, but Im sure the dreamcast didn't look this bad back in the day.

They were talking about a time skipping feature but that was not added until Shenmue 2 because people complained about having to wait so you guys just have to wait or get really good at arcade games. I spent so much time in the arcade when I played this. Also it is good to practice and level up your moves. Even if you have not been in a proper fight yet there will be a lot of them later in the game. You will also learn more moves from people or by finding hidden move scrolls.

It doesn't have 24MB. A Dreamcast just have 16MB of RAM. I have 16GB in my PC and phones have 1-4GB of RAM these days, it is really amazing what they do with just 16MB. But it was still a lot more powerful than a Playstation 1 which had just 2MB. N64 had 4MB or 8MB with the expansion card.

But maybe you were including the 8MB VRAM so I guess that is 24MB in total. There are 8GB VRAM graphics card these days, it is hard to imagine how they could do anything with just 8MB.

Tom x Kurita-san OTP. <3

@dagas: Any advice is pointless, they've already finished the ER.

I work in Japanese->English game localizations as a freelance translator, so let me add a few more technical wrinkles that can influence these sorts of things in addition to the more broad linguistic that's already been covered.

• Lack of documented context for lines in materials being translated. I've worked on about ten game localizations at this point and every developer and sometimes even every project from the same developer is different in terms of how its dialogue, UI text, etc. is compiled for translator use. I've had games that give very specific stage directions that help us imagine what's happening on screen as we write our material. I've had games that just give a simple label for who's saying what and when. And I've had games that didn't do either. You never really know what you're getting until you get the files and start digging in. Likewise, how much access you'll have to the development team to ask questions can vary wildly depending on various circumstances.
  
  In cases where contextual documentation is lacking and especially in nightmare scenarios where dialogue lines might not necessarily be arranged in sequential order—it happens more often than you think even today—sometimes we translators will play it safe upfront just so we're not necessarily adding any wrong information that might potentially mislead players in any number of ways, particularly when we don't otherwise have access to playable development builds to try and clarify things ourselves. Good translators will still find ways to write around those issues and then hopefully that polish will come during the editing phases as your material is examined by people further up the chain, but that's not always a guarantee. The vast majority of the time, you only have one shot to get a commercial translation "right," so to speak, so in such cases, at the very least, you want to make sure it's not aggressively wrong, even if there would be room for improvement under better circumstances.
  
  In Shenmue's case specifically, there's a very strong possibility based on its development background that it was a rush job, possibly one done by non-English speaking natives. (I don't know if the translators are credited in any of the Shenmue games, so while I can't otherwise confirm this, the material that's there has a particular cadence that screams of such circumstances.) At the very least, from what I've gathered about what its voice acting recording sessions were like, very little editing was likely on the material beyond probably a basic initial pass for technical accuracy. Shenmue's not really the sort of game where you can get away with that, especially today, but from the stories I've read, it's something of a miracle the game ever came out in English to begin with, so maybe the fact it's at least not Engrishy is something of an accomplishment.
  
  
• Voice acting limitations probably severely hampered how flexible the translators and voice actors could even be in terms of how things are worded. Think of the basic lip syncing issues that film and animation dubbings inherently run into, but made even harder by the fact you've got a game program running in the background that probably expects every line to be timed a certain way for stability. While localizations increasingly have developers being more accommodating of different languages' speaking speed and word length in recent years, when you're dealing with dubbing over real time cutscenes, very often you have to be careful about how much time you afford every line, lest things either get out of sync or the game just outright crashes. Some developers are willing to rework in-engine cutscene timers to make life on the localizers' side a little easy, but it's usually such a significant endeavor as to not be financially viable.
  
  And in Shenmue's heyday, to my knowledge, such reworking was unheard of considering how localizations were still an afterthought to most Japanese companies back then. All of this is to say that certain verbal ticks like the word "that" can be in games solely as a matter of efficiency and just not breaking the game, even if it's not the most eloquent approach. More often than not, if you think something's weird or off about a game translation, but it's otherwise not grammatically broken or anything similarly bad, chances are we on the localization side are aware of those quirks, too, but just can't necessarily speak to them for various business and legal reasons.
  

Hopefully that all makes sense! I'm writing this as my day winds down and I can't be bothered to proofread it for the time being, but I just thought I'd interject as someone whose work deals in these sorts of issues on a day to day basis.

I don't remember whether I had issues finding that bar, but this game sure does turn it into an ordeal. I think it's commendable that you're supposed to find stuff out for yourself, intuit your way to locations based on clues you've been given by talking to people. Instead of just following a waypoint. That sort of design ethos, the more natural structure, is one of the main things I appreciate about Shenmue.

But the innuendno lady who stands right next to the place, says sailors don't come around there, which is just a damned lie. And having to waste a day if you don't find the place at night, is perhaps taking things a bit too far. There is stuff to fill that time with if you're of a suitable disposition. You Arcade, kitten, training, capsule toys, jukeboxes, exploring around and whatnot. But if you're not in the mood for that, being forced to wait ~30 minutes to continue the story is a questionable proposition. Why Shenmue 2 lets you skip time.

I think Dan is forgetting the ending of Close Encounters a bit.

DON'T FEED WILD DEER DAN. It's actually illegal in most states. You can google the reasons why, but in general it's bad for the well being of the animal and dangerous for people.

I'm pretty bad with directions but even I'm not as bad as them....

Vinny explained why in the comments on yesterday's video, if you care to go back and look.

I don't know why, but I love when they discuss random stuff like the difference between a compound and a fort.

Not really sure why Alex seems like he is in a constant race to finish the game... Vinny and Dan seem like they are there to have fun with it, but Alex wants to get serious and PLAY. THE. GAME.

@pepsiman: Thanks, I always love hearing about localization stuff.

Watching this during the week, combined with watching the Metal Gear Scanlon finale yesterday, had me thinking something precisely along these lines. "They have to talk to him like he's a child, it's embarrassing..."

Anyone else notice Alex's Simpsons reference subtlety hidden in every Endurance Run?

@pepsiman: That's a nice, interesting insight into translation. Thanks duder.

lol @ dan's shipping

also, 'method' acting is all well and good, but it's called acting for a reason, kinda the whole point is that you haven't really experienced whatever you're playing, you're just smart enough to to imagine yourself in that headspace

I think you'll find that Alex has a Simpsons reference in pretty much every video he's in ;)

Is it just me or is the footage blurred and washed out (desaturated and weird contrast)? Did they do some post-production on the video because of the darkness or have they changed the way the Dreamcast is connected?

Animal Crossing better than Shenmue? Kiss off, punks.

"Now you're a sailor". oh my god, that made me laugh hard.

Heeeeeeey Ryo!!

What the 'Charlie'? Is each game in the endurance run going to have a P4 reference?