Giant Bomb Presents: The Enduring Legacy of EarthBound's Writing

Sweet! This series always has a weird place in my past... even though I hardly played it; and the jokes were pretty top notch!

Yes!!

Yes!!

Super Psyched about the increase in interesting interviews. Hopefully this trend continues.

Dump Truck getting all the cool interviews!

I listen to these on my commute, and for the first time I have more podcasts than commute time.

Oh nice drop for this evening. As a kid I would play this at my friend's house and him and his siblings would sit and watch the goofy story unfold. Good times.

This is my favorite game of all time and the localization is a big part of that, so I'm very excited to hear more about this.

What a cool interview. Thanks Patrick!

To Marcus Lindblom, translating EarthBound was just project of many. It was a special one, but the game was a flop.

@patrickklepek I'm assuming you intended to write something more coherent here(?)

Edit This may sound more condescending than I intended

I already messaged you about this on Twitter @patrickklepek, but as a fellow Japanese-English translator, I'm really grateful you got the chance to make this interview happen. A lot of people very rightfully love Earthbound overseas for the writing that it gets, but it's really hard to articulate from a translation perspective both what makes those sorts of works really hard to nail outside the original language and why that difficulty is exactly why translation can be such fulfilling work. I'm privileged to be able to work on a lot of really well-written Japanese fiction, but it's really rare to have the pleasure of working with something written by someone so worldly, down-to-earth, and nuanced as Itoi is. He and Haruki Murakami are basically the sorts of authors working in Japan today that tend to make for the best dream projects as a translator; it's exciting beyond belief to be able to test your mettle with how well you understand such often deceptively simple, yet complex material and then attempt to turn in an English version that attempts to be evocative to a similar degree with a whole new audience. There are things about doing Japanese-English translation work that will only really make complete sense to those who do that line of work, but your empathy as a writer yourself and Lindblom's anecdotes made for a fantastic interview. I really hope you land more interviews with translators for other iconic Japanese games in the future so people can become more aware of what we do and how much our work can impact the perception of the final product behind the scenes. So thanks!

Release Mother 3 already! Let this great man play the game.

What if we sent Mr. Lindblom the translated Mother 3, flashed to a GBA cart?

Not only is that a bit extreme, it doesn't really get around that gray area.

Great interview, @patrickklepek! I'm glad you were able to have a chat with him. There were some enlightening bits he had to share regarding his work on the game. Cool stuff.

Oh, and for those curious, here's the character Marcus named after his daughter.

Keep up the great work, Patrick!

While I would like for the beep beep beep to make its way into the Dumptruck intro somehow, great job on the general presentation and setting up a quite good interview about such a beloved game.

As an aside, I do think some people have a point that you occasionally ramble off your own long thoughts, making parts more like a "Giant Bomb Conversation" than an "Interview", but I still usually like what you have to say. You tend to do it early on in an interview(almost like a listener might guess a "time to Patrick's ramble" like some do "time to Brad's first death", ha), but then you seem to catch on to the ebb and flow with the other person.

I suppose it's just something to look at for the future, as I know you are always intent on improving yourself in all you do. Thanks for working so hard to provide us with such great content! :)

Keep up the great work, @patrickklepek!

While I would like for the beep beep beep to make its way into the Dumptruck intro somehow (heh), fantastic job on the general presentation and setting up a quite good interview about such a beloved game.

As an aside, I do think some people have a point that you occasionally ramble off your own long thoughts, making parts more like a "Giant Bomb Conversation" than an "Interview", but I still usually like what you have to say. You tend to do it early on in an interview(almost like a listener might guess a "time to Patrick's ramble" like some do "time to Brad's first death", ha), but then you seem to eventually catch on to the ebb and flow with the other person.

I suppose it's just something to look at for the future, as I know you are always intent on improving yourself in all you do. Thanks for working so hard to provide us with such great content! :)

Ooh, you got a chance to bend the ear of a translationeer! This should surely be interesting to someone with a penchant for translatology. I just hope the interview went according to keikaku. Believe it!

My only problem when it comes to translationizing is:

about the Mother 3 rom, I don't get his argument. It's actually quite simple: buy a japanese Mother 3 cart through eBay then download the ROM and patch it with the english translation. It's not like you can buy an english cart of that game anywhere...

Keep it Patrick, its been great.

@truthtellah uhh I hear the beep beep in the intro now.

Great interview, thanks Patrick!

Really fantastic interview!

Oh yeah? Where is it? Maybe I just blacked out. ha.

This is such a great interview. Earthbound has been an important game to me for a long long time. There's always been this disconnect between the fans and the creators of the game. It makes me kinda happy and sad that after all these years we're finally starting to bridge the gap. Thank you for doing this, Patrick.

Why are these not called the dumptruck?

Damn Patrick, if you keep up the pace you've been going these past couple weeks you will become renowned as a legendary games journalist.

@truthtellah: I enjoy the rambling and the conversation, why are people so obsessed with robotic barbara walters' interviews?

Nah, don't get me wrong, I like that Patrick has more of a back and forth, but I can still acknowledge that he does rather often somewhat cutoff someone he's interviewing with a bit of a ramble usually somewhere within the first half of an interview before he catches his stride.

It's not a big thing, as I really enjoyed this interview and I appreciate his enthusiasm. He has simply mentioned before that he likes reasonable feedback in the comments on what he does so that he can improve himself, and as a regular listener, I feel like it's something worth kindly mentioning in case he's interested in hearing a small critique of otherwise quality interviews that I usually enjoy more than most. :)

@oursin_360: Yeah, it is too bad that after all the talking up the name Interview Dumptruck as a funny but appropriate name that it was unceremoniously dropped.

Thanks for the interesting interviews lately, guys.

Also for the curious, Daffy Duck gives his name as Aloysius in "Beanstalk Bunny," (a Jack in the Beanstalk story with Elmer Fudd as the giant) to avoid admitting his name is Jack in the story.

Regarding the Mother 3 fan translation, perhaps I'm a glass half empty kinda guy, but it bums me out that fans have to do stuff like when publishers are ignoring their audience. It's super cool that someone would do it, and I know there are people that actually start with fan work that end up getting jobs in the industry, but it would still be cool to see publishers acknowledge and support the people that love their work. And have fans focus on official mods and such like Bethesda has tried to do.