dragon quest XI asks a lot of you at times but the village where everyone speaks in haikus is making me groan so hard. I don’t know if a game’s localization style has ever made me want to quit more than this game. I mean, I’m sure it’s the same in japanese but I just have a real sore spot against literature nerds who are too clever for their own good making everything into a haiku and the extent to which this part of the game is surely making ~those~ people cream their jeans is maybe actually more cringe than I can deal with.
beyond that the localization is already so gratingly twee and precious and in the worst possible way. repeatedly seeing the phrase “the quest has been trangressed with finesse” makes me want to throw my switch into the river for at least three different reasons.
I’m enjoying the rest of the game for what it is, but I feel like there are all of these sort of pointless mechanics grafted on top for no reason. the game feels bureaucratically designed in a generally bad way. like, what the hell is “pep up”? why is it ~called~ that? what purpose does it serve? it seems to come and go randomly and doesn’t have a substantial enough effect on your stats/abilities to be particularly useful tactically, and half the time at least one party member is pepped up regardless. and the game is already kind of too easy without it! it just feels like it adds noise to an already cluttered experience.
I think you aren’t in the right headspace for it tbh. it was very well liked here (find the thread if you like) and all the things that you’re pointing out as cloying – which were cloying to me, even, in other recent dragon quest localizations – I found really well done in this case!
it’s been ages since I touched dragon quest VIII, which had a very similar localization style, but I don’t remember it being this annoying. I don’t recall anything annoying about DQIX’s localization!
I mean I know it was well liked here and far be it from me to piss in anyone’s cereal but I just really don’t get it lol
I’m not sure if I’m telling you this to inform you, or because I know it will cause you pain, but the Japanese version doesn’t have that. They just decided to do it for the English version.
fwiw i don’t think any of the other towns are as corny as the haiku one, but then again none of the other stuff you mentioned registered as irritating to me so, ya know
pepping up is apparently not random but i don’t know if anyone actually knows what causes it. that’s good imo
The abuse of “transgressed” there makes me grind my teeth too. Seems like they started by rhyming “quest” with “finesse” – fine – but then Went Too Far. You can’t just arbitrarily redefine words to mean what would be convenient to solve your rhyming problem
That’s the thing about “cloying” writing, it always comes down to micro-decisions about wording like this. If they had simply not tried too hard on specific places where it was intractable, there wouldn’t necessarily be a problem with a translation with lots of wordplay
I just figured there was a hidden pep meter that different actions contribute to at different rates but it’s all so obfuscated that it feels random-ish.
I think this is right? I can’t remember where I read it, but I seem to recall the theory that each character has different things that build the hidden meter
Yeah, I think that’s the case, and then the different upgrades they grab further specialize how they build meter. It’s a real cool system because it hits that SaGa note of “this is something you could get obsessed with and find lots of depth in or you can completely ignore it and the game works fine either way”
I’m into obfuscated gameplay mechanics but in this case it just feels entirely pointless and again “pep up” is such a screechingly treacly localization choice
could not agree more and imo the game’s localization is full of stuff like this! it just really grinds my gears!
I am still enjoying the game! it just is doing all these small annoying things and I wanna complain about it!
Little touches like this that grind people’s gears, and the resulting vent, are a guilty pleasure of mine. Please keep us updated on the sickly sweet translation adventures @toups
Pep is like Tension in DQVIII but the trigger for it is random and the conditions for it to trigger vary from character to character. Like for some characters you build pep by taking damage while others build it by inflicting damage.
Beyond that it’s pretty simple. You can unlock more pep powers via skill trees. Some of them require more than one character to be pepped up in order to use them and some also can only be used by a particular character.
