Blaustein and Shenmue

[DLPB_]

So most of you will know this guy did the localization for Metal Gear Solid (and imho it's the best one ever done on a game, that I've heard and read anyway), but here he explains why another game he was involved with, Shenmue, ended up a total disaster in the translation and voice acting department.  This really does make you wonder wtf some people are on.  All that money, and bad management/silly supervisor cocked it right up.

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/03/interview_the_life_and_games_o.php

Shenmue

Of all the games Blaustein has been involved with, it’s Shenmue which is likely to generate the most interest among fans – even more so than Metal Gear Solid.

As Blaustein explains, “It was a weird time. I think if you look up Shenmue you’ll see that it was localised by IMagic. I was one of three company owners at IMagic, and I’ve got interesting anecdotes. Shenmue was such a problematic project, you could write a whole book about how messed up things got. You know what the budget on that thing was? $70 million dollars I’m told. And I don’t know what its sales were like, but it didn’t even come out on hardware that sold well. So how much of a disaster was this? This is like the videogame equivalent of that famous western movie, Heaven’s Gate.”

“Suzuki was coming off of huge past successes, and he was the man. And so this was going be THE thing. And surrounding us at the initial meeting were, of course, people from Sega, but also all sorts of outsourcers: localisers and sound people and recording studio people. People to make this, and people to do that. And everyone wanted a piece of that $70 million, you know? And of course that’s like the worst thing you could do, is to start out a project saying we’ve got all this money, and then just keep throwing more money at it.”

“I’ll never forget the meeting for this, it was the oddest thing. I was at the meeting – the let’s kick it all off meeting. And what IMagic did for Shenmue was, we were hired to handle the voice acting... Now, of course with games there’s the localisation itself, and then there’s the voices. The localisation is what we’d normally do, along with the voices, but we didn’t get the initial localisation work.”

Blaustein was reluctant to give specifics, but speculation at the time was that Yu Suzuki gave the text translation to a family member, possibly his brother-in-law, who owned a translation company. This left the voice work to go to a separate company. Unfortunately there was the added burden that Suzuki insisted that all voice acting, including the English, had to be recorded in Japan.

“The reason we did it in Japan by the way, was because Mr Suzuki wanted access to it while it was being done. He probably thought that if he could go and quality control it himself it would be better. Or I dunno, maybe he just wanted to leave his desk and go see how things were going. It was done around his schedule. It wasn’t done because it was the best thing to have done. It wasn’t done because we didn’t have the money to do it in New York. It was simply done because that was his decision. Nobody that was doing that thought it was a good decision. And clearly it wasn’t. Add that to my regrets, that we could have done a great job. It’s like, if we had gone to New York or LA and did it, they’d all have been great actors. We could have had a great script and... Let me ask you and the readers, would Shenmue have done better if it’d had better actors, or wouldn’t it have made a difference?”

“I don’t remember how many characters were in that game, but it’s hundreds. And there simply weren’t enough English-speaking voice actors. In Japan you already don’t have the cream of the best actors, what you have are people who were models who turned into actors, and people who were teachers who turned into actors, or people who were actors and couldn’t hack it as actors in the West and so left to become actors in Japan – and those are the best actors in Japan. So the best ones you have are the ones who failed in America and went to Japan. So it was such a stupid proposition to do it there.”

“The auditions go ahead, we hire basically every single person that exists and calls themselves a voice actor. The people that are doing the translation are late, and I remember it was such a messed up situation, it was so bad that stuff was going directly from the translators, without being checked, faxed to the studio and having actors just read the stuff. That’s how slapdash it all became. And there were actors that had no place at all doing the acting. There was no time for direction – it was like, get it done! When you’re doing it right, like with Metal Gear Solid or something like that, you set up the situation – you’re not doing anything by the seat of your pants.”

“I didn’t direct it, but I’m sure the director was having one cut for everything: OK here’s a line, read it! OK, next. It wasn’t ‘let’s get the best performance for this line’, it was just a massively messed up situation, and the end results wound up being what they are. So, play the game, listen to it, and you’ll know exactly why it got that way.”

Of course Blaustein wasn’t at all happy with the actor situation, so in a desperate attempt to salvage the project and find talent who could fulfil their needs, he flew back to America to round up some voice actors and then fly them back to Japan specifically for the job – something which was unprecedented in the localisation industry.

“And here’s a thing about Shenmue that made it even more complicated, and I can’t recall why this was the case, but for some reason we were also looking for voice actors who would physically look like the characters. I think Suzuki was planning to do some kind of non-videogame media thing. Like there’s that guy Corey Marshall, who played Ryo. And Debora Rabbai too. I hired these people. I came back to America, right, and I found some unknowns and some knowns. There weren’t enough actors in Japan and it was the case that Mr Suzuki wanted a good looking, young unknown. Like an actor. Not even an actor, a young newbie... I don’t know what he was thinking, actually, because if you look at the page of actors on Shenmue Dojo, they’re all good looking people. And Deborah Rabbai, I remember interviewing her in America, she’d had a lot of experience working with animes. Look at these people, these are voice actors that were hired partially because of their looks. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“The one thing you can do to make hiring a voice acting cast even more difficult, you can add this condition: they have to be good looking. So here we are with this ridiculous thing added on top of it. But we weren’t going to say no. So I went back to America, I put out advertisements and I got a couple of people. And the people I got were Deborah Rabbai, and certainly Corey Marshall. And he did martial arts, that’s one of the reasons why he got the job. So I wrote contracts and sent them back to Japan. Corey had never been to Japan, he’d never done acting. We were doing some weird stuff, and that’s just how weird a project Shenmue was. Nobody else was doing anything like that – flying actors from one country to another.”

Despite all the hard work that went into finding Corey, the end result was not without irony, as Blaustein notes. “Now, let me recap. We’ve done a worldwide search for this guy, we find a complete amateur, not hugely talented but good looking enough to be called good looking. He did martial arts so we could say he did them. He satisfied a lot of the checkmarks, and then they changed his voice electronically at the end of all this, to make him sound younger! Isn’t that ironic? Isn’t that hilarious, that after all that work they change his voice?”

“I’ve done a lot of these projects, and a lot of the times we’ve talked about my past work I’ve complained about how the budgets are low, and there isn’t enough money, and here’s a case where they made so many mistakes in the opposite direction. There was poor management and too much money thrown at it. It was rushed, and I know enough about games to know you’re unlikely to get a consistent product. You have bits of it that were translated well, but there were probably 20 translators touching it, would be my guess. And with that many translators, working on that many characters, with a story that diffuse, you’re going to have huge problems with consistency, huge problems with the story, huge problems with characters speaking.”

As Blaustein recollects, no amount of budget could save Shenmue. “Thinking that more money would solve the problem of doing it in Japan, was a mistake. I was not exaggerating when I said it could be an outstanding metaphor for the excesses that videogames reached. The last thing I’d say about it is this: its development is a fascinating story. It’s one of a kind. It may be much more of a disaster than even you know. Didn’t it deplete most of Sega’s finances? What a story!”

[DLPB_]

Blaustein mostly recalls being dissatisfied with the names, something he wasn't allowed to change. "I remember being unhappy about a lot of these names. I was so unhappy about these. I struggled with all those names. I mean, in Japanese you have 'Appuru' for example. Now is that 'Apple' or is it 'Appulu'? You tell me! Also, the developers would tend to put in a name like Victor or Edward or Ted, and to me that sounds SO mundane. So I would make it 'Viktor' for example. But that still left me somewhat dissatisfied. I was trying to satisfy the demands of keeping it close to the Japanese, but still interesting enough."

OH I AM HEARING YOU, BLAUSTEIN!  I AM HEARING YOU ON FM!

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/metalgear/jeremyblaustein.htm

also a good read. This guy has a total grasp of localizing, that's obvious reading that.  Many of the issues he cites are problems we have also had with FF7.  He goes into so much detail, and he has even rechecked the changes that were made to his script in Twin Snakes (and I don't think he is happy with some of that for good reason).

I'd recommend reading that to anyone who wants to localize.  He's definitely given me some food for thought too.

It's sad too, because although Twin Snakes did fix the odd issue with some of the genetics stuff, it wrecked various other lines (like the one mentioned), and the voice acting sounded tired.  I also loved Mei Ling's Chinese accent that they got rid of.

I also would have worked harder to make Otacon less cartoonish. This cartoonishness got even worse, in my opinion, in the later games. In fact, in general, I would say that all the characters and the story itself went from reality to cartoon-land. It had started as a down-to-earth spy story and transformed into a weird kind of world where Snake could somersault off missiles and stuff. I didn't care for that very much.

OK, I am officially a Blaustein fan.

I thought lines like "It's not a weakness, it's a character flaw " had come from Kojima, when all along it was him.  Localizers aren't given near enough credit for the finished game.

[luksy]

You know what the budget on that thing was? $70 million dollars I’m told.

IIRC that's the budget for both games, but it was still one of if not the highest budget for a game at the time.

Unfortunately there was the added burden that Suzuki insisted that all voice acting, including the English, had to be recorded in Japan.

The reason we did it in Japan by the way, was because Mr Suzuki wanted access to it while it was being done. He probably thought that if he could go and quality control it himself it would be better. Or I dunno, maybe he just wanted to leave his desk and go see how things were going. It was done around his schedule. It wasn’t done because it was the best thing to have done. It wasn’t done because we didn’t have the money to do it in New York. It was simply done because that was his decision.

The more important thing to keep in mind here IMHO is not that it was recorded in Japan (itself an obviously bad decision), but the fact that Suzuki was calling the shots at all as far as localization is concerned. Game producers / directors in Japan often seem to insist on rubber stamping EVERYTHING, with no delegation. You can see how this might be an issue if whoever is approving the localization isn't a localizer himself. I think most big developers have caught on since and have a proper localization department or outsource to competent localization companies, but the vertical management structure lingers on.

And here’s a thing about Shenmue that made it even more complicated, and I can’t recall why this was the case, but for some reason we were also looking for voice actors who would physically look like the characters. I think Suzuki was planning to do some kind of non-videogame media thing.

This is all down to how the Japanese seiyuu market works. Voice acting is big business in Japan, having famous voice actors in your game can be a selling point, they're basically a brand that is marketed like Tom Cruise. It's a system that works fine in Japan, but Japanese acting is usually overly melodramatic for Western audiences, so it's really no surprise that an English voiceover made according to Japanese standards turned out like this, it probably would have happened regardless of the talent of the actors or localizers.

Despite all the hard work that went into finding Corey, the end result was not without irony, as Blaustein notes. “Now, let me recap. We’ve done a worldwide search for this guy, we find a complete amateur, not hugely talented but good looking enough to be called good looking. He did martial arts so we could say he did them. He satisfied a lot of the checkmarks, and then they changed his voice electronically at the end of all this, to make him sound younger! Isn’t that ironic? Isn’t that hilarious, that after all that work they change his voice?”

I'm sorry but that's just hilarious, out of everything in the article this is the one thing that points to utter incompetence. The other issues can be attributed to the way the system worked back then, most English dubs and localizations were bad, but this really takes the cake, unbelievable!


p.s. YOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[Bosola]

Fascinating stuff.