In a recent interview with Famitsu, Dragon Quest series creator Yuji Horii and Paranormasight series director Takanari Ishiyama (who also worked on DQX) had a “master and disciple” discussion to commemorate the launch of Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse.
With both creators being prolific storytellers and writers, much of the discussion was dedicated to their know-how and peculiarities when approaching a game scenario, like Horii’s manga-inspired technique of almost completely abandoning narration in favor of dialogue.
Interestingly, the topic of localization also cropped up, with Ishiyama expressing concern that his obsessive pursuit of the perfect word choices and phrasing in The Mermaid’s Curse may end up being for naught when translated into other languages (the game released with day one English and Chinese language support).
In response, Horii commented, “When it comes to English, the flavor tends to get lost in many ways. Things inevitably end up sounding simplistic.”
As one example, Ishiyama brings up the variety of first-person pronouns available in Japanese – like ore, boku, washi, watashi, etc. While each of these can reflect the speaker’s gender, age and even personality traits, in English, they all become simply “I.”
Horii seems to consider the shortcomings of Japanese-to-English localizations a result of inherent differences between the two languages, commenting, “I’ve come to accept that English is a simple language, so there’s no helping it.” On the other hand, he feels that this issue has been somewhat improved with the introduction of voice acting in games, given that voiced lines create extra room to convey a character’s traits through tone and delivery.
Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is out now for PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch 2, iOS and Android.
