Tales of Vesperia’s Japanese Speech Styles & English Typos

A reader sent in a question about Tales of Vesperia, a really fun Japanese RPG from 2008:

In Tales of Vesperia, the character Raven often refers to himself as “”ol’ Raven”” and I was wondering. What does he call himself in the Japanese version? Or more along the lines what kind of dialect does he have?

I actually played Tales of Vesperia many years back – I translated the anime movie prequel, in fact!

To prepare for translating the movie, I played through the English version of the game, taking reams and reams of notes to make sure my translation matched every little nuance in the game. In all, I spent maybe two or three months on the project, even though it was like a simple 90 minute movie.

Anyway, in the English version of the game, everyone calls the Raven character “old man” throughout the game, even though he’s not THAT old. In fact, even Raven himself often refers to himself as “ol’ Raven” a lot too. So what does he call himself in Japanese? Here’s a random sample from early in the game:

Basically, rather than call himself “ol’ Raven”, he just calls himself “old man” like everyone else calls him. This sort of thing happens all the time in Japanese, but it doesn’t work quite as well in English.

For example, “You just leave it up ta old man.” has a bit of oddness to it. Using “this old man” instead is a solution, but overuse of it might eventually become strange too. Even more so if a voice actor has to say it out loud over and over. So the use of “ol’ Raven” instead is a nice localization solution that matches his character AND is memorable.

As for his speech style, he definitely talks in a less standard, more “carefree” style, for a lack of a better explanation. I wanna say it’s a light Nagoya-style dialect based on his usage of stuff like ～だわな and ～わ, but he actually doesn’t talk much in the anime so I’d need to play the game in Japanese to get a better feel for it. From videos and such that’s how it seems to me, at least.

I actually have so many fond memories of digging into this game’s translation that it’s partly what inspired me to start my Legends of Localization stuff in the first place. It was neat how parts of the localization really shone – the English lyrics in the intro song, the phrasing of certain things, the script direction in some scenes… but then there’d be sudden, jarring typos and oddities too. Here are some for fun:

How does a little girl know such a fancy word?

A dude lost his hand!

Grammar mistake

Item name typo

Script typo

Context error - In Japanese “key” and “lock” are the same word

Typo? Grammar?

Typo

The eternal typo

Typo

These are just some random pictures I took years ago – there are a lot more little issues like this that pepper the game regularly. But otherwise I could tell from my own work on the movie that the game had a quality translation, both in writing and in its thoughtful localization choices.

So what happened? I’ve heard from acquaintances who worked on the game – and from the localization grapevine in general – that although 8-4, Ltd. handled the bulk of the project, some last-minute materials were given to a cheaper and completely different company, hence the final clash in quality.