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They're the people in the shadows. You don't know their names, but you know their words. They localizers, the folks that take games not only from another language, but also another culture and open them up for another audience. "Good translation is tough to quantify," says Tokyo-based localizer Matt Alt. "If it's well done, it sort of disappears. Ideally the person playing the game doesn't even realize they're reading something that wasn't originally written in their native tongue." He runs
AltJapan along with his wife (and company president!) Hiroko Yoda out of a small second story office on Tokyo's westside. And with 99.999 percent of the games AltJapan works on that’s true. Well, save for one:
Ninja Gaiden II.
Since the PlayStation 1 era, the AltJapan team has been working on big AAA titles — games you've probably played. Games like
Dragon Warrior VII,
Shenmue 2,
Monster Hunter,
Final Fantasy XI,
Dragon Quest VIII and most recently
Ninja Gaiden II. Like we said, big famous games that were made by big famous Japanese game designers. "One of the big misconceptions about working in localization is that you have constant face-to-face contact with the game designers and directors," says Alt. "In reality, many times you have very little contact with the people who made the game outside of sporadic emails. The dev team is busy with their own work, trying to make their own milestones. So I can count the times I've met directors of projects we've worked on on one hand. If your deepest desire is to simply speak with star video game directors and designers, you're probably better off going into journalism!" Though, for
Ninja Gaiden II, AltJapan was doing more than mere translating.
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