Can Woosly REALLY be blamed for ALL the changes?

[MJN SEIFER]

Yes!

No!

Ted Woosly master of woolslyisms has caused many FF fans to Giggle over stupid mistakes "Vicks = Biggs" but is it ALL his fault?

I do not think he's to blame for everthing ok alot of you think Biggs is a simple translation but it's not do you know why in jappanese "B" and "V" are similer as are "G" and "K" so "BIGGS" is "VIKKS" aka "VICKS"

so

L/R G/K B/V is just like C/K S/Z in our language really so it's a simple mistake!

also theres Ziegfried and Siegfried ! as I said in english Z and S are pretty close especially in in words like "Siegfried" which is prounounced "ZEEG-Freed"

finnaly come censorships they appear in ff5 and 6 mainly (Did woosly do FF5 i can't remember!) Ok replacing the "F WORD" was good for the kids but did here have to remove words that are no longer SWEAR words?

I mean he writes

"Heck" instead of "Hell"

"Datt" Instead of "Crap"

"Darn" intead of "Damn"

so he went a bit to far!!

FF6 (SPOILER)I think it would look funny Kefka saying the F word over and over intead of Hate hate hate but wattyagonado?

[Pancaek]

Certainly not. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the censorship guidelines were from Nintendo, and Woolsey probably did the best he could to edit around it.

I also don't blame him for taking some artistic license with names and whatnot. It's not like everyone is a hardcore purist who'd think FF6 was ruined and feel like castrating him for calling Terra Terra instead of Tina. When I first played FF6 I had no idea that anything was any different, and I loved it. I'm sure many other people did too.

Sometimes localization actually makes games better. For example, in CT, I thought it was cute how everyone was drinking pop even though they were clearly in a bar. =)

MJN SEIFER, hell and damn are still swear words. You're probably just desensitized to them. Besides, I'm not sure if Woolsey and Nintendo wanted the characters to always randomly swear just for the heck of it, like they did in 7, 8 and 9.

[TheAbominatrix]

Woolsey is just a good target for us to yell at. Plus his name is funny. Woolsey! *laughs merrily*

[Big D]

Some of his changes weren't so bad. Censoring the porfanity wasn't his idea, and it didn't really change the story a whole lot. Really, most of what was changed was simply the result of guidelines, as Skye-chan said.

I'm really glad that one scene in particular was changed - the one where Edgar meets Relm. According to 'Kishi, in the Japanese version Edgar comments on how mature she is, and then reminds himself not to have dirty thoughts when he learns she's only 10. I don't remember the exact dialogue or content, but it wasn't charming, to say the least.

[Kawaii Ryûkishi]

That's very nice, but I never said nothing of the sort.

[MJN SEIFER]

hell and damn are still swear words

English laws must be going soft!

[Big D]

Originally posted by Kawaii Ryûkishi
That's very nice, but I never said nothing of the sort.

Sorry, maybe it was someone else. I just automatically assume "'Kishi!" whenever I think of 'obscure but fascinating, how-the-hell-did-anyone-know-that' FF facts. I know someone mentioned the scene I described; with your legendary encycopaedic knowledge, I must've assumed it was you.
Oh well.

[Bahamut2000X]

It's not like everyone is a hardcore purist who'd think FF6 was ruined and feel like castrating him

Actually in older Woolsy threads, people that think because of the cencorship of nintendo (which ironically many blame Ted for that too, funny that) they also ish him dead for saying the game would of been betetr with Kefka spelled with a C instead of a K. And yet most of these people I doubt speak japanese fluently, and also many of the woolsy haters I have noticed say that FFVI was the best FF ever and yet their thinking the game is horrible because of a few translation errors (although I don't think their errors unless I actually hear from someone creditable that they were)

But I loved the translation of the game. Although I would of liked to of seen it not censored.

[Sephex]

I am just sick of people bitching over the simple stuff...like the Vicks things that was already mentioned. I forgot who said this here, but someone said a real long time ago that he "raped" the translation. Now that is just ridiculous.

Also, I am sick of people thinking the alternate translations through ROMs created fans equal the 'real' script. I doubt that everyone said the "F" word and S*** every other word in the japanese version.

Anyway, his translation in FFVI and Chrono Trigger were fine.

[DJZen]

Uhhhh.... Okay, Woolsey was responsible for translating the games, but it was NoA responsible for censorship. So things like Tina -> Terra, that's all him. Things like Holy -> Pearl, that was NoA (they changed "cross" to "boomerang" in Castlevania after all). Also, with just a rudamentary understanding of Japanese, I can tell you with a great deal of certainty that there is no equivalent of dropping the F bomb. There is a word that translates literally as s***, but you can just as easily translate it as damn without really changing the meaning at all, it's just a light profanity in Japanese that isn't considered offensive. If you watch a fansub anime (yes, FANSUB!) you'll see that there isn't a lot of cursing, even when people are angry, it's usually a lot of "WHY YOU!!!!" and "I'LL KILL YOU!!!".

[Big D]

From what I understand, Japanese doesn't actually have any profanities to call its very own.

[DocFrance]

I'm just tired of people blaming Woolsey for the FF2 fiasco. FF3 was the only Final Fantasy that he touched, really. Of course, he also did CT and I think another Square game, and none of them were quite ruined by him.

Besides, I think that "Terra" is better than "Tina," especially when you consider the origins of the names Terra and Celes. I also think that "Cefca" looks pretty stupid; "Kefka" implies a krazy klown. I prefer "moogle" over "mogri." I know it's some sort of Japanese play on words, but I'm not going to be able to understand that.

Localization is a good thing. If I wanted to play the game as if all the characters were Japanese, I would learn Japanese and play the JP version.

Thank you, Mr. Woolsey.

[Bahamut2000X]

The thing I don't get is that CT and FFVI were said to be the best games of all time and yet people those people say it's ruined because some guy translated it "wrong", hmmm am I the only one sensing something wrong here?

[Sefie1999AD]

I think you should all just leave the poor guy alone. Woolsey did FF6 well, even though Nintendo gave him loads of restrictions. If you want to blame someone for FF6's big censorship and how it was watered down, go chant "a**holes, a**holes!" at Nintendo, not Woolsey. Woolsey did the translation part well, and he also localized it so that the contents would feel more comfortable to the English-speaking players. IMHO, "Wait? Do I look like a waiter!?" and "The world is Square" are pretty nicely made up word plays by Ted Woolsey. Those lines certainly were word plays in the Japanese version as well, but if they had been directly translated into English, we would have got word plays that nobody understands and that make no sense at all. Oh, and Terra would add up to this word play that has been in FFs ever since that: Terra (earth), Celes (celestial, heavens), Cloud, Aeris (air), Squall (storm), Sora (sky, I'm not sure if Riku and Kairi meant something).

Chrono Trigger is Ted Woolsey best translation effort, IMHO. I'm glad things like Marl, Jacky, Kaeru and Bausch/Gausch/Hausch were translated into a lot less awkward names like Marle, Magus, Frog and Melchior/Belthasar/Gaspar (the prophets' names taken from the Bible, except I think it was Balthasar, not sure though). I don't think changing Vinegar, Soysauce and Mayonnaise into Ozzie, Slash and Flea was that bad. It was kinda funny when someone in CT called those three "evil and tone deaf freaks" The overall translation in CT was well done as well. I think there's only one typo, and that's for (SPOILER)Black Omen's mutants: Mega/Giga/Terra Mutant, when it should be Mega/Giga/Tera Mutant.

For Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2), I haven't played much of the game, but according to what I've heard, Woolsey did a very good job even though he had only a few weeks to translate the game.

Originally posted by Sephex
I am just sick of people botching over the simple stuff...like the Vicks things that was already mentioned. I forgot who said this here, but someone said a real long time ago that he "raped" the translation. Now that is just ridiculous.

Also, I am sick of people thinking the alternate translations through ROMs created fans equal the 'real' script. I doubt that everyone said the "F" word and S*** every other word in the japanese version.

As always, I agree with Sephex about this translation issue. I think Sky Render is a really idiotic Ted Woolsey hater. He keeps telling how much Woolsey sucks and how he screwed and raped his translation job, but when Sky Render made a retranslation of FF6, he made Kefka say the F-word (uncensored) 17 times on a row in the Floating Continent, then yell (I'll censor the following but Sky Render didn't): "Ah! Crap! Sh*t! Damnit you stupid b***hes, give me your Goddess power now or you're gonna regret it, g*****nit!" He also claims that this is a very accurate version of the Japanese text. His claims really conflict with what DJzen and Big D said about Japanese not having major cusswords. If he claims Woolsey sucks so much, he should at least do some good translation work himself! Instead, he translated those Floating Continent lines all wrong, and he translated CT's food names as Vinegor, Soysah and Mayonay. IMHO, that is Engrish, not Woolsey's translations.

[Big D]

I personally found FFVI's translation to be a bit more... well... 'mature' than FFIX's. I mean, the dialogue in FFIX had a tendency to be somewhat childish, whereas in FFVI the script was often a little more meaningful. So in my opinion, FFVI has this one edge over FFIX, which is strange, considering Alexander Smith's fine work with FFVIII, and in particular, the beautiful dialogue in Vagrant Story.

Perhaps Square wanted FFIX to be slightly less grown-up than its predecessors?