It’s finally here! Over 10 years later, the second Investigations game is finally officially available starting today! I hope you are as excited as I am!
I’m Janet Hsu, localization director of Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, and I’m here for a special one-off about the more technical side of localization. I’ve talked at length about my localization philosophy in my The Great Ace Attorney blogs, so I figured I’d take this rare chance to talk about the differences in my experience of localizing the first Investigations game into English in 2011 and the second into multiple languages in 2024.
A lot has changed in these last 13 years. By 2011, Capcom had the MT Framework game engine, but the first and second Investigations games ran on their own custom engines. The screens on the Nintendo DS were also very small and in 4:3 aspect ratio. The simultaneous worldwide release of multiple language versions wasn’t the ironclad industry standard it is now, which, when combined with the storage limitations of a game cartridge or DVD, affected even how game assets were named. Game development was like a totally different world back then.
So come along now as I show you how old I am by regaling you with stories of “back in my day” – localizing games edition!
Engine Improvements and the UI
In a series like Ace Attorney, the UI is everything – it’s the way all information is conveyed and the way the player interacts with the game. Unlike action games, for example, there is literally nothing else. Therefore, improvements in UI implementation mean a great deal for the series – and by extension, the localization.
In the olden days, all of the buttons and panels players interacted with in the Nintendo DS version were graphics with the text baked in. This is because it was hard at times to make the text look exactly as you envisioned (especially when you needed to squeeze more letters on a panel than it was designed for), so the only way to ensure that you got the exact look, amount of scrunching, etc. that you wanted was to make everything into a graphic. Of course, this also meant that every little text change was another time-consuming task for the UI designer who had to go back and re-render the graphic. It’s enough to make one feel guilty for each typo and grammar mistake…
Needless to say, this method is unsustainable the more languages you add, so thankfully, as text rendering technology improved through modern game engine tools, we’ve been able to move away from using graphics for everything. So for the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, we actually went through both titles and converted the pre-existing Japanese and English graphical panels (such as the topic selections and Logic pieces) into regular text that is rendered in real-time on top of one shared blank panel graphic.
Autoscaling panels are also a blessing for languages with longer words! Plus, we can do special effects like have panels get slightly bigger when selected and go half transparent when they’re not!The decision to render each panel’s text in-game meant that the programmers had to go through and make sure that every location where these graphical assets were once being called would now call the correct text string instead. And, of course, they had to make sure each new string in each additional language version would also be called correctly. In the end, we localizers are super thankful for the UI designers and programmers’ hard work because it meant that we could make adjustments to our translations (almost) completely guilt-free!
Another big change in the UI that affected the localization was the amount of space available to us on-screen, which is related to the screen size and resolution of the hardware the games are on.
16:9, 1080p Becoming the Standard
Yes, by 2011, 4:3 and standard definition screens had pretty much disappeared in terms of TVs, but it wasn’t so far removed from when that was what the majority of people had in their homes. Perhaps that’s why the Nintendo DS’s 4:3 aspect ratio didn’t feel so out of place back then. In addition, the Nintendo DS obviously had a very small screen for portability reasons, so while we did upgrade the graphics once for smartphones, we hadn’t adapted some of it because of how small the screen still was, and because every phone had their own set of hardware specs and aspect ratio. With this port to a more standardized series of platforms, we took to finally expanding all of the graphics to 16:9 and filling in some of the details you couldn’t really see before.
Let’s just say there’s a reason why there was a whole discussion about whether we should add a roll of toilet paper to the holder or not.So how did making the screen 16:9 help the localization? Well, for one thing, the added horizontal space allowed less compact languages like English to use longer words. In the era of the original Nintendo DS version, we still used the “number of characters” x “number of lines” method of calculating how much text could fit in each text box. So when I was localizing the first AAI game, I had to stick to the 30 characters x 3 lines rule because of how narrow the screen was for the main text window.
As you can see, by re-doing the line breaks into the modern UI layout for this collection, I could’ve had so much more space to work with – even within just two lines. Plus, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about the text window blocking something important when compared to the Japanese version.
However, as anyone who works with text knows, you can never have too much space. Sometimes, a slightly longer word simply is required to avoid an awkward re-write or to convey a nuance. But if we stick hard and fast to the 30×3 (or 50×2 in the modern UI) rule, there is always the potential for wasted space. In fact, if you count the actual number of letters in the first line of the screenshot above, you’d see there are actually 57 letters. That’s also thanks to a bit of wizardry I’ve asked for since the days of Dual Destinies – a pixel checker.
Because English and other Western European language fonts are generally proportional (as apposed to fixed width like the Asian languages are), every letter is of a different width. In this title’s UI settings, skinny letters like lower case “i” and “l” are 17 pixels across, while a larger letter like “m” is 52 and an average-sized letter like “a” is 30. Even a single space takes up 18 pixels. So you can see how depending on what words you use, you can squeeze more letters on one line than just the average number of 50 if we work off of a maximum of 1500 pixels per line.
While it’s not impossible to convey what needs to be conveyed in a natural way in the old 30×3 style, you can see that I had to allude to the fact that something about the president being in the middle of his speech is important. Contrast that with how it could be spelled out in full like the original Japanese with the luxury of more usable space. Also, you can see how in order to save myself a few letters, I truncated “What is” into “What’s” and relied on the fact that the next screen is the Organizer opening up to give context as to what the word “piece” is in reference to in the second text window. These small changes might not seem like much, but depending on what you’re trying to achieve, they can be a big deal. For example, what if a character is the type to never use contractions because they’re too posh to do so? Or what if I really needed to direct the player’s attention to something specific or it would be very hard for them to solve the puzzle? These are the sorts of things I have to balance whenever I write anything during a localization. What can I sacrifice of a character’s voice for brevity? How do I re-write this hint to the player so that it’s still comprehensible and will fit within the box? It truly pays to learn how to write with an economy of words in these cases.
Does this mean then that an infinitely large box where I could write whatever I wanted would be preferable? I actually don’t think so. I’m convinced that part of the appeal of Ace Attorney’s writing is in how short and simple each line is. No one line feels like a chore to read, and before you know it, you’re 100 lines on and have gone through three dialogue options. This is all thanks to Mr. Takumi’s original design concept of “text short enough that players can take in the whole text box at a glance”. It’s why the Japanese text is also written in an exceptionally short style at 18 characters x 2 lines for the main dialogue window.
I have noticed that for The Great Ace Attorney, some people have commented on how the verboseness of the dialogue makes it harder for them to get into those games when compared to the mainline games. In that particular duology’s case, it was an artistic choice to mimic Victorian era writing, and yet, I believe those comments lend credence to the statement that brevity is the soul of wit. In fact, one of the issues we had during the localization of “Prosecutor’s Gambit” was tone consistency. Because we had more space to work with than the first game, the initial translation sometimes contained sentences that were longer than necessary. So one of the things I did was to go through and pare things down so that Edgeworth and company didn’t sound too tonally different from the first Investigations game while remaining accurate to the Japanese.
…Okay, I know I said no waxing localization philosophy in this blog entry, so uh… let’s get back on track, shall we?
Speaking of consistency, an interesting thing that often happens on HD remasters of Ace Attorney games is the need to suddenly fill in backgrounds with text you had previously written into examine dialogue. Take for example, the Judge poster in the first game.
When we were listing up how each graphic would need to be updated, one of the things we had to do was recall which examinable items had what text connected to it. Back on the Nintendo DS, you couldn’t see what was written on the poster, for example, so there wasn’t even placeholder text scrawled at the very bottom. But now, if we didn’t add the slogan that’s supposed to exist in tiny letters to the poster, it would create a disconnect between the visuals and the examination message. So we added the in-game dialogue to the bottom of the poster for consistency’s sake. As for what it says, you’ll just have to see for yourself!
By the way, if you guessed that the reason we had a whole discussion about toilet paper is because of examination text, give yourself a pat on the back!
Another thing the new 16:9 graphical update affected was how we localized the graphics for each language. In some instances, there was a need to redesign some element or another so that the key point from the Japanese source was conveyed correctly.
Mmm, smell the 4:3-ness…
For example, this is a food stand that sells sakura-flavored manju (manju are small, sweet pastry items). Now, what exactly is sakura supposed to taste like is something even Japanese people wonder about. So it was nice that we could keep the examine dialogue where Gumshoe asks Edgeworth what “sakura” tastes like the same in the English and the Japanese. (Apparently, “sakura flavor” is the taste of coumarin – an organic compound in cherry tree leaves that is only released once you crush or salt the leaves! …is an answer only Ema could find fascinating, I know, I know.) Because the examine dialogue is specifically about the flavor of sakura, “sakura” itself becomes an important piece of information to convey. To that end, I made this mock-up on how to localize the graphic for the artists:
Since we were expanding the base image to be 16:9, I thought I was being smart by using that extra space on the right to have the word “sakura” be clearly visible. To reinforce that, I added the sakura pictures at the bottom since it worked well design-wise and was similar to the original Japanese version (which also featured a lavender sakura design under the character for sakura “桜”). The final result is this lovely background here:
Way to go me… *facepalm*
The lesson to be learned here is to let iconography do the work for you when you can’t fit the words you need in. Icons also help when you forget like a foolishly foolish fool that there will be a lantern covering up the very word you were trying to make visible. But hey, at least the important information was still conveyed!
I made mock-ups for some of the other language-based tricks in the additional new languages as well, which leads me to my next topic: localizing for more than one language.
ROM Sizes and Distribution Mediums
Back in the days before the cloud and digital distribution, how much the physical cartridge or disk could store dictated how much you could stuff in your game. And oftentimes, that meant only one language version would fit on one cartridge. So even if the standard was to create all language versions at the same time, you would still have to contend with the hard limit of the medium you were publishing on. But let’s say you did create more than one language version at a time. In the olden days, you might have gotten away with using the same exact file names for all the assets, regardless of the language version, since there was no chance of them winding up on the same cartridge. So one of the big updates we had to do for the Investigations Collection was to re-work some of the programming to accommodate all of the localized assets.
This applies to the UI assets I mentioned at the very beginning too, but the programmers had to come up with a naming scheme so that the original assets and the localized assets could all live happily together, and anyone working on any new graphics, sound, or text had to stick to this naming scheme. And then, the programmers had to think of a way so that each location that called for an asset would display the correct one depending on the game’s settings. For example, if you set the text to English, but the audio to Japanese, the game has to know which text to display and which “Objection!” to play.
Just look at all these Samurai Dogs…!
So you see, when localizing an older game, it’s more than simply tweaking or adding a few new assets – it’s like implementing all of the assets of a whole other game sometimes.
These are just a few ways technological changes affected how we localized the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. Some of these things may seem small, but each advancement in technology brings with it the potential to make an even higher quality localization than ever before. Whether it’s improvements to the workflow or the ability to do what we have only dreamed of, I can’t wait to see how the process and philosophies of localization will continue to evolve alongside the technology of the future.
Until then!
