Harps into Ocarinas
For those of you who don't know Working Designs (shame on you, *****es), they were a company that sprang up out of nowhere around 1993, when the CD age of gaming was still in its infancy in the US. CEO Victor Ireland decided that he wanted to give lesser-known RPG franchises a chance to see the light of day in America, and he founded WD to accomplish that goal.
Working Designs seemed to specialize in anime-inspired games with prominent voice acting released for consoles like the Sega CD and PC Engine. Their first release was a little game called Cosmic Fantasy for the Turbo CD. With its unleashing on the US market, people began to clamor for WD's attention to bring their favorite games to native soil.
The Lunar games for Sega CD marked Working Designs' most well-known ventures and a concrete style for translators and voice work. Ireland never used professional voice actors, instead plucking talent from among his co-workers and personal friends. Translation jobs for every WD project were handled...differently, taking a lot of liberties with the original scripts and Americanizing games quite a bit. WD became well known for injecting American humor and pop culture references into their translations. for example, a child in Burg (Lunar: The Slver Star) talks to Alex about eating his Wheaties to grow up strong someday, and Ronfar (Lunar: Eternal Blue) quotes Austin Powers with a "yeah baby!" whenever he uses his Clean Litany spell.
Most critics viewed Working Designs' localization decisions as brilliant. Keep in mind, though, that this was during the infancy of the disc age of gaming, when the Sega CD was the height of technology. US gamers knew nothing about the process of making a game, breaking it down to its base ingredients and putting those all back together for an American audience. We weren't familiar with the nuances of scenario writing, characterization, or musical and graphic artistry in a digital medium like that. We only knew these games were fun to play.
When I was a kid, I played Lunar more than any other game I owned. I'd sit in front of my TV and put "Fighting Through the Darkness" on loop for hours because it was the most awesome thing I'd ever heard. Seeing someone like Jessica DeAlkirk bust out with jokes I understood was a rush compared to something like "I, Garland, will knock you all down!"
But after becoming to embroiled in the industry and knowing as much as I do now, Working Designs and their labors put me in a Flowers for Algernon kind of position. I still love those games, but I can't go back to thinking, for myself, that a translation like that is justifiable. I want to know what the original work was like. I don't want Red Bull jokes covering up what I could easily suspect to be a lazy translation job.
I used to say, when I first bought Lunar and took it home for the first time, that I desparately wanted to work for Working Designs someday. Now...I'm kind of glad they're gone.
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