"Radia War" fan translation vs. "Tower of Radia" prototype

[DRW]

I recently found out that there's an actual American protoype of the game "Radia Senki - Reimei Hen", called "The Tower of Radia". Until now, I only knew about the fan translation "Chronicles of the Radia War":



Has anybody played the prototype? If yes, is it complete or are there texts that are not translated yet? And is the tranlation any good?

Mod edit: fixed typo in Subject ("trasnlation")

[Jedi QuestMaster]

All I can say is that "Tower of Radia" rolls off the tongue much more pleasantly than "Chronicle of the Radia War."

I know that it's supposed to be literally correct, but come on! Why not shorten it to "Chronicles of Radia" ? In fact, I think I like that better than "Tower." Whatevs.

[Bregalad]

No, I had no idea there was an english prototype of this game. I played the fan translation, did the first few missions but then it was starting to get boring and I didn't know where to go so I stopped playing. But yeah, looks like a decent game.

[OneCrudeDude]

This makes me wonder. Are localizations of NES games essentially glorified translations, or are fan translations just amateur localizations? When you think about it, they're both accomplish the same thing, only difference is that localizations tend to be more professionally made, obviously. I also wonder if the localization team included any of the Japanese employees, or they probably had the source code available since Nintendo themselves needed it before their game could be licensed.

[tepples]

Fan translations try to change as little as possible. Official translations are more likely to include changes:

• Censorship: Nintendo of America Inc. aimed for a younger audience than Nintendo Co. Ltd.
• Restyling for western sensibilities: Look at how different Totally Rad cut scenes look from those in Magic John.
• Difficulty rebalancing: Final Fantasy II (U) is FFIV Easy Type (J).
• Mapper hacks: A whole bunch of stuff got mapper hacked to MMC3 (and Castlevania III to MMC5) because it was cheaper than getting NOA to certify a custom ASIC mapper.
• Rearrangement of music for 2A03: NOA ran NES audio through the bottom expansion port instead of the instead of the Game Pak slot and never widely released anything that used it.

[Bregalad]

@OneCrudeDude : Actually you are quite wrong. How many fan translation did you play ? It's true there is quite a few unfinished/buggy ones, but there is also a lot of them which are way supperior than what any official team would have ever done. There is a lot of official translation which are very poor for the following reasons :

- ROM size limited to the original japanese's ROM size, but Japanese text takes in average half of characters as equivalent english text
- Window size on screen is too small to show the same thing in english (or any other indo-european language) with 8x8 characters -> a VWF has to be implemented, or multiple page breaks should be added
- Official translators had hard deadlines
- Official translators had to remove most references to japanese culture such as food and find a cheap western equivalent
- For german, french, etc... translations, usually they were based on the poor english translation and then poorly translated again to another lanaguage, making the result having barely any sense at all (this is especially true for the PS1 area)
- In addition to that, all that tepples said above

Difficulty rebalancing: Final Fantasy II (U) is FFIV Easy Type (J).

Technically this is wrong, it contains a mix elements of the normal version and easy type version, and a few changes were made soleely for the USA version. Legend of Localisation website explains this very well.

[Dwedit]

Didn't Easy Type come after the US version?

[Sik]

I think that's the point, it's not the original version.

[Bregalad]

Didn't Easy Type come after the US version?

I don't know, but the release date means nothing as when the developpers actually does the change. They might have done them before one day before the release

[tepples]

Didn't Easy Type come after the US version?

My point is that FFII (U) came after FFIV (J), and the changes were extensive enough to be called a whole different game in the Japanese market.