A recent interview with Dragon Quest XI‘s director and producers revealed that the reason why the imminent English release has a dub is because they now have the time to implement one (unlike the Japanese version), which dub critics will likely consider a poor decision…
An interview with director Takeshi Uchikawa and producers Hikari Kubota and Hokuto Okamoto divulged information on the upcoming English release, such as an explanation for the existence of an English dub (when the Japanese version doesn’t have one at all):
Interviewer: “The Japanese release of Dragon Quest XI did not contain any voice acting, but this new western release does. What lead to the decision to add English voice acting?”
Hikari Kubota: “There’s a couple of aspects that lead to this decision. One is the main Dragon Quest games that released in Japan did not have voice acting, and that’s what the Japanese audience is used to. Additionally, Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest XI’s lead writer) often changes the scenario and story up until the very last minute and tries to do all these things to make it better and develop it further. That means that there isn’t a lot of time to do recording and we want to get the game out to Japanese players as quickly as possible. Keeping the voice acting out helps to get the game finished more quickly. However by the time it came to the US, everything with the script was already finalized and there weren’t going to be anymore last-minute story changes. So that was why we decided to go ahead and put the voice acting in the English version.”
When asked if Dragon Quest XI will have mod tools for its PC version like Final Fantasy XV:
Interviewer: “Final Fantasy XV had mod tools created specifically for the PC version of that game. Can we expect any sort of official PC specific additions for Dragon Quest XI?”
Hokuto Okamoto: “We hadn’t really considered doing that.”
Hikari Kubota: “Originally with XV, the PC version was released later than the console version but with Dragon Quest XI, both the console and PC version will be released at the same time so generally they will have the same content.”
They were also confronted regarding the name changes of certain characters:
Interviewer: “Why were some characters names changed in the western release? For example, Camus was changed to Erik in the western version.”
Hokuto Okamoto: “Dragon Quest is a game in which even in translation we try to give a different feel to each of the worlds. Kind of a different regional feel, so that’s where changing the names started because obviously in different places and different languages, it’s going to feel differently. In order to keep that, we decided to change some of the names.
Because there’s so many different areas and regions within the game, each one has been given a very strong regional feel to it. Specifically, in the case of Camus to Erik, it’s because we wanted him to seem Scandinavian. To Japanese people, the name Camus comes across as Scandinavian but that’s obviously not going to work for English speakers so we decided on Erik. It wasn’t just off the cuff. We wanted it to seem like his name matched the region he was from.”
Dragon Quest XI will launch for the PS4 and PC in the west on September 4th.
Huh, there was an article on DualShockers says that DQ11 won’t be censored in its localization, but if they’re going with banal name changes (Martina changed to “Jade”?), so I’ll reserve judgment until reviews come in. They said they’re not altering puff-puff but meh, I still remember how the Danmachi localizers claimed it “wasn’t censorship” to remove the “touching” feature.
localization is not censorship. danmachi’s devs on the other hand, are idiots, and that was indeed censorship.
“localization is not censorship” well it is not the meaning now.
“localization” now simply means “maximum censorship+creative writing with SJW jargon” at least in this decade.
Also f♥♥k Danmachi SJW censorship implementer.
Wasn’t implying this was censorship. Just meant that I was optimistic about DQ11’s localization because they said no censorship before, but I’m less optimistic now that I’ve seen the banal name changes.
But it’s also worth noting that the line between censorship and localization is blurry in the eyes of some devs. Having a license can make people feel entitled to do whatever they want if they think it would “improve” the story, and call it “localization”. The Danmachi team’s inability to comprehend the word “censorship” is just an example of this in my eyes. It rarely makes sense for stories with fantasy settings to have their fundamental setting details “localized” because they’re already Western-ish. I’m optimistic about DQ11 but changing 7/8 of the characters’ names is a red flag to me.
English over Japanese, deal with it weeabo retards.
Most players of Dragon Quest want it to stay original, if you start changing things just so the casual player will buy it, it’s still selling out, and you can also lose a lot of the feel of your story just from simple name changes and voice acting. Japanese players could be getting a strong sense of nostalgia or a better experience that is taken away in the Western version, just from those changes
the games been out in japan for a fucking year how have they not had any time before this
Must agree with the guy, Camus doesn’t sound scandinavian, sounds Albert.