I am deeply ashamed to admit I’ve been a bit more active on my Tumblr blog(s) and forgetting to mirror all of my doodles on my main page. Mostly it’s been due to being kind of worn down from my current workload, though admittedly I’ve been a little down in the dumps too and the delays it’s put in my projects put it in kind of a vicious cycle. Been testing and revising Project Irrgarten a bit at a time, running all sorts of “what if” cases through my head to try and pre-emptively address them in the rule booklet. Also took a quick look around at tips for looking at publishers for board/card games, but I don’t think I’m *quite* ready to start wrapping my mind around that yet.
In more fun news, sort of, I’ve been enjoying my time with Fire Emblem Fates, and I’d probably be enjoying it even more if I could stop finding out about new gratuitous name changes and altered content. It’s still fine, as a game, but I’ve grown up with so many oddly/’safely’ localized games over the years that I thought that the industry was getting over the need to do it. I do understand that (for the most part) Nintendo is *the* family company and would probably try to tread lightly in our weirdly/selectively puritanical U-S-of-A, but what gets me are the unnecessary and seemingly random changes of characters’ names, which makes googling for information or pictures of characters really annoying. Was changing “Harold” to “Arthur” necessary? Was it really worth making two characters’ names anagrams of Awakening characters to really drive home how similar they look? Was the Treehouse team paid by the edit or something?
I can understand some names seeing alteration in the localization process- it’s not unusual for names to involve sticking to a theme, or some sort of pun or other wordplay that doesn’t translate exactly gracefully into English. At times, if a game is targeted at younger audiences, like LBX for a recent example, they might just change names into a Western approximation so they’re easier to read or pronounce. I also totally get when something needs changing because the original name carries worse connotations in the expected area (LBX’s penultimate boss was originally called Lucifer, but was changed to Nemesis.) No, it’s the gratuitous stuff. Material changed for change’s sake or because someone on the inside wanted to show off how clever and creative they could be with someone else’s material.
But as I said before, I can’t be too upset with the end result. It’s More Fire Emblem, the online My Castle features are pretty fun to screw around with, and I probably will eventually cave and get most of the DLC maps and junk just to squeeze more play out of it. (The decision to divvy up the game into *three* parts and then put out what is effectively a season pass on a portable RPG is aggravating in itself, but I’m trying to do the “close on a high note” thing here…) If anyone wants to hit up my castles, by the way:
Ft. Eishi(Nohr Version)- 17208-54903-00989-08719
Ft. Eishi(Hoshido Version)- 17208-54903-00989-08713
While I’m at it, my Nintendo ID is ThreeTwo and friend code 2766-8411-9034.