Better in the original Klingon. Er, I mean in the U.S. version.
- Ghaleon's voice acting, particularly in the Sega CD games. Sardonic, bitter, self-satisfied, exultant, defiant, fiercely intelligent, and, in Eternal Blue, overplaying his affected villain role with hammy glee. XSeed seemed to know what they were up against with recasting a role that had been so definitely performed; I understand (correct me if I'm wrong here) that they recorded their new voice actor reading Truitt's "coming-out party" lines from the Playstation version with a particularly derisive inflection, seeking to tar the original performance with the brush of reflexive homophobia. If that's so, the plan seems to have met with unfortunate success, as nearly every mention of Working Designs Ghaleon I've read post-Harmony bemoans how "flamboyant" and "effeminiate" and other unsubtle code words he was. Fuck those people; Truitt was awesome.
- Popful Mail. I haven't played the original Japanese version, but I imagine the Melrose Place and Donald Trump references weren't present. WD's juvenile pop-culture humor usually makes me grit my teeth, but the game and characters here are so anarchic that it fits right in. The voice actors have such great life and - rare in the medium - chemistry; this is secretly WD's best outing for its voice-acting stable and is its most representative game.
- Zelda II, though everyone knows this already. The original game is quite rough in spots and 2600-esque beepy. (Plus, that roar in the Japanese version for Mazura et al. sounds like an ATV spinning its wheels in the mud.) All the U.S. version's enhancements are appreciated, but the music is worth singling out, and the U.S. title screen with the streaming stars and rich reverb is something special.
- Meanwhile, the Super Mario Bros. 2 we got, cut & paste though it may be, was a huge step up from the SMB2 Japan did - a far better showcase of the NES's technical capabilities as it progressed in its life cycle, and few games have such pick-up-and-play joy.
- Gamers love railing against censorship, but I do think some changes removed distracting & detrimental elements. One of those would be the opening attack on Kim in D2, the more lurid elements of which are obscured in the American version through a shift in camera angle. It's tough to settle down for an atmospheric, quiet tale in the Canadian winter after a graphic oral rape that has little to do with the plot (I'm referring to the nature of the attack, not the attack itself).
- In other Wise Excision news, the porno mag from FF6 inserts a cheap joke into a tragic scene and is not missed in its game's misnumbered U.S. counterpart.
- In the Japanese 999, the characters' code names directly incorporated actual number names; Ace, for example, was "Ichinomiya" ("ichi" being the name for "one"), and Lotus was "Yashiro" ("ya" being the prefix for the counter for "eight"). Unlike English, there are a good number of everyday names in Japanese that incorporate numbers, but codenames that evoke something symbolic of their owner's number seem a more elegant solution. (Besides, Lotus doesn't look like a "Yashiro.")
- The Japanese version of Spy Fiction stars for the most part the same voice actors as the U.S. game but gives them a different script and has them recite their lines in extremely slow intonations that make the characters sound as if they have brain damage. (I presume that this was so they'd be more easily understood by an audience that is still learning English.) Also, Dietrich has no accent in the Japanese version. If your name is "Dietrich" and you dress in military black and silver, you have no business having anything but a German accent straight out of Hogan's Heroes.
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- Popful Mail. I haven't played the original Japanese version, but I imagine the Melrose Place and Donald Trump references weren't present. WD's juvenile pop-culture humor usually makes me grit my teeth, but the game and characters here are so anarchic that it fits right in. The voice actors have such great life and - rare in the medium - chemistry; this is secretly WD's best outing for its voice-acting stable and is its most representative game.
- Zelda II, though everyone knows this already. The original game is quite rough in spots and 2600-esque beepy. (Plus, that roar in the Japanese version for Mazura et al. sounds like an ATV spinning its wheels in the mud.) All the U.S. version's enhancements are appreciated, but the music is worth singling out, and the U.S. title screen with the streaming stars and rich reverb is something special.
- Meanwhile, the Super Mario Bros. 2 we got, cut & paste though it may be, was a huge step up from the SMB2 Japan did - a far better showcase of the NES's technical capabilities as it progressed in its life cycle, and few games have such pick-up-and-play joy.
- Gamers love railing against censorship, but I do think some changes removed distracting & detrimental elements. One of those would be the opening attack on Kim in D2, the more lurid elements of which are obscured in the American version through a shift in camera angle. It's tough to settle down for an atmospheric, quiet tale in the Canadian winter after a graphic oral rape that has little to do with the plot (I'm referring to the nature of the attack, not the attack itself).
- In other Wise Excision news, the porno mag from FF6 inserts a cheap joke into a tragic scene and is not missed in its game's misnumbered U.S. counterpart.
- In the Japanese 999, the characters' code names directly incorporated actual number names; Ace, for example, was "Ichinomiya" ("ichi" being the name for "one"), and Lotus was "Yashiro" ("ya" being the prefix for the counter for "eight"). Unlike English, there are a good number of everyday names in Japanese that incorporate numbers, but codenames that evoke something symbolic of their owner's number seem a more elegant solution. (Besides, Lotus doesn't look like a "Yashiro.")
- The Japanese version of Spy Fiction stars for the most part the same voice actors as the U.S. game but gives them a different script and has them recite their lines in extremely slow intonations that make the characters sound as if they have brain damage. (I presume that this was so they'd be more easily understood by an audience that is still learning English.) Also, Dietrich has no accent in the Japanese version. If your name is "Dietrich" and you dress in military black and silver, you have no business having anything but a German accent straight out of Hogan's Heroes.
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