Dragon Quest has a long and interesting translation history which I would like to talk about.
A thread draws near! Command?
A thread draws near! Command?
It's hard to understate how much Nintendo strove to help make "Dragon Warrior" a thing in the West back in the late 80s. Copies of Dragon Warrior 1 are still cheap nowadays primarily because they shipped it for free with early Nintendo Power subscriptions.
That's all in addition to how player-friendly their instruction manual walkthroughs ("Explorer's Handbook") and Nintendo Power guides were. They knew that in the US there wouldn't be the extensive library of guidebooks kids could find in Japan.
It also started a decades-long practice of trying to steer away from Toriyama's art. Even when Enix US started embracing their game's style in the late 90s, they still often eschewed 2D art in favor of clunky 3D game covers, a longstanding Western tradition.
Nintendo threw their own translation muscle into Dragon Warrior 1-4 in the NES era. They went out of their way to go olde-English with Dragon Warrior 1 and 2 in particular, even going as far as writing the second-person narration in the same style.
Dragon Warrior 3 used plain US English for the most part, with a few notable exceptions, mainly the big bosses. Dragon Warrior 4 dropped the olde English entirely, and even its final boss used plain US English instead.
These games had some interesting and sometimes shortsighted spellname translations. ギラ got translated as "Hurt" in DW1, and ベギラマ got translated as "Hurtmore". This got changed to "Firebal" and "Firebane" in later NES games. (And Sizz and Sizzle in the modern era.)
Likewise, the priest's wind magic of バギ and バギマ got translated as "Infernos" and "Infermore" back in those days, which was fine...???
...Until visual effects got introduced in the SNES/GBC era depicting a wind attack. (It got changed to Woosh and Swoosh in the modern era.)
...Until visual effects got introduced in the SNES/GBC era depicting a wind attack. (It got changed to Woosh and Swoosh in the modern era.)
No DQ translation primer would be complete without mentioning the games that most notably DIDN'T get translations at the time: Everything in the SNES era. 5, 6, 1+2 Remake, 3 Remake, Torneko's Mystery Dungeon.
To me, this nearly 10 year gap is the most pivotal part of Dragon Quest's history in the West. While a generation of NES kids was growing into teenagers discovering the joys of JRPGs via FF, CT, and SOM, DQ was left languishing in relative obscurity in the US.
This is where there's a huge gap in my knowledge. As many English war stories as there are from key Square translators in the 90s, I haven't seen any from Enix employees. So I don't know what changed or why, but their approach shifted drastically in the late 90s.
Suddenly, they started aggressively releasing every current DQ title they had on the Gameboy Color and PS1. Dragon Warrior Monsters. DW1+2 GBC. DW3 GBC. Torneko: The Last Hope. Even the granddaddy of ginormous JRPGs, Dragon Warrior 7 (with non-3D art!).
These releases adhered to the spell name conventions set by the NES release pretty faithfully, but not the NES character/gear/location names. For example, Midenhall became "Lorasia" (honestly for the better, but it got reverted later anyway), and Malroth became Sidoh.
The gargantuan undertaking that was Dragon Warrior 7's translation has been discussed at some length. I shudder to imagine those translators working in the trenches with rough-quality faxes of paper scripts. Bless their hearts, seriously.
It looked like Enix was finally on its feet. They had a firm handle on their own flagship series in the West. Sure, the SNES was a lost era for DW, but now they could translate their own games fine without needing to lean on Nintendo for help.
Then came the Square-Enix merger.
Then came the Square-Enix merger.
Following the merger, Dragon Quest went through another dead period in the West, in which many GBA and PS2 games came out in Japan that never saw an English release.
This dry spell was broken with the NA release of Dragon Quest 8 in 2005, now under the original name of "Dragon Quest". This release was pivotal for many reasons, not the least of which was the establishment of an all-new, unified translation standard for all future DQ titles.
This standard included a complete overhaul of all spellnames, plus extra guidelines such as the usage of puns and wordplays for names of monsters, items, people, places, etc. It also codified the use of modern UK English for all text including UI, with region-based accents.
NA DQ8 did two other main notable things I'll touch on here.
1) They added voices to a game that had previously been unvoiced.
2) They completely overhauled the menu.
1) They added voices to a game that had previously been unvoiced.
2) They completely overhauled the menu.
The voices were a huge deal at the time. For my part, I remember a summer in Japan in 2006 where I checked out an Akiba game store that sold foreign (US) games, and they advertised the US DQ8 game with a little sticker that said "Adds voices! A whole new experience!"
The menu overhaul is a very divisive topic, I've found. It added a ton of visual information to what had previously been a very barebones, text-only menu.
However, it also added full-screen opacity and load times where none had previously existed.
However, it also added full-screen opacity and load times where none had previously existed.
S-E used DQ8 as the launch point of a hard push to try and make DQ happen in the West. Over the next few years, their notable releases included DQ Monsters Joker 1 and 2, DQ Swords, and Slime Morimori DQ 2, shortsightedly named "Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime".
Real talk, Rocket Slime's English translation is like a master class in punnery. It's genius. That game is an absolute delight to read and experience. I can't recommend it enough.
hardcoregaming101.net/dragon-quest-h…
hardcoregaming101.net/dragon-quest-h…
Between 2008 and 2011, the DS remakes of the Zenithia trilogy (4-6) also got released in the West, meaning 5 and 6 finally got translated into English. These were the first mainline games to follow the conventions established in 8, and in many ways, they were a testing grounds.
Given that 4 already had a serviceable older translation in plain US English, its overhauled and very accent-intensive newer translation was a drastic departure. The accents in DS DQ4 were dense and hard to parse at a glance. They got lessened, but not eliminated, in 5.
Notably, these dialects got preserved in voice form later. Dragon Quest Heroes 1 and 2 featured characters from DQ4-6, and their voiced dialogue was much the same as their DS game dialogue, which for me mostly meant that the cool martial artist princess talked like Zangief.
S-E also released DQ9 for DS in the midst of this big marketing push in 2010. However, after this and DS DQ6, their releases went quiet for several more years while DQ10 flourished in Japan as an MMORPG (spearheaded by the now way more famous Yoshi-P).
Dragon Quest wouldn't make another major resurgence in the West until the release of Dragon Quest Heroes 1 in 2015. S-E has been faithfully releasing pretty much every mainline game in English ever since - Heroes 2, Builders 1+2, and DQ11.
In this same time period, S-E has also released Android and Switch ports of DQ1-3, with brand new translations following the new conventions. As Clyde Mandelin recently pointed out, though, sometimes the olde English in DQ1 and 2 gets a little thick and hard to parse.
DQ3 is the most interesting of the three, translation-wise, because it uses modern UK English for most of the game. Then when the endgame of the story takes you back to DQ1's Alefgard, it's back to olde English everywhere again, and it feels like coming home.
(For comparison, the NES version of Dragon Warrior 3 just used plain US English throughout, even in the Alefgard sections. I feel like the Android/Switch translation handles the transition more elegantly.)
One could argue that we're currently in the midst of the longest period of abundance that DQ has ever known in the West. After lots of starts and stops over the past two decades, it feels like Square-Enix has finally found a comfortable niche that Dragon Quest can thrive in.
I considered touching on this and decided against it, but I'll go ahead and summarize anyway: The developer responsible for DQ4 PS1 shut down, meaning Enix US had literally zero dev support for an English version. They wanted one but couldn't do it.
One footnote for Dragon Warrior 3: The US version, in addition to adding a sprite for Ortega, also added an entire combat sequence of Ortega falling into the volcano, rendered in-game. This got added to the SFC remake as well.
(It startled me as a kid.)
(It startled me as a kid.)
CORRECTION: At the top of the thread I claimed that Nintendo did the heavy lifting on the NES translations. That was incorrect. Apparently according to the "Iwata Asks" interview for DQ9, Enix did the translations with support/input from Nintendo.
