There's no such thing as a perfect translation – strawberry ice cream never really tastes like strawberries grown from the dirt – and even localization experts need to accept there are limits to what they can do. Final Fantasy 9 translator Brody Phillips certainly does, so he's waiting for a day when a team "sharper" than his own interprets the JRPG for an English-speaking audience.
"I think we did a good job of bringing the game to life for Western audiences," Phillips says in a recent interview with Time Extension. "But looking back, I wish we'd been sharper about the nostalgia aspect – picking up on more of those deep-cut references to earlier Final Fantasy games. We caught some, we updated some, but others we just missed. I'm sure a modern team – especially one steeped in the series' history – could make those shine even brighter."
"I'd honestly love to see what a new team could do. Localization's come a long way in the last 25 years, and now translators have tools that make the process so much smoother," Phillips adds. "Back then" – North America got Final Fantasy 9 in the fall of 2000, while Japan got it in the summer – "everything was manual. We were using WZ Editor with regex to do bulk changes, version control was literally file timestamps, and we were emailing files back and forth in Outlook. Work got lost, mistakes happened – it was messy."
And while Phillips regrets that some of Final Fantasy 9's original references to older games in the franchise "slipped by us completely," he also suggests that, nearly 30 years ago, Western audiences would have been oblivious.
"The release history of Final Fantasy outside Japan was messy at the time," he says. "Even if we had caught every reference, there would have been internal debates about how they would have been localized on the consoles of the time."
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