Lost in Translation

I played Future Performers in Japanese text with a dictionary. I thought the story was quite enjoyable! Though I’m not really into any famous visual novel games to compare this one with, if it got me thinking about some of the scenes in 3D when I’m not even playing the game then I think it should be at least decent to others.

Then I saw some English communities online complaining that the story isn’t good. Eh, something must be missing on the other side? I switched the game language to check out the English story a bit, and I immediately knew what English players are missing out on.

I’m not saying the localizer / translator is doing a bad job, they are doing great, but English lacks the decorations that make Japanese light novels work. Especially a very “trope-y” story like this one, where each character promptly fills the conventional manga character quirks matrix until there are no tropes left behind, and the story itself is the classic sports manga “from bottom to the top”.

Inside this article tree I collect some interesting bits that I thought I’d like even English UI users to know. If they had been listening to the VA for every single sentence, maybe they already noticed the things lost in translation.

It contains SPOILER, of course! Only the parts of the conversation I want to comment on remain. Each page uses the same episode number and title as the game, so you can match it against how far you have played. That means the titles can spoil by themselves, so if you know what point you’ve played until, you can avoid clicking past that point.

Honorifics

Something I already mentioned might not be mentioned again and omitted in future instances, since they’ll do that consistently throughout the story. So you have to read these articles in story order to catch the thing that was just newly introduced. (e.g. Went to new school for the first time.)

A big one is how character addresses each other. This story is a multiplication of several layers that conveniently produces permutations different ways they call each other :

• School consisting of one Groove Coaster club.
• Inside each club, members across 1st ~ 3rd year of high school.
• For each member, a character trope that they occupied.
• There are multiple races in this story so might as well multiply that too.
• Even higher than the 3rd year is the club advisors and the match announcers. Characters talk back to their club advisor, but not to the announcers.
• Exceptions like someone who is technically a 3rd year but is a kid because she skipped grades.

So the thing consistently lost in English would be like how Kakeru would have to call almost everyone of 2nd and 3rd year of any school with -senpai. Or inversely someone of higher year would add -san or -kun, or they might use custom nicknames. I think it does matter to the feel you get reading it, even though I also ended up translating to English in my mind.

Japanese Level

Note that I’m at the level where it took up to 1 minute for one text box before I press the button, also I tried taking N3 test and surrendered after the first half break. (The food at the Kyoto University cafeteria was great, that’s all I remembered from the test I took for fun while I did the master degree in Japan.) So, I want to say sorry ahead of time if I told you something I misunderstood along the story.

I do believe writing this guide is a part of my learning, and I’d rather just do it to rack up my Japanese quantities in what I already enjoy than worrying.