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Hi, I'm Alexa Rae Correa, and this is the Game Maker's Notebook podcast.
I have two very interesting and special guests for you today Olly Chance and Morgan Rushton of Schlock, a localization writing company that has definitely worked on every great Japanese game you have played in the last oh, I don't know two decades.
They worked on Final Fantasy XVI, Death Stranding, Ni No Kuni for Blast from the Past and, of course, the most recently released Final Fantasy Tactics, the Ivalice Chronicles remake.
Ollie and Morgan are amazing.
We talked about localization writing, how to approach localization writing, the challenges of writing a game, localization live as the game is being designed, as was the case with Final Fantasy 16 and talked a lot about performance working with actors in this space.
It's a really cool conversation in a part of the industry and a part of the writing community that I think doesn't get talked about enough.
So please enjoy.
Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in-depth one-on-one conversations between game makers, providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.
The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member-driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.
All right, my favorite opening question.
How did you get here?
What's the journey from where you started to the career you have now?
Wow.
I think you should start.
I know, loaded.
Olly should get the first go of that because you were in the industry years before I was.
Yeah, like a year and a half.
I came up to London to go to university.
I walked in to the Japanese department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, which it definitely isn't called.
I think they just call it so these days.
Okay, reasons that should be obvious.
And upon the notice board I saw the Squaresoft logo as it was at the time, and they were literally advertising for testers and I was like holy shit what?
And so I went for an interview.
I met Ed Valiente, who was the boss at the time.
We went for coffee and cigarettes and I pretended to like some techno records I'd never heard of, And then a day later I got an email saying I'd got the job.
Amazing.
And then for the whole time I was at university, I was testing.
So worked on Vagrant Story was my first game.
And then we did FF9 and we did, you know, tons and tons and tons of stuff.
And then through the course of doing that, realized that I liked this industry and doing that thing.
And obviously my degree was pointed in a good direction for a certain angle on it.
So yeah graduated, went full-time there for a short bit, realized i couldn't have a full-time job ever because going to an office every day makes me want to die.
Decided to go freelance.
Went freelance with translating.
Translation turned into obviously, all the voice recording stuff.
Voice recording turned into direction and writing and other things.
And now we're here.
I did accelerate the last 20-ish years of that.
Really, that did sort of start from a very low gear and then a very high one.
Where i came in, there was um, I did English at uni, moved to London after that with my then girlfriend, now wife.
And one of our mutual friends from uni told her she's German, told her I've seen the sign on the UCL notice board for the best summer job ever.
I think it literally was titled best summer job ever, which was being a German language localization tester.
And me and Steph, we bonded when we very first knew each other over the final boss fight of Final Fantasy VIII and subsequent fifth season.
She sat with me for the 45 minutes of casting double and triple and Ultima or whatever it was.
And we connected there.
And anyway.
So before she went in for a kind of interview and language test and all that stuff I gave her.
We did a lot of Square Enix revision together.
I was already very much an FF8 and FF9 guy.
Oh, Enix.
It was Enix.
We bicker.
That's our process.
Anyway, and she got that job.
And that put me in touch with people like Oli and our then boss or sort of sub-boss Seb, before Katrine.
Yeah, Katrine was boss at the time.
Yeah, and Seb was a right hand.
And basically, a job came up in the English language testing team.
I didn't have any Japanese, unlike Oli.
So I just came at it from a kind of English literature student perspective.
Who happened to love the games?
I got chatting with Seb about football, which was the equivalent of the obscure techno records.
And that got me a job there.
Ollie very kindly quit his full-time role soon after, and I replaced him.
And that was when Dragon Quest VIII was coming out.
And Dragon Quest VIII was the first...
Kind of like.
I've been Dragon Warrior for a long time and Dragon Quest VIII was the first one where they were kind of we're going to really localize this.
And the idea was to distinguish it from the Final Fantasy series to that point.
They were going to do it in British English and that gave me a perfect opening to be.
That was my first job as a script editor was Dragon Quest VIII.
Wow um, and that led to final fantasy 12 and ffta 2 and many dragon quest games and final fantasy 16 and all that's pretty much the same path, as i have 14, which is 14 14, we're working on 14 since about 2010.
Wow, oh god yeah, version one.
A lot of love went into that um so yeah, and that's sort of how we did it, and each thing, essentially organically, as in the accelerated timeline, led on to the next and um uh, i think.
What we've always found though, is that our origin, that the being a video games tester yeah, meant that we essentially it's the runner job, it's the lowest rung of the video game possible rung of the video game industry, and that really was helpful, but for just humility and also everyone else in the process, if you want to communicate, if you want yeah yeah, it's like it's the most useful thing for process, because when you're a tester, You start out having to write bugs that you know have to go up the chain.
And if you've been annoying, if you haven't explained yourself properly, if you haven't said things the right way, it's just going to come back, not waived, as they call it, not fixed, however you call it, in whatever setup you're in.
And so you have to learn, right from that minute, to frame the problem the right way, to look for the solution in the right way, to explain what you're talking about the right way.
Flatteringly.
Flatteringly.
But then that's really useful when you get to editing text, because then if you're noticing a problem with a piece of text, you know how to talk about the problem with that piece of text, because you wrote all those bugs which were ways of talking about those pieces of text.
And then when you go further up the chain, if you're doing the writing, if you're originating the original text, or if you're even sitting in a studio looking at lines with the associated comments and you know how everything works all the way down that line, you have a much more like zoomed out idea of the process, an idea of how a thing might have ended up, how it's ended up, and a much better idea of how to fix it.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you think from your vantage point because obviously you guys are the the success story of came up through testing own, my own company do you think that pathway into the industry still exists?
No, this is one of the things we know.
This is like.
This is the thing that frightens me most, like covid started strangling it and ai is trying to kill it.
It's like the way you acquire these skills, the way you get these people who move through an industry like that in a useful way and learn the right way, how to you know, like gradually move up the ladder, that the less possible that becomes, the weirder things get, and unfortunately it's becoming yeah, less possible.
Testing moved remotely during covid right, and now testing is done like either like super remotely or they're even doing it less or not at all automated testing.
There's a lot of that stuff, but so that as a way, in is kind of going and then, if you don't have that, like i say, you don't acquire those base level skills like so we are say, working with newer editors who haven't come through that.
And I can see they haven't come through that, because when they write about the problems in a text, they don't write about them in that way that they've been beaten down by trying to get bumps up through the chain.
But that's such a useful learning process.
And it's how to I had a friend whose novel I edited and he was like, what the hell is this?
I've never seen professional Oli before because, like there was not a single word or comma or whatever that I wouldn't very carefully explain exactly what the hell I was changing and why.
Because that's how I was trained and there's no, absolutely no judgment on the people who aren't coming up that way, because the opportunities just don't exist.
But in terms of learning a craft, they're learning it millimeter by millimeter.
Those chances don't exist.
And once ai cuts out the lower and mid levels of that and of all of all aspects yeah, and everybody's expected to show up fully formed.
Because that's the other thing, the thing that we've noticed again, you have to now, like you have to have a really good linkedin game.
You know you might be expected to talk at a conference before you really know what you're talking about.
Yeah, and like there's a tendency, i think, on the part of old hands like us to be a little bit like grumpy about that, like why are you talking about this?
You don't have any rights at all, but it's like that's how you get on the map right, it's people's only choice.
So, and i really, really feel that and i'm like if i had to come up through this LinkedIn-y, conference-y world that exists today, absolutely no way I would have made it to where I've made it, because I suck in that environment.
I'm terrible at self-promotion.
I hate LinkedIn.
I hate it.
Right?
But it's all – it's the circuit.
It's all of those things having to be seen in the right circles all the time.
Just on the point about trained humility at the beginning one of our first interactions in the industry – was um Ollie being instructed to take me aside as my team leader and tell me why uh, the fact that I'd rewritten every single line from the ending of a Final Fantasy remake was not going to be taken.
And it's actually, but just basically somebody had kind of gone, oh yeah, go crazy.
You know what I mean?
And I go like, absolutely.
Okay.
Right.
Well, let's look at every one of these lines and how could this be better?
And I just kind of deployed my english literature training and like my kind of knowledge of theater and uh and and it turns out that doesn't go down immensely well with uh thin-skinned uh colleagues far away, you know.
So yeah, ollie kind of read me the riot act, so i remember that finally, with consideration.
It's just that it's that thing of like, you know, like the fantasy of every fan.
Right is to get in the guts of it and to make those big changes.
Yeah, but the one thing you have to be aware of is, like i say to, to move, to add or remove, or move.
A single comma you learn when you come up through that testing thing is a you know.
To learn how to do that, to explain yourself, to get it moved, to do that in and of itself is a hard enough job and a craft that you have to learn.
So I'm going to rewrite the end of FF whatever, as much as necessary.
The lesson to actually learn there is like, well, sure.
But before we get to that, there's like so much that we understand now.
Yeah.
You know, recently I came to understand, but at the time.
Yeah.
But yeah no, to go back to what you said Alexa, I think that thing of like, how are people going to learn the craft?
That's a really tricky question.
I don't know what the answer is.
It's.
It's heartbreaking to watch on my side as well, from the like writing standpoint, because something that i think we're seeing a lot and a lot of these people developing these ai programs or these studios that are wanting to use ai.
They're selling it to us as, oh the ai will write your ambient npc dialogue, the the ai will write your barks, your battle chatter, and you don't have to worry about that, you can just focus on the script and the thing is, the ambient dialogue, the battle chatter, that's what we train new writers on.
That's what we give to juniors and associates to cut their teeth, to get used to things.
So when you're eliminating all of that, you're eliminating our training ground.
So I agree with you that I think we have to be super careful with how AI is coming into the situation, because it can't be replacing essentially the next generation.
What happens when we're all dead?
Who's making video games?
AI.
Yeah yeah Gemini, I guess, but like I hate that it's called Gemini, I hate that there's a.
Really there's a big problem which plays into a lot of the work that me and Morgan do as well is like expectations.
In this industry standards right, are already wobbly enough, and the one thing we've spent all of these years trying to work towards is go.
No, as a fan, expect more, expect better writing, expect better performance, expect all of these things.
If it's localized, it doesn't matter, it should still be written.
If it's, you know, no forgiveness for any kind of lowering in quality.
And then AI is going to come along and it's going to have context, like you know dialect, like all of the ah, fuck it.
It's just words in the background.
You know, that's a nonsense.
And people who don't take it seriously as a craft are not going to take it more seriously once we mess with it like that.
The specific, the thing we recently finished, Final Fantasy Tactics, the Evilist Chronicles, very proud of having worked on it. um, the stuff you mentioned about like your, your, your peripheral, your sort of NPC flavor text, the, the, what that cast on final, on, um, on tactics has some incredible actors who only have those roles.
Yeah.
And I'm talking like they have, like they are the main character, like the Kate Kennedy who is the, the female Spartan in Halo right.
Is she was one of the nameless night characters in the back.
And she just came in and just, that's all she got.
I heard her.
Right.
And was incredible.
There was some absolutely brilliant.
And and what we kind of one to do with all those peripheral things is spend as much attention on them and and i think the public has kind of noticed they're like it goes deep.
This game, you know, you just sort of some random nameless character kind of launches into some kind of attack on the nobility and you're really with them.
You know you go yeah, like the, the trailers um came out and we kind of we didn't know what was going to be in them, and then we saw uh, will coban, some of will coban's lines in there just, and we're like yes, that's why we spend that time and and i think um, it can.
Performance is the same thing.
Um, i've seen uh, when i went to gdc obviously that's when we first met um alexa i went to a round table there where a bunch of actors around the table going no one wants to do the battle lines i don't mind as a guy who's made it kicking down the, the bottom rungs of the ladder, and you're like right what, it's incredible, this short, the incredible short sightedness.
We're all right.
You know like, and yeah, it comes down to performance, every aspect of like automation at the bottom level to get rid of all the training grounds for everybody.
Your first role in games is very likely going to be one of those roles.
Right, it's not going to, you're probably not going to get the lead role, right?
So yeah, So we'll just Ben Starr, play everyone forever.
Yeah, unless you're Ben Starr when you just get to be the hero of the franchise anyway.
Morgan, you are... He very loudly and often credits you with discovering him.
So we have you to thank for this mess.
Why are you playing into this, Alexa?
Look how much he wants this.
What?
That is...
So I would love to be able to take the credit for Ben Starr.
He is a phenomena in his own right.
So let's put that first.
For introducing that wrecking ball of a human being to this industry.
But that's the thing.
Actually, a thing we've encountered as well is uh, the phenomenon of, the phenomenon singular, of the live audition is a thing which yeah let's, the industry are trying to get rid of.
Like yeah let's, let's talk about that.
You still do live auditions yes god yes absolutely, because the the ludicrous phenomenon of sending, casting the net wide and sending some like rough, impressionistic descriptions of what you're after, and then a brilliant actor sends something and you go yeah, that's not what i was thinking, You know, and that just that happens.
We see that happen.
People slip through the net where we think slightly.
I mean, not arrogantly.
I would say it's just you never know how somebody's obviously as people who write stuff.
We know this.
You never know how someone's going to interpret a piece of text.
Right.
There's a casting side with a we're looking for this.
Ben tells very similar stories about this.
You go into an audition thinking you know what they're looking for and if it's self-tape only, you'll give what you think they're looking for.
But only in a live audition can we go.
I totally see how you took that off the page and felt it needed to be that way.
But it's actually this and if you don't audition live, you never get that, and so you will miss some of the best performance that ever could have been, because somebody guessed on a, on a self-tape at best.
And if they're database cast, then I mean, the other thing you're going to miss is the things like Ben's story.
So Ben has told it many times, but quickly we had been, I think it was the 4th of July.
I remember it for that reason, however many years ago.
And he came in last of the day for a character.
We'd already got loads of good candidates for anyway, much smaller character.
And had it not been for that being live and us being, and basically I kind of I was there and Hannah Price was actually on the button that day doing the directing.
And it may have been me who said, I think we should try him for Clive.
But I think Hannah was going to say it straight after.
So maybe I got to kind of say the famous words, but she was at least Buzz Aldrin.
But the point is that that was a moment where we saw ben in between takes, like he kind of gave us his kind of like gritty, mercenary character and in between takes was that love, like lovely human being who has got some vulnerability but like he's got every reason to be confident but is also humble and all that stuff, and it was that like there's these flickers of that in between the takes.
Yeah, this made me go like that he basically is clive like like so, and then we gave him the the thing and he looked at it for 30 seconds and then gave us the best audition of the whole thing, um and that.
So that's how that happened and thanks to him, for i mean god, like just going with it, having coming in, feeling spent and then getting this flung in front of him and just sharing like we.
I was basically in tears because he was, he was sharing some of the loss of his brother moments and that stuff, and there it was, just it was amazing.
And so that's the benefit of a live audition right, exactly that.
You see something you miss ben star amazingly, but also, like i said, just some amazing actors.
Just don't know what you want, especially because what we try and do also is we're reaching into and very much enjoying reaching into film and tv actors right, not people who are necessarily experienced in video games And they don't know what a video game audition is like.
So you've got to get them in the room, because if you get some old TV person, some brilliant but I'm very experienced TV person, you give them, you know, three sample scenes from a video game.
They have no idea about.
If they self tape that, you just it's obviously going to be completely just sort of thrown out there and whatever.
But if you get them in the room and we've had people come in who are like this is so good.
I've been begging my audience, my agent, for 20 years to get me in these video game things and once they're in there and they feel because it's the confidence thing as well it doesn't matter how experienced somebody is, especially in the booth in there where it's really exposing, and especially when it's like oh, you're trying to listen, do they like me?
You know there's so much self-exposure in there, but if we could be there and go this is fucking great, let's try this, let's tweak it like this.
That's amazing, do that a bit more like that, do that like that, and they go yeah yeah, and you can see them grow into it, coming along with it.
Because historically, the assumption was when you got profile actors film and tv actors they would come in and go like it's like cartoons yeah cool, like and that and and it was they're not coming.
They weren't coming in to fulfill creative aims.
Historically, for the most part, that was my experience really changed.
Some of them really changed and they also like.
The people I like are the people who were like ah, so it's that kind of puzzle and they kind of take it that way and they're like oh okay like say, you're doing something that's quite strict ADR, and you get actors who love ADR and you get actors who hate it.
So somebody's got to do you know that one line coming across the bar and we need to keep it human, but we need to also get it within that time.
You get simple Actors who you work with, who love solving that puzzle, and other people who you can see yeah, they'd rather be doing other things.
But the ones you find and those little discoveries and those moments of like, this is fun.
Like, yeah, they're what we live for.
And you, yeah, you have to look hard for those.
Why do you think so many... studios projects are moving away from live auditions to just self-tape.
Why do you think that's happening if it's not beneficial?
I assume it's agenda-based.
For the same reason that incorporating AI into every process, there is some shareholder pressure.
In the biggest publishers, those are the ones that are slashing the headcounts.
The idea that cutting our auditioning budget in the context of a development budget, The idea that if we can shave off three live auditions each 20 minutes long, that's a director, three actors if they're even paid to audition and studio space and an engineer that drop in the ocean that that represents.
And the idea that, no, we'll just self-tape for everyone, give us lots more choice.
It just doesn't make any financial sense either.
I do think there is also cynicism about what fans um will accept.
Do you know what i mean?
There is, and i think the biggest danger for us is that people are like oh, it's video games, it only needs to be this good and it's like no, that thing.
We've that thing we've been trying to do which is add table reads, which is do all live auditions, which is get actors their scripts beforehand and let them explore the roles properly so that we can level things up.
There's kind of a drive in the other direction.
And I think it is because of cynicism about what you can get away with pushing on people.
And I think that's really sad and a bit dangerous.
That's so weird because you would think that well, looking at the kids, I guess, if you open TikTok, my algorithm because of the things I like are fan cams of Ben's characters and fan cams from Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy and whatnot.
People really gravitate towards these strong performances.
So it feels really counterintuitive to me for companies that are studios that say hey, like we're whatever, it's fine, like this is just good enough.
Like i feel like the art of the video game, performance has become really um, a lot of.
There's just a lot of scrutiny on it loud, a lot more eyes on it.
And correct me if i'm wrong, but you guys, projects that you've worked on for the last couple years, have all had performance nominations in every award show the Golden Joysticks 2023 Ben, we had, Brianna we had yeah, last year, and like that thing that taking it seriously amazing, let's level it up.
But ultimately, somebody at the top of the pile is going yeah, but does it increase sales enough that we care?
And unfortunately, i don't know if the answer is yes, but we'll keep doing what we're doing obviously, but you know there's that guy at the top of the pile going we could just not do that.
But alexa, like it's no surprise that you you know your tiktok feed is full of that because you love it right.
And we've all come into a position of love rather than a position of I've got quite a lot of money, but I would like some more.
So if I pile it into this publisher, then I expect this return.
Right, so then you've got something that we have talked about before, which is things like what was the one we talked about?
We talked about net ease going into Japan, right?
Going in and going in two years, we haven't made any money.
We're pulling all our money out again.
Like that's the level of thought that's happening at the top of this process.
Have you ever heard of a video game that took two years to make?
Like, so yeah, there's, there is kind of an unrealness once you get up the top of the money pile.
And I think yeah, the people in charge of that, while they may go.
Yeah, these performances have resonated.
They might not take the care and attention to to, I don't know, do anything to make more performances like that happen.
Sadly yeah, that makes me sad.
Yet it does.
It makes me sad, but but yes, those little, those breakthrough moments, your bends, your boulders gates.
You like these things where people are like mentioning performance and that's getting you know once it's getting in front of people and the fact that we're able to, speaking quite cynically, get back to our clients and go look, here's the nine places where they mentioned performance.
This is not just little bits of extra polish around the edge.
If you do it right, it can get the fans on your side.
That's kind of where we'll win those battles.
Specifically Tactics, it was lovely that it was such a faithful remake.
It was such a kind of pure Matsuno vision, and the thing that was novel was the bit we worked on, and that meant that it was very easy and it sort of invited discussion And it's generally been really positive.
Oh, and just to be clear on that, we did not write the text for that one.
We directed the performances.
I do not wish to take any of the credit away from Tom and everybody at Square Enix and all of the people.
Obviously you know who came before, who worked on that text.
That was not us.
We just directed the performances, which were all right.
I want to talk about that part of tactics because obviously the original text was meant it was written to be read, right?
So now you're making it with Voice acting.
Obviously there's a challenge there and a little bit of adaptation and having this text that was meant to be read voice acted for the first time.
So how, what was that process like?
Well, first of all Tom Mills and the team at Square Enix did.
They certainly smoothed off some edges, some of the things which are a little bit angular in the mouth.
And what was really lovely is because I've both obviously me and Ollie basically we started out at Square Enix like 25 years ago now.
So we've accumulated a lot of trust and experience with those teams.
Like, so we know, you know, Koji from 16, I worked with him on version one of effort 14.
So there's a lot of like, you know, we've worked with almost everyone there on one thing or another.
And that meant that we've got some trust in the bank with them.
So like Tom came in and said, here's the, Here's this localization.
Clearly, the War of the Lions script has been very highly lauded within our industry and is therefore a little bit of a sacred thing.
But if you think there's bits we need to change, say so and we'll do it.
So when we kind of found that we were just struggling with a moment, we'd go like, maybe this.
We did do a little bit of iambic pentameter rewriting in the studio, which was very fun.
The thing you didn't read aloud when you tried to.
We did, and that was that was just good fun, but like it, i think.
Um, you can, you can have experiences in the studio where um, where the client isn't as open to those kind of changes, and then it can be quite like so that there's an actor who's struggling with something, a director is trying to be an interlocutor between a client who doesn't understand the trouble the actor's having and the actor doesn't understand what the client wants, and all that kind of stuff.
And that could be really tricky, but we've been very lucky generally.
Tom was great.
Tom was absolutely great.
And just let us kind of like you know if, if there was doubt in his mind about a solution, he'd let us have a go of it and then listen and then kind of make a call and we'd rewrite it again if necessary.
But that was, it was super supportive from their side.
I think that's generally the way that um, even you know even your scripts, Alexa.
Some some lines will have gone to the studio and you've said it your own way a thousand times, and then the actor comes in and they're just it's just a little different shape, you know, and then just you kind of use them and they can steer it in whatever direction.
Obviously, That's not to say the actor's always right about every line either, but as long as you can kind of communicate effectively and mutually supportively, that tends to.
And I think the other thing that made that room good was that trust that Morgan was talking about, that we built up and that we didn't have six members of the dev team all dialed in to the sessions.
Do you know what I mean?
We were trusted to take that text and do with it what we did with Tom there to guide us.
And then you can just develop a nice relationship with the actor because like, the more time the talkback is off and this eight-way conversation is happening in here and the more they're sitting there again.
The problem is me that you know that that stresses people out, it pushes performance in funny directions whereas, if we can minor, morgan's policy is talk back on at all times.
If the talk back is off and it's not a take, something's gone wrong.
So just wave your hand, because not leaving people in that weird limbo is really, really important to us.
We just want everybody you.
Part of the comment.
There will be moments obviously, where it has to go off, but the ideal is a session where it never has to go off, and so if then you've got like people dialing in from japan over here, a member of the dev team who has to have things interpreted for them over there, and then all of that stuff happening, that would have made it um, obviously it's great to have that input, but it does just add layers of complexity which we didn't have and which meant that, because of that trust, i think, i think we had a nice, a smooth room where everybody loved each other.
That's the dream, isn't it?
Um, how do you, how do you, how do you maintain that trust?
Like I've looked at both of your Moby games.
You see, you say 20 years, that's like 60 games, that that that that you guys have have on your, on your credit.
So how do you across?
You know these are.
They're all square franchises.
But, like you know, dragon quest is different from final fantasy, is different from.
I saw Drake and garden there.
I know you guys worked on kingdom hearts.
Like it it.
How do you maintain that trust over such a long period of time?
How do you maintain that kind of building, that building relationship, especially in a sector of the industry that can feel very subjective and objective at the same time, writing performance stuff like that?
I think that, to speak for myself, I've always been doing things the way that I wanted them to be done.
From Dragon Quest, from the overly exuberant bug reports suggesting we've reached everything.
Ultimately, I'm not doing it for an audience.
I'm just going...
What do I think this should be to be the best it can be?
And that was spotted early on that I was just that, you know, it wasn't it wasn't a matter of ego.
It was a matter of like centered.
How can I improve?
You know what?
Do my best, essentially, in any given context.
And that was what I took into Dragon Quest.
And, and I think generally speaking, as long as you're not abrasive and you're like, I think it should be this way and you're wrong.
You know, not none of that is because we learned the hard way.
Yeah.
Then people like koji fox people, people who are like huge names and localization alex smith uh, joe reader those people appreciate, like they appreciate their input ultimately, even if you disagree with them, and they're the they're the experienced old pros and you're a new kid on the block, as long as you're kind of going, i think it should be this way because of this, and maybe if we did it this way it'd look this way.
Then they kind of mostly kind of go oh yeah, And then they look really good.
Making people look better.
It's like caring, very important.
But as nerds, many of us care in the wrong way. in a slightly tricky way.
So learning to take that... Hate is just another form of love, right?
Learning to take that desire to rewrite the end of a fantasy game and channel it in the right direction, but also showing your workings right.
And doing the work, putting the work in and going like look, I'm prepared to sweat blood for this thing, to make it right.
It's all for the love of the product, right?
So let's sweat.
I keep going back to that comma, but let's sweat every comma.
Me and Morgan will literally have a 20 line back and forth about the specific placement of a comma, because you just get used to caring on that level.
And if you do care on that level and you can explain yourself in a thoughtful, well-reasoned way, but also be aware that many things are subjective.
So you're not always going to be right.
We went through horrendous stuff together where Morgan, when we first worked together, post working together at Square Enix, Morgan was editing the rewrites of an old game that I had been working on, and it was the first time we'd worked together.
I was so rude to you in the comments.
I was like, no, I'm not being spoken to like that.
And our trust with each other is an incredibly hard one.
But the ultimate lesson is we both really, really, really, really, really fucking care.
And now we're out the other side of that.
I don't think either of us could say or do anything that would ever upset the other one, because it's just for the love of the thing.
In a situation like in the studio.
If there is any heat in the room, it's generally me and Ollie arguing about something.
You know what I mean?
And people... might be a little bit you know a little bit odd like momentarily but then people kind of realize oh hang on they're just trying to like you know it is to get the best thing and it's never aimed at anyone you know it's it will always be between us any of that uh and not aimed at like the actor can't do the thing so why are you none of that sort of stuff yeah um but that's that's really useful creatively because um i think one of the things you may find this too alexa uh is that once you're Once all of the entry level jobs have gone.
Right.
And people are kind of coming in and they sit in a room with somebody.
And let's say in my case, I've worked on like this many numbered Final Fantasies.
Right.
And like I'm working on a Final Fantasy game and it's quite difficult for someone to come into the room and go.
Well, I don't think it is like that actually because like, because there's this sort of like well, this person's kind of got this way of experience and, like you know, people are going to side with that.
In our case, because our careers have been so parallel.
There's like no.
What are you talking about?
We can absolutely go to town on each other, which is very helpful.
Incidentally, you said about this note, like the 60 games or whatever.
The idea of caring is not kind of, this is a little game I'm doing until I do the game I want to do.
It is about kind of going, okay, this is a little game.
How can we make this, like ios game, as good as you can, possibly both of us.
It wouldn't matter what we were working on, every line, every bit, everything has to be, has to be.
Yeah, it will get that level of love.
The dragon quest, vr experience yes, that stuff, great experience, really great experience, great actors.
There's a vr experience.
I didn't know this in tokyo.
Yeah, it was like a temporary installation a few years back.
Yeah, But yeah, I think caring, and caring in a constructive way,
And then the other thing is just like you know, not like everybody can smell a careerist a million miles off right, if you've shuffled it like and I literally mean this if you come in to this booth when we're recording something and you think you know how it should be done better, I will feel you thinking that and it will change the vibe in the room and, really weirdly, even if I'm sitting there, I won't be able to relax until I've turned around and I've got that person on board.
Do you know what I mean?
I will feel the need to, to sell the person that vision, so that we're all pointing in the same direction.
Just because that type of tension, it'll literally kill a room.
So that's why we have to fight it out.
When we fight it out yeah, so fight, fighting it out is a healthy, it's a healthy exercise for us too, for you, like i said, it happens that are the kind of the, the symmetrical or the parallel career paths have really helped with that, like.
But it is still the case though, that when we i think um, we worked on nino cooney, i think that our proper first game together was nino cooney yeah, and uh on nino cooney uh, so the ghibli game right which yeah, it was still a career highlight for us, i think yeah, it was brilliant, amazing.
Stefan rodri is the brilliant mr drippy uh, like an all-time great character of us.
I think um, that we worked on, i mean um, but that was a project where me and ollie and geraint and mark are kind of the, the with the core team of schlock, and we all worked on it And I was notionally the editor across the whole thing while these guys were translating.
And Mark and Geraint took pretty much every single edit I did.
Ollie, maybe 5% generously.
And for me, that was arresting.
Because by that time, I'd already got Final Fantasy XII and big games under my belt.
And that was just like, oh.
I thought we got each other, you know.
But actually there is nothing like kind of getting into the trenches on a project and kind of doing that.
And it's taken us years to do it, to find that trust.
And those times when it's like, well, it doesn't sound, I can't decide which one I like better.
And then the other one goes, well, this one's better, so I can decide.
The thing that's nice about that and I mean, ultimately we're coming back to these conversations of things.
You can't fake things, you can't jump into the middle of things.
That will get lost if there isn't this path up through, which is weirdly becoming a theme, and a sad one, but I think it's important.
But like it then developed into when we're in the room directing together.
So then there will be certain actors who I get, I just have more of a immediate relationship with, and others who Morgan does.
And we know when to just swap out and step back and do that.
And having that sense of each other is just that's only one.
Through years and years of hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of hours of working together, millions of words of writing, you know like insane amounts of doing the work.
That's the only way of getting there, and if you take those opportunities out for people, we're in serious trouble.
Yeah i, i agree.
The dream is to eventually, you know, get some, just a bunch of like junior writers or something to teach and move forward, and i imagine for you it will probably the same.
So i'm in agreement.
Yeah, and there are positives as well, because you could be writing the battle barks on a call of duty.
But equally, the best thing about games of the last two decades easily is the indie thing, the fact that it's now possible to make games in your bedroom again that sell a million copies, and talent can come through from crazy places because of that and amazing talent and talent you would never have seen before.
That's, I love that.
So that, you know, there is an upside and there's no way you're AI in that out of existence.
Life will find a way.
Life finds a way.
Life finds a way.
Yeah, I think of you mentioning that, the sort of the inroads into the industries and the places people come from.
I think immediately of Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, the writer of Expedition 33, who was a finance girly who was writing short stories, who just kind of fell, fell into this, and she and i have had a lot of conversations about this.
That sort of the traditional pathway into making games does not exist, and i find that when the kids if you will sorry, sorry to all the juniors who listen to this podcast but when the kids come in and they're like how did you get in?
It's like well, my pathway, your pathway, isn't really the way anymore.
You can literally just make something yourself and put it out there and pretty much pave your own road.
Is it going to be the shiny, well manicured but also built on smoke and mirrors?
Triple a road?
Maybe not, but you'll be on a road that maybe is a little more stable.
Um, and every game and every piece of narrative that's really resonated with me from the last decade, literally in video games, has been indie right okay, it's so personal to everybody who's making it and that's that's true.
Wish i'd had that coming up.
So you know there are payoffs and stuff.
I did start out being super negative, saying you have to be a LinkedIn monster but, like indie devs are like the most magical thing about video games in 2025.
Expedition through is a great example of just like something which is a singular vision right, and it doesn't because it doesn't have 250, whatever million dollars riding on it, that it can be somebody's passion, rather than a, you know, a team of lawyers and a team of accountants kind of you know yeah, mediocrity in their way to the most, you know the, the biggest overlap in the venn diagram, that kind of thing like it's.
So there is hope, right.
There is hope.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
There is hope.
And maybe in those indie fields and forgive me, I haven't really tested this thought out, but if somebody is good at the writing bit and they want to use an AI tool to do the other bits of their thing that they don't have any money to do, then maybe there is something in that or as a person who can bring their one talent and not the other bits, but really it's better to just like meet other human beings.
That's a strong no from me.
Is that a strong no?
Sorry, that was I'm trying to, you know, trying to.
I see, I see where you're going.
I feel like, so like AI is.
I know that I've worked on projects where engineers and programmers used AI to just help them speed up coding, but they're not using it to like create the artwork or create create like like copying.
Copying and pasting an object in in the in a build could be argued as like oh, that's ai, but like that's the stuff where i feel like we could use the help is like standing things up, but in terms of the actual design, the stuff that requires some kind of human emotion to get behind it, like we really can't replace that, even if you put all of the um.
You know, i've i've seen um, I've seen startup programs where it's like, oh well, we built this database, this GPT, if you will, that is fed human work that was written specifically for this engine, for this work.
It's not scraping the Internet.
But then you hit a button and the AI writes something based on everything you've already fed it.
I still feel like that's not it.
No.
This is getting so opinionated.
I'm so sorry, Claudia.
I am wildly anti-AI for a number of reasons that we won't get into.
But I think there was a line, a useful line, that we had to hit with a client recently which was uh, they were using some kind of machine machine translation tool for stage directions and for some system side text, and so the line we managed to agree on was anything player facing?
No, the player sees nothing ai generated.
Sure, in the background, the thing that said somebody was shouting.
At this point, i think maybe i still don't like it and i'd still rather it didn't happen, but we were at least able to negotiate that line.
Okay yeah, and anything player?
Yeah, and i just don't.
I don't know like i am.
I hate battle barks more than anybody in this industry.
I hate them.
I would rather we never had to do them ever again, But if they got AI out of existence, we would see.
This is the thing.
They differ.
What's the word?
Divide opinions very strongly.
Some people love recording them.
Some actors love performing them.
And it's like, and as you said earlier on, Alexa, there's tons to be learned from working on them.
So if they got AI'd out of existence, ultimately it would be everybody's loss, even if they annoy me personally.
Do you know what I mean?
There's just, I don't know.
Like so yeah, in terms of useful distinctions, I think that player facing thing is maybe the start of the conversation.
But like cause cause.
You know, in a good screenplay The protagonist just swears or looks out of a window and everything happens in the stage directions.
We work with Kojima Productions on some of their stuff.
And really Norman Reedus often, especially in the first game, really doesn't say very much at all and it's all about.
You know why he's looking in this direction, what he's feeling and all that stuff is, you know, like the.
The framing of that is super important.
So the idea that we go, i'll just bosh that out with some ai, we'll just uh, tidy up okay okay, so not even stage directions.
Actually, i kind of feel like it isn't you know and i i've you know that the non, the no gm kind of food that there's like a like a, like a yeah yeah yeah, That's what I kind of feel like we need to decide as a species whether we want to remain relevant and that we need a sticker which you can put on the box saying no AI went into the.
But there is also there's the conversation about the fact that how LLMs work is they take existing words and they remix them.
So it's basically are you choosing to draw a line on human creativity at this point and say we've done enough, we just need remixes of what we did already?
And i'd like to think we're not doing that, so let's not make that the future.
Um, i'm gonna rewind this a little bit and go back to talking about because we've talked about um stuff you've done localization for the process of collaborating into the performance part.
I want to talk about the process of, like when you begin one of these projects, when it's like okay, we're working on a dragon quest or whatever, here's the script like where, where do you even begin to start?
When you start tackling these giant localization projects.
It's changed a lot over the years, to be honest, because when we first started, the game would exist already.
Yeah no, sim lock was not a thing, right.
So you, you could take the world as a whole and go right, i can play this whole game, i can do have this whole experience and i can go right.
What does the english version of that look like what?
How do the people in this part of the world speak?
And all of that stuff would just be that much more kind of plottable out in your mind and we would start putting together bible stuff, so style guides, character profiles, right from the start, right from the early days of doing it, and then we would have glossary creation time, which means taking probably two weeks of spending, sometimes physical time face to face with each other in a writing room, like a writing room, naming everything in the game, coming up with the style uh the, the sort of approaches, like how we would do things, all of that stuff, so that by the time anybody hits the ground with any actual writing of lines, they already know the world inside out.
And that's still the ideal.
Nina Cooney was completely that.
Ollie managed to peel me out of Square Enix, basically.
I was kind of going to be a Square Enix lifer, and then Ollie was like, cut the Studio Ghibli game.
I think you need to work on it.
And so I left Square Enix and the next day I was in Fukuoka in a room going through every bit of this game and just going like, like where, and knowing that we can, we can foreshadow, we can do all that stuff.
When you have the whole thing spread out in front of you, that's pretty wonderful.
Actually reminds me just testament to the work of mr richard mark honey, which you thought to have a lot of that stuff happen back when it was not standard practice.
He would fight to have us spend time in that room.
The most fun about Nina Cooney was Mr. Drippy was going to be Australian, Welsh or something else.
And so part of this writer's room month was also that.
And it was really a month, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was.
And we came in with like sample scenes and went, right, if it was Australian, this.
And then we had to think about like, well, they've got to do stand up comedy.
So what would the... you know all of that stuff nobody was thinking about doing that in japanese to english localization at the time but ricky richard mark honeywood was doing that and was very much a mentor to to both of us in showing us what was possible and the ideal approach is still that the ideal approach is right what is the world we're dealing with what's the zoomed out view of that world as we get more granular how do people talk how do they think what's the history of that world what's it's basically you know it's it's building a bible exactly like any other large-scale writing project it's exactly like writing and that's i think that's the way to the the the lack of compromise that we've kind of in the love trying to invest care in all these things it is it comes from it just isn't for me there isn't any difference localization is ultimately or should be prompted writing if you see what i mean the existing language is a prompt to get you to then create something over here and there's huge amounts of debate to be had about um all kinds of aspects of that but ultimately if the end product is not properly well written and thought about as a written product and not a translated product then something is going wrong in my humble opinion which obviously isn't humble at all so you've you uh started talking about how like for the dragon quests it was done you had this you had it you were able to play it you were able to look at the whole thing holistically but for 16 it's my understanding you guys were embedded like pretty significantly and development was ongoing.
Like you were not, you were not like getting the whole thing at the end.
Did, um, and I'm assuming you worked on things out of order.
There was probably a lot going on.
What was, what was that process like?
Like how do you keep that stuff straight?
How do you stay nimble and iterate and not only, you know, iterate on the script, but also you were, casting and recording as this thing is actively being made right that's that's pretty much i think like so the story you tell about ben's performance right and how that evolved over four years five years of recording and so there were things where back at the start of the process lines had been recorded a certain way that by the end of the process we'd learned enough all of us about clive and about how he spoke and about how he acted and reacted in certain situations it was like that line needs to change you know and that's yeah i literally thought so we uh so we started whenever we started and then covid happened and there were sort of various pauses and things and then um we carried on and like ben got to know clive better and better and better and so we all did and we started to write for his specific kind of patterns of speech and all that and uh and then we listened back to some of our early recordings and i'm like no no no no you're playing that back at the wrong speed i literally thought that that something like some sampling rate had gone awry and it was being played at 1.25 speeds because it just sounded a bit lighter and a bit brighter and it was nope that's who we were in 2019 so we had to redo it but like in terms of the question as far as like as things are developing you basically have to have you have to have a very set picture of the world you're creating in your head right at all times and bits of it a notion of direction right like like a direction it's going even if you don't know exactly how you get there exactly so bits of it are popping into existence all the time and then you're like right where does that bit slot in where does that fit right i've got that locked in there so then i know that's kind of coming up the road so it's going to sit next to that a lot of that Thinking about the process that we learned through coming up through QA is also useful because you get to writing in such a way that you're not causing problems further down the line.
So if I'm like, are we talking about the thing over there or the thing over here?
I don't currently know.
So I will write the line in such a way that it doesn't matter whether it's there or over here.
But the impression of specificity, without actually like hanging yourself up.
Then you get into like specific points of story, right.
So is it like are we foreshadowing this at this point?
You need to know that right, and so we might have to check in about something like that.
And no, we're not giving that away there.
It's just, you know all of these things, you have to have a sense of you kind of broader trajectories and all of those things carefully, slot stuff in and leave lots and lots of notes.
We have a note which is resolve in all caps yeah, which means come back here later on, do a big sweep of all of these things and make sure that those, the particular lumps on those puzzle pieces are fitting together.
I think it goes goes, probably goes without saying, and again, i would imagine all of the things we're describing just it's that's standard game writing, but ultimately there is a There's a motivational, problem-solving thing going on here, right?
It isn't just like you don't just go, I've got this story.
I'm going to pitch it to EA, and then they'll make a first-person shooter around it.
That's not the way it works.
It's like, okay, we've got this level.
No, it's not, yeah.
You know, right?
Ultimately, it's the same with us.
If we've got a character beat, a motivation which doesn't quite communicate from source to whatever, then you've got to figure out a way of sensitively rendering that motivation.
Yes, and i think there would be an assumption that because it exists in the japanese already, that problem is already solved and it's just, and that is not the case.
That is just isn't the case, simply because we don't come at things in precisely the same way.
They just.
There are turns of phrase, there are ways of thinking, there are ways of signposting.
Literally there are cultural standards in how you set up stories that are different.
So some of the techniques being used, we can't go about a thing in the same way, you know.
So it is still that kind of sort of problem solving that kind of thinking ahead.
There there is.
No, I don't think the source language is ever a crutch to lean on for that stuff.
It can be a useful thing to go like okay, are we still in line with that?
Great we're, on course, but it's never a like I'd.
We can never be in a point where we're like we don't understand this line, but it will probably work because the broader thing will say every single piece has to be fully understood.
Otherwise, we're not signing off.
Obviously, when you get into performance as well, you cannot ever be in a situation where you go well, it's roughly, you know, like that, and because an actor is going to go like it's roughly, like one of the three different things, i don't understand, you know, like it just doesn't make any sense.
So, specificity of like, specificity of intention, at least right, even if we then and then we find out we've contradicted ourselves and we have to throw it in the bin.
And that communication, let me just say, like the way that that sim, the sim lock thing works, is what you absolutely have to have is a like a direct line to the dev team basically, and yeah, and we, we had, we worked with koji fox and um yeah uh john uh taylor, and they could lean over the desk and go like my hero.
What did you mean by this?
You know, and like sometimes, my hero, my hero, my hero, sam sam.
There you go sorry yes, i'm very insensitive, he's great.
Uh, they would lean over to him reverentially.
Yes and um, they would say Who's this person's dad?
You know, and sometimes Maya hadn't thought that that was particularly important yet.
And so it'd be like, okay, who is that?
You know, and then then a solution would be found because like, ultimately um, we've talked a little bit recently about working on the logos, writing the logos um book from um.
But even as a world builder, you can't build all the world.
You build it at a certain distance.
And even within that circumference, there are still the details that you didn't think were particularly salient when you're doing it.
And then somebody else in the process, like us, goes... but exactly you know how many brothers and sisters did they have and like and how how much older and how much younger than the other youngest sibling were they and those kind of questions and then yeah and be able to go to koji and and say can you ask him this or koji himself was a kind of absolute wellspring but also having somebody like koji who takes that seriously as well because ultimately like a really good test of any script that we've worked on is would i hand this line to an actor and would i have faith that that's just a really good test for anything because ultimately if i can't explain it to them i can't explain it to anyone and koji and tom talking back to the tactics thing as well really good at kind of consulting in at those moments going right no shit we do need to figure out what exactly we're saying here why we're saying it and what it leads to and where it sits in the broader framework of everything so these questions which could possibly be taken as kind of like nitpicking or trivial or whatever the fact that they inform tiny nuances of the worlds we're creating and the fact that we have people who do take that seriously so that we can then take it seriously so that actors can then take it seriously so the players can then take it seriously that's the magic no matter bet like the bet hedging earlier in the process when it hits the microphone yes not better anymore or you really hope you really gotta hope it isn't because there is a there is a thing where especially some really good actors can basically fool you into thinking they understand the line like we've got like really extremely good actors i'm talking about now and you go like and everyone else in the room will go like my god that was incredible and then i'll go did you understand what you were saying then not really you know and you go like wow okay let's do it again even though it was amazing and affecting i want you to do it now you understand what you're saying because it's so crucial but also that will do things with again taking the product seriously taking the craft seriously because if somebody gets that sense that they can phone it in they'll phone it in but if we're all like and i think i know some of the people you're talking about as much as they might slightly tune out the second it's like okay good we're taking this seriously you have told me what that means you have told me where it's going that suddenly makes everybody that much more invested and you get even better performance just watching an actor really switch on is just brilliant where you feel like they're already switched on and then you kind of give them something and it really works for them like it's an image or it's a way into a moment and they go like And you sort of see them go, oh, right.
And then it just sort of all goes, and then it's just, oh, now everything's true.
Suddenly, you know, I have to go back and do the first bits again.
I'm curious what the iterative process is like with the actors for what you do, versus like writing in english, shooting in english.
So, like as a writer, sometimes we'll get, we'll get the actor in the booth games in production and sometimes that actor will be very influential on how the character develops, how we write that character.
It's a very meaningful contribution.
But when you're doing um, you know something like a final fantasy or a dragon quest or even like death stranding, how much are you allowed to have that actor kind of shape the way that you are shaping the script?
It really depends on the project.
Definitely depends on the project.
The brief a thing that makes me laugh sometimes is that, you see, one of the reasons I was slightly scared to do this interview today was because localization is so divisive.
Really?
Some people just don't think localization should exist. they feel like you know essentially a a uh a faithful translation is all they need and they you know and and that's look each to their own and that exactly what i don't want to get into yeah because we can't get into that because there's no such thing as a faithful translation morgan exactly no no exactly i mean the point is that localization exists because different different societies come at things different ways right but anyway i was scared about that a little bit because um because it is uh so divisive and i've completely lost my train of thought now you did that shout uh what was the question um how much iterative with actors yeah apologies um so with certain clients ultimately they specify it's not like some like localizer comes in or like a consultant comes in and goes i think you know i'm going to impose my work agenda or whatever that just isn't how it works of course it isn't like we get brought in they go this is what we want stay this close to this like you know or diverge a bit and um what we found was 16 is a good example of um clearly there's a we're recording in English first, right?
So that allows us to set certain rhythms to those things.
But we're still working within a fairly kind of set, fixed set of parameters.
But basically, if we can get the dev team to kind of invest and that we can get and like, infuse them and what i think, like very early on, one of my first jobs on that project was to go does this guy ben star?
He's absolutely incredible.
We have to use ben star.
Please koji, tell them we have to use ben star and like convincing, right.
But then like and like, and then you know, and then a few months or maybe even years, i don't know, but a few years or months later there is uh yoshida san and and co having dinner with ben and they're all getting on famously and like, And in that context you can see why then they're going to be a little bit like.
If Ben wants to do it this way, maybe we can steer it a bit more this way, you know, and that's beyond the patterns of speech and all that stuff.
But there is also lots of room to play.
Tactics is a good example.
I mean I'm thinking if you go all the way up the top end, you've got Stefan Rodri doing Mr Drippy and Nina Cooney right.
Which had to be him.
It just had to be right.
It was the script was written a certain way.
But the idea of that is you give it and you just watch him go.
And he was incredible.
And like the ad-libbing on the fly and all of that stuff.
And then the us that back and forth to make this character as much is as possible was huge.
But all the way down the other end, back on our battle stuff.
On FF16, we had to do 150 sets of battle barks with all kinds of different actors and stuff.
Of course.
We worked with some incredible actors doing it.
And the little kind of thing we developed with Harry McIntyre was every single character and we started doing it on a project we were working on recently.
Every single one of these background characters, be it Thief 14 or Slightly Smelly Man 7, we'd build a backstory for that character.
Amazing.
Partly we're the actor in the moment partly, but yeah, partly because it's a nice exercise, partly because it gives people ownership, partly because then it becomes a piece of collaborative work, but also because then there's just texture there and there's, you know, and it's developing that, making it feel like a, Because there's a lot of people out there who can smash out some battle barks as thug.
Four
But, you know, the ones where we've gone like, yeah, but he doesn't like his dad that much.
So I feel when he's doing that spell casting, he'd be a bit more defeated.
And you honestly, that might sound mad, but like, building those levels of texture into things massively, massively improves things and it's only with actors who are prepared to go there with us that that gets.
But that's before.
So we're shaping performatively there that with um, with peripheral characters and in games, more than like in a mainline final fantasy, you know there can be some pretty strict like animation things to match, like on a, like an ff7 something.
You know that there are marks to hit right um, so it is definitely the case that Uh, sometimes we have more margin for that, but even with that there was always that bit of like.
Why are we saying this?
So, like you know, it's the the why more than the what is the thing we can change often in those kind of bits, you know, but like that often makes all the difference actually in terms of the quality of the finished product.
But I think the experience you may be referring to in your own career they're kind of okay.
This actor just let him go.
Let him improvise a bunch of stuff.
I wasn't in the studio, but I believe Norman Reedus improvised a bunch of stuff for Death Stranding.
And that's great.
When you've got people just super talented people who super fit the character, then it's lovely to be able to do that.
Yeah.
Well, you're also not.
You're not just doing the localization and casting performance, you also have to think about Well, you mentioned for 16.
You recorded in English first.
So you're essentially, and even for tactics, for you know every game you've worked on your writing for what is essentially an international audience.
So yes, you might be writing in British English, but you have to kind of think about that.
Like where does that factor into your process when you're changing lines, when you're, when you're trying to preserve intent, when you're thinking about casting?
Like, how much does that factor in?
That's a good question.
It's different.
I mean, I think there was a temptation early on to we were like working on I'm thinking of like Dragon Quest 5 right, which had a ton of very extreme accents and no voices where it was like let's go wild in these worlds and let's make them super like hyper characterized and we kind of.
That's where we went deepest.
And some of it, looking back now, probably should have gone a bit less deep.
But you learn a ton of stuff from that, right?
And so there are things to do with yeah, what resonates more or less with US audiences and UK audiences.
And then because we have extensive French Italian German Spanish, Portuguese other language teams who work with us.
Like, the feedback process there is super important as well, because there will be things we haven't thought of classic stuff like a character name that accidentally means mucus in another year, but all the way up to just things or like cultural norms or whatever that you don't really know about, and so yeah, i don't know, it's like um, we have to be careful with it and we've learned to be more careful with it, and what i've learned particularly is that, especially now we have more voice, you can do way less on the page and you can leave you.
Basically, you cast But authentic casting of actors who really are from the place that you are doing the accent or the dialect of, or whatever.
Letting them bring themselves to the text just turns out to always have been the best way to do it.
And so...
Write the lines, as you know roughly in that region that you think it needs to be in, and then make it very, very clear to the actor that you've cast them because they're a Cockney, because they're from Liverpool, because they're, you know, US actors as well.
We do this with it's like.
You know.
Bring yourself to this like, because if you're not in it, then it won't sound authentic.
And so it's what?
Yeah, my hard lesson has been if you're writing scottish, you don't have to make it so full of apostrophes and madness, but like, ultimately the this all came from.
There's a lot of sort of legacy kind of thought processes within video games right, like there's lots of like how things are done and how they.
So we came from games which were vast majority were not voiced, so there was the idea how do we give this place, this new village you've come to?
Yeah, that's a flavor like a new constant.
You know from one line of dialogue with any one of those villagers this is where i am yeah, this is what they sound like.
And so that was, that was a conscious choice.
It was.
It wasn't immersive, it was supposed to be an aid to immersion, but you can absolutely see how it was also a barrier to emotion, because people don't understand a single word.
Any of them are saying this, but there is a quest marker.
So that's enough, you know, but like, so we will have gone.
Yeah.
Lessons have been learned, but you are right that it was originally done specifically because there was no voice.
Yeah.
And then you just have to have confidence in the fact that it being performed is going to.
That's what's going to take it off the page.
You don't need.
Yeah.
And it's really fun.
That's where all of my most fun sort of experiences of doing this have come from.
Is somebody, when people bring themselves to a role right, and when somebody finds it and suddenly it clicks and you go away and you start writing that character in that voice do you know what i mean?
Like, sometimes you'll be writing something, you'll be yeah, this all feels roughly in the right place, and then somebody auditions and you're like, of course, it was that the whole time and that will then change how you write everything.
That's another live audition thing.
So, like Stefan Rodri, who we've already talked about, but Shai Matheson in DQ12, that Silvando character was a lot of it was on the page already DQ11 sorry, a lot of it was on the page sort of already, but it was only once Shai came in and shied the absolute shit out of it that we were like, of course, this is the character, let's go.
He's now Batman, Lego Batman now.
He is now Lego Batman.
Very good yes, But yeah those, those are kind of like the.
To go back to the original question, we it's an interesting thing and you can get it wrong, and we definitely have got it wrong.
But I like the fact that that is a learning process and we just don't have to do as much of it.
I'm literally working on something right now where there's a town with a pretty unique accent, but i know we have great actors we can call on to do it, so you're not laboring with the style guide, doing all of these, trying to shoehorn something into every sentence to make it clear you're working with that accent.
That's not having to do.
That actually makes it freer.
I feel like ff16 was a good.
That's an example.
Having worked for a really long time, i worked on 14 with him and kind of we came up with some of the early dialects for bits of that world and our.
The idea behind those dialogues was to make you go into a place and go like what the hell is everyone saying?
Like you and sort of, and the idea of alienness and like it's just a mixture, all these things and this a port town or whatever, and what we ultimately found was that people are going.
I don't understand the quest.
Do you know what I mean?
I see I've got to get these four things, but I don't understand why.
And so we very much learned a lesson from that.
And I think 16 being the product of a lot of the 14 kind of teams, learnings was a place where we kind of toned back and toned back and lent into just like emotion and immediacy more.
That was what we were trying for anyway, and not trying to hide things behind us like florid language.
Yeah uh, and that was.
That was a kind of a yeah, it was.
That was sort of like the summation of a lot of the learnings from 14 in terms of dialogue, i think um yeah, so we've we've talked a lot about your work with square um, because you are, as evidenced by the body of work, squares favorites um, what is it like to live my dream guys?
Um, but have you, Have you?
Do you work?
I'm curious to know if you work with like, indie companies and if that process differs in any way, because you're not dealing with big, bad AAA, you're dealing with a smaller team with a little bit more intimacy, a little bit more flexibility.
Is that something in your pipeline too?
We have worked, we've done indie writing projects and they were lovely because literally that's just direct contact with the creators and that's like that's what we've been dreaming of all of these years.
There's literally a guy on the end of a chat and i go what do you think this means?
Shall we make it mean this?
And he goes yes, and that's it.
That's the whole conversation.
It's just beautiful, you know, like the most purest form of that, and that was amazing and i want more of that in my universe.
Um, we've got we've been doing a lot more localization into our other languages of indie stuff recently, that's true.
Um, so you know uh french italian german spanish, all the other languages versions of games which originated in english, which means that the company is involved with them, but we don't get to be as involved with them as much, which is sad, because there's some amazing stuff we've worked on and some titles that I've played in my own time and stuff and really, really loved.
And I'm, do you not need us?
You know, but like it's just as I said earlier on, it's a world I love and that I desperately want to spend more time in.
And that is one of my key aims, which is why Morgan, I'm going to take this opportunity to say I quit.
Great.
And I'm going to be coming in.
Some of your shares go to me out of interest.
No, you have to kill me for that.
Okay.
Oh dear.
Oh my.
Well, you know, it's fine.
It was coming.
It was coming, honestly.
So last question how do you feel about obviously we've talked about the kind of challenges of localization now, especially in Morgan, you were mentioning this before we started about the specter of synthetic performance and how that is kind of factoring into everything that's going on right now.
How do you feel like we can make this sector of the industry better, more collaborative?
I know you've said treat it the same way you would treat your writing partners.
It is a function of writing.
But what do you think from your very storied vantage point, we can be doing better.
Specific, specific measures.
I mean it clearly, clearly in terms of like taking um, taking localization seriously very early in the process, whatever creative process.
That's the thing that's changed and that's the ff16 is a great model of that it is.
It was essentially like a parallel Japanese-English development.
English recording, first of all, that stuff.
That helps.
That means that the creators, in whatever language, are already realizing that most of their audience might not be in the language they speak.
If that's true, because we are making decisions like we're not going to do live auditions because it'll save 50, and that kind of thing.
If we're in that world, then really the same accountant should be saying Well, there is the Spanish-speaking world though, isn't there?
Do you know what I mean?
Ultimately, all of those decisions should be made very early and it should bring on people who are good at speaking the target language, good at speaking the source language, happen to be writers and not just people who just self-describe as translators.
Essentially incorporate them into the writing process really, I think, is the way to get that to be taken seriously and get get us to a level of product where the localized product is the same quality as the source material and then and then it will sell better.
Right, this goes all the way up.
It's not just localization right, that's writing, that's acting, that's everything we all need to treat this industry as seriously as it deserves to be treated.
Right, and performance is no less important than you know.
You look towards the magical unionized worlds of film and television and go that's nice.
They take that seriously.
They, you know, that's, and that's what we need to do.
And I think it's what, as makers of games, but also as fans of games, we need to do is just encourage ourselves to all take it that much more seriously.
Cause it is, it's that good.
We should.
Ultimately, if we take it more seriously, the audience does not settle for slop, does not settle for compromising.
But put it to the audience go.
Do you not see the difference between Oh, but audiences are doing a great job.
They're doing the best job of all of calling out the AI nonsense.
That's true.
That's my favourite thing.
Long may that remain.
That's the deal, because ultimately our only... are only safe haven that is a direct result in fact of not taking your audience seriously and treating them like they're fools it's like no we saw the ai crap you shoved in there don't you dare treat us that way and i love everybody who kicks up a fuss about that and keep kicking up yeah yeah zombie with six fingers like you know from trillion dollar company yeah maybe not okay right maybe not okay to charge us 15 a month for whatever like it's just ultimately those margins are yeah it's it's it's quality is the our only refuge as humanity if we want humans to remain relevant we have to decide that we want to be and we have to decide that we want the products of humanity essentially and that's yeah i hope we do yeah me too because we'll all be in the unemployment line together if that shit goes south so we can all just go start another indie studio because it's so yeah that's a whole nother conversation um but we'll definitely talk about that um gentlemen thank you so much this was so lovely i'm so glad to finally have gotten you on here obviously like big fan of these games loved the writing we met when 16 came out loved the writing on 16 and i'm excited to see what else you guys work on thank you thank you love you too what's this now right this is what the gen z's are doing this hard that's old korean people do that that's okay in korea Damn.
Well, I'm old.
I don't know either of those.
I'm going to do this.
I call this Thumbs Up.
Very 90s.
Right.
Just like me.
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