"The bottom line is we were short changed," he says. It went from something that was meant to be a fast, one-week project, to something that ended up requiring a Japanese speaker and project management."īurke says he was "pissed off" by the original localisation, although he doesn't blame Baskett for how it turned out. And you go to the next map and you hope that one's going to flow quite well and it's going to make sense, and then you realise it doesn't. "So you change that one, and before long you've got a whole map that's been changed. "You change one line, and then the next one doesn't flow right," he says. Daniel Burke has spent the past five years retranslating Final Fantasy 7. Final Fantasy 7's localisation had deep-rooted translation issues. But, he tells Eurogamer, as he pored through the dialogue he realised its problems were sweeping. But the translation errors stabbed at him like a scratch that could not be itched.īurke used his admittedly poor programming skills to prod the game, at first simply to polish up some of its worst dialogue, such as the infamous "this guy are sick" line. So, he planned to make a video, like a Final Fantasy 7 story movie, she would sit down to watch. He wanted to show his girlfriend Final Fantasy 7's story, but knew she would not play through the game. Then it counter attacked with its laser.įive years ago, Daniel Burke's ambition was modest. Then, "It's gonna counter attack with its laser!" So, we all attacked the beast while its tail was up.
a puppet." And who can forget the game's first boss fight, against the mechanical Guard Scorpion? "Attack while it's tail's up!" Cloud tells the player. Jenova, the mysterious being at the heart of Final Fantasy 7's complex story, has just one line of dialogue in the game, and it includes a typo: "Beacause, you are. Perhaps most famous is Aeris' early-doors line, "This guy are sick", but there are many more. Understandably, mistakes were made.Īnd what wonderful, enduring mistakes. But it was the best it could be given the time afforded to Michael Baskett, the lone translator within Squaresoft USA who was charged with turning thousands upon thousands of lines of fantasy-strewn Japanese into the English-language version of perhaps the greatest JRPG story ever told. We were probably too young at the time to notice, but its localisation was a poor, rushed and desperate effort, with odd grammatical errors, out of place turns of phrase and in some cases what are thought to be mistranslations of the original Japanese. Who can forget that death scene? Or that Omnislash? For many, playing Final Fantasy 7 was a formative experience: the memory of a summer spent entranced in front of a CRT telly now feeling like a warm, welcoming embrace, nearly 20 years later.īut not all of Final Fantasy 7 was perfect. The 1997 PSone original was a revelation for the genre in the west and captured the imagination of a generation of game players who marvelled at its pre-rendered backgrounds, elaborate 3D combat visuals and, perhaps most importantly of all, its tear-jerking story.įinal Fantasy 7 cemented the likes of Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Sephiroth and Aerith (or Aeris, depending on your point of view - we'll get to that later) in the heart and mind of the collective global gamer consciousness. Final Fantasy 7's status as the greatest Japanese role-playing game of all time is a matter of debate, but its impact cannot be disputed.
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