Lunar Threads

It's not the same without Ted Woolsey's translation. I don't care if he was inaccurate at times, I have read some of a literally translated FF6 script, and Kefka owes his sadistic sense of humor to Woolsey. In the Japanese version, Kefka spoke with a Kansai accent, and threw tantrums. Most if not all of Kefka's one-liners were added by Woolsey. Not mention this version censored Celes' introduction, and the screens look too bright, while FF6 is a very dark game. I'll stick with the SNES/PSone versions.

The name Ted Woolsey brings back good memories... hmmm, let me read a bit about him.

"The company moved to Los Angeles in 1996. Woolsey's last project with Square was the translation of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Woolsey officially left the company before its English localization of Final Fantasy VII."
(wikipedia)

OMG. Whaaaaaaaaaaaat. Final Fantasy VII was the beginning of Final Fantasy's doom of uninteresting games for me. Coincidence?
Hmmm, Ted Woolsey doesn't MAKE the games so yeah, funny coincidence!!

Anyway, just BTW, FF6's retranslation is still amazing

Shinto-Cetra wrote:Not mention this version censored Celes' introduction

That bit is annoying, but the fact that they changed her suicide attempt into taking a refreshing dip in the ocean to "perk up" is just aggravating. Granted, this indictment is more aimed at Nintendo's refusal at the time to depict something as un-child-friendly as suicide than it is at Ted Woolsey's translation work. The rest of his work at Squaresoft was amazing.

jay_are wrote:Woolsey officially left the company before its English localization of Final Fantasy VII.

...and it shows. I've been hoping we'd get a remake of Final Fantasy VII for years specifically because it would likely mean a new, better translation. I've actually never seen the end of FFVII specifically because the translation we have now is so painfully bad I can never bring myself to finish it.

We won't have FFVII remade sadly. At least not in the next 10 years. And if it doesnt happen there, it probably won't happen ever. That is, if we believe what the company has said!
I can't remember who exactly said it, but one of the main people behind Final Fantasy said that it would be too much of a big project, even if they focused on it full time. Not sure what that means cause i've seen similarly big games being remade... another thing they said is that because FFVII was the most successful one profit-wise, they think the game specifically doesn't need a remake unless a newer Final Fantasy proves to be more profitable or more successful than FFVII !!

And that makes sense. Of course as always, it's just a matter of taste, but FFVII is still the best Final Fantasy SINCE itself. The games that came out after aren't as good as it or at least surpass it!
I have a feeling they don't WANT to surpass it. Except graphically-wise, which is what they've been doing from then on.

They owe us so many remakes anyway... why make FFX - X2 HD when they haven't made a 3D full fledged big console remake of FFIII, FFIV, FFV and FFVI?

Keeping in mind I can't really compare to the Japanese versions, I'm mostly happy with Woolsey's translations. As pointed out by others, many of the problems were the result of censorship that he had no choice about. He did supposedly mistranslate a line in Chrono Trigger, changing the meaning from "talk to your party members for information" to something that implied the existence of an extra side quest. But on the whole his scripts seemed fine to me and many supposed "mistranslations" I've read about seem to be reasonable choices he made or people whining about pointless spelling issues. Apparently a group made a fan translation of FF6 that was supposed to be "more faithful to the original" but I'm pretty skeptical. Usually these kinds of efforts result in poor localizations (leaving in honorifics, untranslated puns, etc.) and it just seems like a waste of effort that could have been spent on a fan translation of a game that never received an official English language version.

I've spent a lot of time investigating this particular translation. In terms of reasonability, where does this fit -- replacing the phrase "girl who has the power of magic" with "magitek-riding Imperial witch"?

And your skepticism about the fan-retranslation is well founded, I'd say. As far as I could see, it's an exercise in imagination.