Do you like accents in CC?

[utunnels]

Recently I'm translating CC scripts into my native language, so I check both versions simultaneously.
Just noticed a while back that Mel's cat, a shadow cat, is called Lucha(Rucha) in the Japanese version, although it is renamed to Luna in the US version.

  [/offtopic]

[Mr Bekkler]

That's just a lame cop-out/excuse to me...Japanese names are going to continue to be harder to pronounce & remember by English-speaking audiences if they're not exposed to them. Plus, it's not like the localized names' pronunciations aren't being debated as-is...

I'm just sayin the names were not my only or biggest problem with Cross. Now, if Glenn's japanese name is Chuck or something else unrelated to Trigger, I'd be kinda peeved. But it's not like I wouldn't play the game because of the names. The accents though? That took a while for me to be able to "get".

[Yourgingerestfan]

I liked the accents but only for 2 people : Harle and Kid , they were special and the accents showed they were different and hiding something In my oppinion .

[IshitoxRuchianna]

HELL YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ZombieBucky]

hell naw!!!!
the accents gave it a certain feel, but sometimes i couldnt even visualize their voices. when i read something i hear the character's voice in my head. with the accetns, i cant get the proper voice down. i cant hear what they say. i dont know how irenes pronounces her words. i cant imagine harles fake french accent. i can hear certain characters like kid, but not others.
if they had made them more believable... that would have been good.

[Licawolf]

This is an old topic but I'll add my two cents.

It's an old tradition that in Latinamerica the videogames are distributed in the north american english version, no translation for us (Just very recently we have started to get spanish versions, at least for the Wii). That was ok for Mario bros. or Megaman games, there were not too many dialogues, just action action action. But the few of us who were discovering our love for RPG's were forced to play the games with a dictionary at hand (or worse, with your mom or your dad at your side, helping you translate   ). When I first played the Chrono games (that was like, um, almost ten years ago), my english was so much worse than it is today. I played Chrono Trigger forcing myself to read through the dialogues, stopping every other line to use the dictionary, but I understood enough to love the game. When I played Cross... well... let me tell you this, the accents were A PAIN IN THE ASS. Most of Kid's dialogues were just guesses for me, I seriously hated Harle's accent particularly, i couldn't understand a word she said, because accents and weird speech patterns are not in dictionaries. I'm sure that was one of the reasons I ended up becoming a Cross hater, just very recently I re-played the game, now that my english is better, and discovered I actually love it now.

I'm not blaming north american translators for anything though, I mean, why would they consider the non-english speaker latin american market anyway? I'm just telling you my very own experience with the game's accents.

Nowadays, I'm actually from the generation of mexican gamers that cannot stand playing games in spanish. There are now fan-translated versions of many games out there in the internet, but I don't even consider downloading them, not even RD which is text based.

As a curious note, I recently started writing Cross fanfictions in spanish, and it's strange because there are no equivalents for many of the accents used in the game. For example in spanish there is not such a thing as pirate talk or an australian accent. Aussie characters in dubbed movies and series are translated as talking perfect spanish with neutral accent just as every other characters. So it's funny and interesting trying to figure out how to reflect that in spanish.

[Schala Zeal]

If you hate accents, you're gonna hate my in-progress fanfic... heh.

[utunnels]

There should a switch to turn it off, hehe.
Hmm, you mean fanfic...never mind.

[Licawolf]

If you hate accents, you're gonna hate my in-progress fanfic... heh.

Oh, no no no, don't get me wrong   That was then, now I don't mind accents, I even like some of them... actually, there are still some annoying ones, but once i get use to them they are  ok, he.

[Manly Man]

I really like accents, but they have to be done properly, you can't just put in a little code in the game that switched things to fit whatever their accent may be. It's best, when written, to speak out with the corresponding accent and write what comes out. I've got a Soul Calibur fic I'm working on, and I have an accent for everyone where I know how to apply them (for example, I have no idea what a Greek accent is like). So far, I've got Siegfried (German), Raphael and Amy (French), and I plan on having Taki and Mitsurugi at some point, and even Maxi, although he'd only be a very temporary one to have in there. Tira I don't really give one; being an assassin, she would have to speak several languages, and mixing them all together in English gets you... American. Sort of.

I've also got Spanish characters, but their accents aren't very prominent in the way one would think, but how they speak their English sounds very Spanish.

Honestly, it all depends on how well it's written. How they tried to give Luccia's Dutch accent was clumsy, but others are very characteristic of them and help flesh them out. For example, there's Harle, who you can hear swear out loud in French, and Leah saying 'um' all the time is reminiscent of how many little children I've heard talk, having and 'um' between every two or three words. Grobyc's-funny-replacement-for-spaces gives him the feel of talking semi-monotonously, just like you would expect from a robot. Some of them were don well, and others... not so well.

[Mr Bekkler]

I know there are different dialects of Spanish you could try to emulate! Mexican Spanish is different from the Spanish someone from Portugal or Spain might speak. That'd be really interesting, though I think I'd suffer the same problem trying to translate that you did while playing Cross!

[Licawolf]

I love Spaniard Spanish!(most mexicans don't, though). Even inside mexico there are different accents, almost every state has its own accent... I talk with a little of a northern accent myself ( with an intonation similar to the stereotypical speedy-gonzalez accent   I hate to hear my own voice from a recording).

Mmmh, I think if abused the accents could lead to giving the characters bad stereotypical treats, but if used correctly... maybe spaniard spanish to replace some of the european accents in the game or caribbean or puerto rican spanish for Guldove characters to represent their more traditional relationship with the islands, umm... you really got me thinking there, it may actually work, thanks for the suggestion  

[Mr Bekkler]

Exactly! That'd be sweet. It just takes a little creative tweaking. If it can be done in english and japanese, it should be doable in almost any language. probably not latin.

[Sajainta]

I'm waiting for Thought to come to this thread and prove that Latin can have different accents. 

[alfadorredux]

Of course Latin can have different accents: the Romance languages all got their start as regional variations of Classical Latin. So no accents in Latin = no French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portugese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansch, Mozarabic, and several more that I'm forgetting.