square soft and enix are both guilty of messing with the gameplay and script and aren't the only ones to do so during localizations. So I don't really see the point of bringing it up to cite one single company when multiple companies all did it. It makes you out to be a fanatic for square enix/soft and specifically only against working designs. And it kills any standing your opinion/argument had as extremely bias.
Now the promoting thing I never heard about so I won't touch on that.
I’m a long time amateur translator (I do stuff mostly for fun and practice, but I’ve done my share of manga scanlations), and I’m not saying that other companies at the time didn’t have their share of translation issues, but Working Designs’s localizations are so far beyond something like what Woolsey was doing in changing the tone and script of the games that it’s embarrassing. Generally translators try to either be accurate to the original text or faithful to the author’s intentions. WD often did neither. There can be some merit to this practice if it makes the script more engaging (I enjoy the Digimon Adventure and 02 dubs, in spite of them taking similarly massive liberties with the script), but WD translations often seriously alter the tone of the script—inserting condom jokes into Magic Knight Rayearth? Renaming a character in Alundra “boner”? Sex jokes pretty much everywhere? I’m not a prude, I don’t care if an author wants to do this, but you have to see how a translator doing this would significantly alter the way someone playing in English would experience a game compared to in the original Japanese. To me, as a translator myself, this is a problem.
And this isn’t WD’s biggest problem—if it were, I honestly wouldn’t care that much about them. The fact that they almost always monkeyed around in the code to try to make their games harder is the biggest problem I have with them. No, that’s not even true, lots of companies in the 4th generation were doing that, theoretically to combat the rental industry. The biggest problem is how over the top WD went—many of their localized RPGs went from fairly typical experiences, in terms of the need for grinding at least, to massive grindfests. Silhouette Mirage was changed from an interesting, well-balanced action game offering some flexibility in how you play the game to a tedious slog forcing you to farm resources at every opportunity and removing most of that flexibility. Exile 2 is famously essentially broken due to heavy handed, poorly considered coding changes—read the
Cutting Room Floor article on the game for some insight on that mess. These are just a couple of egregious examples, but until around 1997 or so, pretty nearly every Working Designs game featured significant alterations to game balance, very often along the lines of, if not always as extreme as, the examples above.
I’m not saying they’re the worst localization company ever, but they’re responsible for some grade A bullshit, and while I respect some of what they were doing, I don’t think there’s any reason to put them on a pedestal short of nostalgia blinders.
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