Nintendo Treehouse on localizing Mario & Luigi
The Nintendo Treehouse is behind pretty much all localized titles that Nintendo puts out on its systems. Mario & Luigi is no exception. Fortunately, senior localization manager Nate Bihldorff says that the characters only require a few tweaks – no major recreations of characters are required:
“Conceptually, all the characters are generally just one tweak away from being awesome. It’s a matter of making it fit better.”
Bihldorff explained things by discussing the Massive Brothers. The two aren’t Russian in the Japanese version, but they were given Russian accents for the overseas release:
“We ended up making them have these crazy meathead Russian accents. They certainly weren’t Russian in the Japanese. It was actually born out of the fact that there are scenarios involving them flexing their muscles and screaming out these massive punchlines that are giant letters, maybe four Japanese characters wide.”
“The text was so big that these punch lines had to be really short. I ended up landing on that accent because the Russian accent can truncate sentences so much just by removing articles and entire sections of normal English. As it turned out, with their mustaches, they kind of looked like classic Russian strongmen anyways, so it fit naturally. They were already meatheads in the Japanese [version]. We just changed them a little bit to fit our language.”
Bihldorff also commented on the biggest challenge in writing for an RPG such as Dream Team:
“With an RPG, you have so many ancillary characters. You have to get a unique personality in them with five messages. They have a message when you first meet them, a message when you complete chapter two, a message when some other event happens, an end of game message, and that’s it.”
“That’s their whole personality. Keeping them interesting enough that people will want to go up and talk to them – especially the modern gamer who maybe doesn’t feel like they have time to talk to everyone – ‘Send me to the next dungeon, man, I don’t have time for this’ – keeping dialogue appealing for that guy is a constant challenge in localization.”
