Capcom published another blog last night detailing even more of the changes made in the western version of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. The company talked about things like the font, UI, and a few other elements.

Below are a few excerpts:

Moving on, the UI in the Japanese version of the game is well-designed, but during the localization we found some places where our translations simply couldn’t fit without abbreviating them down to single letters. Thankfully the Monster Hunter dev team was open to modifying the UI for us whenever it was required. An example of this is in your status screen that displays your health, defense, resistance, etc. Most of the time our translations were easy enough to implement, but the weapon’s element is represented by a single kanji character in Japanese, so that meant we only had 1 or 2 letters worth of space to deal with. In a game like Monster Hunter that has close to a dozen elements, this is really tough to deal with, so we used the elemental blight icons instead of text. It may not seem like a big change, but for new players their time is better spent hunting monsters rather than hunting down what the heck “FI” or “TH” means.
Another small but important UI change is in the lobby search menu. When you search for lobbies in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, you’re shown a lot of information on just one line. If a player is ready to depart it’ll show the quest name or quest type, and if they’re in the middle of a quest it’ll show the quest name plus time elapsed. Obviously this really makes things hard for the localization team because our quest names are generally twice as long as the Japanese, so we had to come up with a way to get all of the info across to the player without having it look strange.
Our way around this was to have the text switch between different status messages, much like a blinking ticker. The info will now display the quest name or quest type, and then quickly display other pertinent info like time elapsed, if players are ready to go, if the quest is finished, etc. Unlike a simple color or window size change, the back and forth about this change took a week or so because we had to get the timing just right. If the text switched too fast, no one would be able to read it, and if it switched too slow, you might not be able to join the lobby in time because someone would’ve joined before you. I’m very thankful that the dev team went the extra mile to get this done for us!

Head on over to the Capcom blog for the full post.

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