North American Localization of Japanese Games

[jhd]

 

I have been thinking lately about the process of how Japanese games were adapted to the North American market.

 

Obviously the big issue is translation of in-game text, but there are also adaptations of culture references, sometimes censorship in accordance with NOA's guidelines, and even adjustments to the difficulty level.

 

Were these localizations often done by the publisher, or were they out-sourced to third-party companies? What resources were provided -- did they normally have access to the original source code and graphics files? 

[Tanooki]

Usually it was done by the same people who worked on the original, or perhaps if it was some small developer but big publisher over there, possibly the publisher would make the fixes requested by NOA to sell it stateside.  A good one I can think of is the massive roll up that was this ninja style game that turned into Yo Noid in the US, a Capcom title, changing it entirely in visual style to be dominoes and not old edo style.