Zoids Saga II review

Zoids Saga II: A Sequel with Terrible Localization

Covers of the original Japanese and the localized version for international release

    When it comes to foreign games, translation comes a bit too far behind. Especially when you consider the current trend of how localizers nowadays injected street slangs that are locally known only in the West that if you retranslate the translated JP->English, Kr-> English for example, you ended up getting the results in somewhat gibberish as each country has their own local slangs, culture, and so on. This one is one of the case of horribly translated localization case. When I say horrible, I didn't mean the plot, I'm talking about the case of a lot of typos, tendency to use the Americanized version for names or mistranslation for character's name. Let's get into this deep, shall we?

What the Game is About

     The game takes you in the role of a young man. You are Zeru or Zell Jupit, a 14 years old mercenary who is a descendant of Zenebas family which Claudia Diamant later pointed out when she saw his pendant. As you progress in the game, time-space distortion begins and you were transported to Zoids New Century world by accident. On the first town, talking to people gives Zeru an idea of becoming a Zoid warrior and in the second town, he meets Juno Hera and from here on...things get more complicated as Prince Guard or Gard in localized version plans to use Juno to revive Death Saurer. On your quest to save Juno, you will meet more characters from Zoids anime from Chaotic Century, Guardian Force to New Century Zero (Genesis and Fuzor made their debut in the 3rd game) and Zoids VS, Zoids spin-off Liger Zero: Mythical Silver Beast, Zoids Saga. Unlike the first game where you travel across time and space through Time Artifact, the sequel basically have a Time orb appear on specific places that will take you to either timeline of the anime while the world you were mainly in brought over all characters from the games except for the spin-off. the latter concept of time orb appearing in specific location of the map became the main time traveling concept for Saga 3/Fuzor.

The Start of Horrible Localization Reputation

    While Takara TOMY did make video games based on the early Battle Story and one game was based on continuation of Chaotic Century, when the company decided to bring their game to international market, the result is sadly not good. When they brought the sequel of Saga to international, they had North American to localize the game and the result is beyond hilarious. While they did try to translate the JP to English, sometimes...the translation is a bit too literal and the fact that the localizers had a tendency to use the Americanized version of anime character's names such as Brad Hunter name became Ballad Hunter, Jamie Hemeros name became Jimmy Hemeros, Dr. Toros became Dr. Tros, and even game character Blood Keel became Brad Keel (That's too literal for translation). Not to mention the numerous typos and wrong descriptions for some Zoids especially on Blood Keel's Geno Hydra Zoid where they got the plot context regarding the Zoid mixed up with Atory Arcadia's Trinity Liger, the game ended up laughed by many due to how ridiculous the localization is compared to the one done by Capcom or Konami in the past. Some of character's battle dialogue ended up hilarious due to how literal the translation is such as Zan's quote "ぶっとべ" ended up as "Blow up!" when it was supposed to mean "Get lost!" and presumably Alster's quote when hurt,"うわ！まだまだ！" ended up as "Ah! More!" (I'm sorry they did this treatment to you, kid) when he's saying,"Uwah! I'm not done yet!" when translated better. I would try to fix the broken localization but I'm an amateur in terms of coding to hack the game's text as I currently tried to label each category of texts that I can use to have me and others to fix the game later once we figured out how to do it.

Rating

• Graphic: 8/10 (A bit of downgrade on the character's sprite and face sprite style compared to the first but the Zoids artstyle remain the same)
• Gameplay: 9/10 (EP regen depends on Zoids XP points, E-Shield is implemented, hitting flying Zoid is still difficult and Anti Air featured in some weapons)
• Sound & Music: 9/10 (Same as the first with some new soundtracks)
• Story & Characters: 8/10 (Story is fine here but the problem of the game is that...it has rather horrible localization. Some typos, some are translated too literal without paying attention to context, some ended up hilarious for battle dialogue)
• Replay Value / Content: 8/10 (When you finish the game, you can still come back to the game and unlock the rest of Zoids Database that you have missed before)

What now?

This year, more and more starts talking about this topic regarding Zoids. Slowly but sure...one by one... journalists who are unaffiliated with any companies start talking about it and start giving out ideas that TOMY or Sunrise for Gundam's case (Gundam at the time was gaining popularity in the West while Zoids first started and attempt to compete with Gundam) could use to make sure both mecha toyline stay alive. What will the future of Zoids be? We will never know, not as long as TOMY start doing course correcting in their marketing effort and decision from the higher up in the company else the toyline will die out faster in the same pace as Gundam in the next couple of years