Why was "Working Designs" so hated?

[fake-kun]

The extant to which people have wrapped around to defending "localization" is just embarrassing.
No, I do not want Bill Clinton jokes or "awesome sauce" style quips in my Japanese fantasy game. If you find the original script bland then play a different game. If you can't bring yourself to deliver a translation that's in the spirit of the dev's intention then don't translate games.

It's incredible how people make out translating video games faithfully to be some kind of impossible task.

 

[Bonkers225]

Were they hated back then, or is it something more recent? Because if it wasn't for them back in the 90's, people would have missed out on alot of good anime like games in the US. And they were trendsetters with their special limited edition releases with bunch of cool extras in the US. Lunar 2 for the PSX comes to mind.

 

[NemissaFotia]

Every time I think about Working Designs, I think about Albert Odyssey and the... questionable decisions they made with that game.

 

[newageretrohippie]

I did know about the increased difficulty on Magic Knight for the Saturn

that game was still pretty easy... and kind of short.

Post automatically merged: Mar 1, 2025

Every time I think about Working Designs, I think about Albert Odyssey and the... questionable decisions they made with that game.

View attachment 34770

ebonics classes were a thing though. i mean it wasn't the 2000s. I took an ebonics class one time at a summer camp... and it was taught by black people! It was a wild time, i'll tell you!!

Where they screwed up was some of the horrible boss battles toward the end. I fought one boss for like 45 minutes... and died... I never played that game again :(

Post automatically merged: Mar 1, 2025

Were they hated back then, or is it something more recent? Because if it wasn't for them back in the 90's, people would have missed out on alot of good anime like games in the US. And they were trendsetters with their special limited edition releases with bunch of cool extras in the US. Lunar 2 for the PSX comes to mind.

View attachment 34742

no! nobody hated working designs.... we just hated having to go to the mall every week for 3 months, because they kept moving the release date back... and back... and back... and back... and back... and the only way to find out was to go to the mall on tuesday and ask the guy at Kay Bee Toys.

 

[freebie#47]

Don't like what the did, but glad they help pushed for more RPG games to get oversea releases. It was around that time that most companies didn't want to put the money and effort for a genre that did extremely poorly and cost a lot to license and translate.

Also F### you Ted Woosley...I hope you in hell.

 

[Stookymalarkey]

Don't like what the did, but glad they help pushed for more RPG games to get oversea releases. It was around that time that most companies didn't want to put the money and effort for a genre that did extremely poorly and cost a lot to license and translate.

Also F### you Ted Woosley...I hope you in hell.

Why the Woosley hate?

 

[miguk]

Every time I think about Working Designs, I think about Albert Odyssey and the... questionable decisions they made with that game.

View attachment 34770

This was not the only bigoted humor they had in their games. Lunar has a few "coded language" jokes in it that are a bit more insensitive. And Popful Mail straight-up repeatedly uses the R-word and an old-timey slur for Black people. Knowing Working Designs sense of humor, there was likely more that I don't remember off the top of my head.

ebonics classes were a thing though. i mean it wasn't the 2000s. I took an ebonics class one time at a summer camp... and it was taught by black people! It was a wild time, i'll tell you!!

no! nobody hated working designs.... we just hated having to go to the mall every week for 3 months, because they kept moving the release date back... and back... and back... and back... and back... and the only way to find out was to go to the mall on tuesday and ask the guy at Kay Bee Toys.

Anecdotal evidence is not real evidence. A single incident does not mean that such classes were rampant. I've never heard of such a thing elsewhere, and you provide no proof of it.

Plenty of people hated Working Designs back then. Anyone who had to put up with their difficulty changes and read the magazine articles that pointed out that the translation staff was responsible for them was rightfully angry at them. And many of their "translation" choices were obviously incorrect; nobody in Japan was writing slurs, Clinton jokes, and references to Fast Times at Ridgemont High into their games. And those jokes weren't even funny; they were cringe Boomer garbage.

Don't like what the did, but glad they help pushed for more RPG games to get oversea releases. It was around that time that most companies didn't want to put the money and effort for a genre that did extremely poorly and cost a lot to license and translate.

Also F### you Ted Woosley...I hope you in hell.

Yes, it was good that we even got those games, but unfortunately it has caused an inertia in the fan translation community about fixing the mistakes. We may have had an accurate fan translation by now if there wasn't this ridiculous attitude among fan translators that only Ted Woosley ever did bad translations. (Which is flat-out false; Woosley did good by the standards of the time despite the flaws in his work. He is only hated on because he was hyped up as "the worst translator ever" by online trolls.)

Oh, and you dropped your hat:

 

[newageretrohippie]

yeah, well you are all a spoony bard. every last one of ya!

 

[Bonkers225]

Look at it this way. It was either bad/questionable translations, or learn Japanese, play the game through trial and error, or print out sheet after sheet of translated dialogues to go through the game. Some ppl are just ungrateful.

 

[Gorse]

It was either bad/questionable translations, or learn Japanese

This is the single most flawed argument about the entire subject of localization — if a translator has done their job properly, the audience won’t have to learn the original language. That’s the translator’s job.

If I hire an accountant and he screws up my taxes, then says “Don’t like it? Do ‘em yourself!”, I’m shoving his head in a paper shredder.

 

[newageretrohippie]

This is the single most flawed argument about the entire subject of localization — if a translator has done their job properly, the audience won’t have to learn the original language. That’s the translator’s job.

If I hire an accountant and he screws up my taxes, then says “Don’t like it? Do ‘em yourself!”, I’m shoving his head in a paper shredder.

seems like there is a good bit of nuance in Japanese.... especially written japanese, because you are sort of thinking in the back of your head about how the Kanji might be pronounced or what it might mean in Chinese too...

Like, for instance, the Kanji for the "America" in "America-jin" means "white rice" in Chinese. lol. So we are kind of sort of "white rice people" in America! F*ck yeah!

But the worst thing is when you are watching an anime, and you have to read the subs because you don't REALLY know japanese, but you know ENOUGH to know that the subs are completely different from what the characters are saying. That is REALLY annoying.

 

[Bonkers225]

This is the single most flawed argument about the entire subject of localization — if a translator has done their job properly, the audience won’t have to learn the original language. That’s the translator’s job.

If I hire an accountant and he screws up my taxes, then says “Don’t like it? Do ‘em yourself!”, I’m shoving his head in a paper shredder.

You have completely misread what I've stated. If the game has not been translated by said distributor in the first place, it means you would have to go through the headache of importing, AND learning Japanese to go through the game. I'm not giving you an option here, "Oh I didn't like this translation, so I'll seek an alternative, by learning Japanese hurhur". You get nothing, except pay more for the game and wait 4-6 weeks or more until it arrives in your mail.

Also, you're comparing taxes, something that affects your life from here on, till the day you die, to a video game/hobby you can live without and be perfectly fine. Get real.

 

[Gorse]

You have completely misread what I've stated.

I wasn’t attacking you directly, I was criticizing that line of thinking for faulty logic. I don’t really give a hoot what the process used to be like, it 1) isn’t nowadays, and 2) was terrible and worthy of criticism then, too.

Also, you're comparing taxes, something that affects your life from here on, till the day you die, to a video game/hobby you can live without and be perfectly fine.

If I have to pay money for both, I’m holding them to equal standards. Get real!!!!!!!!!

 

[spectresfrommercury]

taking way too many liberties and straying far from the original translation easy answer.

 

[miguk]

Look at it this way. It was either bad/questionable translations, or learn Japanese, play the game through trial and error, or print out sheet after sheet of translated dialogues to go through the game. Some ppl are just ungrateful.

Here's something worth noting: It took me decades — not weeks, months, or years, but frickin' decades — to play through Popful Mail. I couldn't even get through the second f***ing stage of that game because WD borked the difficulty to an absurd degree. And I'm not some noobie to Metroidvanias; I played all the major ones from the years just before and after the game's release. The game wasn't even close to playable until the unWorking hack became available.

Now, with that in mind, am I really so ungrateful to "just be able to play the game?" I couldn't just play the game, and I had it! Really, at this point I wish it had never been translated so that I could have just waited for a fan translation to come along instead. And if I had to play it in Japanese, so what? That would be more comprehensible than not even seeing the whole game because I'm locked out of getting anywhere. And a lot more comfortable than having to hear "hur hur r*****" over and over again.

 

[Bonkers225]

Here's something worth noting: It took me decades — not weeks, months, or years, but frickin' decades — to play through Popful Mail. I couldn't even get through the second f***ing stage of that game because WD borked the difficulty to an absurd degree. And I'm not some noobie to Metroidvanias; I played all the major ones from the years just before and after the game's release. The game wasn't even close to playable until the unWorking hack became available.

Now, with that in mind, am I really so ungrateful to "just be able to play the game?" I couldn't just play the game, and I had it! Really, at this point I wish it had never been translated so that I could have just waited for a fan translation to come along instead. And if I had to play it in Japanese, so what? That would be more comprehensible than not even seeing the whole game because I'm locked out of getting anywhere. And a lot more comfortable than having to hear "hur hur r*****" over and over again.

It's so easy to think like this with hindsight, and experiencing it beforehand, when if it had never happened, this game probably wouldn't even be in your rader today to even think any of that. Also, it wasn't only WD that increased difficulty of games for the US versions. Konami, Treasure, Midway, Tecmo, Sega, Nintendo, etc, were all known to do this with their games as well.

Also, obligatory get good bro.

 

[miguk]

It's so easy to think like this with hindsight, and experiencing it beforehand, when if it had never happened, this game probably wouldn't even be in your rader today to even think any of that. Also, it wasn't only WD that increased difficulty of games for the US versions. Konami, Treasure, Midway, Tecmo, Sega, Nintendo, etc, were all known to do this with their games as well.

Also, obligatory get good bro.

I'm a regular reader of Hardcore Gaming 101, and was even for the old site (which unfortunately didn't port over all of their articles to the current site, but at least it's archived). It's rare for a game with a cult following to be off my radar. Other companies did increase the difficulty, but not in the absurd ways WD did. Nobody else did that stupid saving system from the Sega CD version of Lunar. There's increasing the difficulty, and then there's just ruining it. None of the ones you listed ruined any games.

I beat Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts on original hardware. I beat the first 2 Mortal Kombat games at the arcade with less than 3 dollars on hand (so no more than 5 tries). I can handle old-school difficulty. I'm not adapting to b***s***.

 

[Ikagura]

Honestly I forget about them.

I'm Team Aeon Genesis haha!

 

[queensquest]

They took major liberties with their translations, though that was true of a lot of Japanese media and pop culture translated to English at the time. To that extent, I think they probably get a worse rap then they deserve these days, or at least they should be judged in the context of the 90s. Given how shoddy a lot of translations were at the time, with WD you did get the sense that they were invested in the final product, that they weren't just fly-by-night operators looking to cash in. Popful Mail had very good voice acting for the time, for example.

But having recently played through Alundra and Popful Mail, some of the humour does grate, and the difficulty changes can be obnoxious. One late-game boss in Alundra took me about 15 minutes of whacking it endlessly, not because it was difficult as such, but because they decided to massively increase the HP over and above the original for no obvious reason. Popful Mail was evidently intended to be a breezy game, but they turned it into a real slog.

 

[SolarSpectre]

what they did with the translations went way beyond just taking "liberties". it should be a criminal offense.

 

[CG4R12I4N]

The question is not "why were they got hated", it's "why were they not being hated more".

Like seriously, the amount of changes they made to the games they published are just baffling, and sometimes even made them unplayable at certain point due to bugs. I knew that because I played both Lunar games and the ways they happened were absolutely disgusting.

The only game they didn't ruin much is just Growlanser series (still got some character name and difficulty changes) and I feel like it's only because the writing in that series is really good compared to most JRPGs that they probably considered it a highbrow art.

 

[Adrastia]

I could be wrong but, as far as I know they would make changes to the games for the worse. Increasing difficulty and making things tedious to increase play time to try and combat rentals. I think they would also fill their translations with pop culture references and just translate things poorly or just wholesale make stuff up and things like that.

I never found the games that hard though. I know there were some frustrating things. But most weren't that bad from what I recall.

The pop culture references and bad jokes annoyed many people. But since it was Working Designs or nothing I appreciated that the games came to the west at all. Someone who is just playing those games now may not understand that angle. It's very similar to how those of us who grew up with heavily edited and Americanized anime didn't know any better. And if we did then we also understood that was the only way those shows were getting on TV. You just had to deal with what was available.

 

[Graw]

I never found the games that hard though. I know there were some frustrating things. But most weren't that bad from what I recall.

The pop culture references and bad jokes annoyed many people. But since it was Working Designs or nothing I appreciated that the games came to the west at all. Someone who is just playing those games now may not understand that angle.

There's only been once or twice pop culture references have bothered me in things like that and it's mostly been when the original translation didn't have them but then a retranslation did. I can't remember which games this was but I do remember playing at least one like that where a game was relocalized and the second localization ended up having more out of place pop culture references.

It's very similar to how those of us who grew up with heavily edited and Americanized anime didn't know any better. And if we did then we also understood that was the only way those shows were getting on TV. You just had to deal with what was available.

It was the same with early fan translations as well. I know it's a terrible translation but my favourite version of Tales of Phantasia will always be the snes dejap one where Arche probably 'fucks like a tiger' just because it was the only way to play the game when I played it. The official translation in the GBA version just isn't the same for me even though it's a better translation.

 

[Bonkers225]

I'm a regular reader of Hardcore Gaming 101, and was even for the old site (which unfortunately didn't port over all of their articles to the current site, but at least it's archived). It's rare for a game with a cult following to be off my radar. Other companies did increase the difficulty, but not in the absurd ways WD did. Nobody else did that stupid saving system from the Sega CD version of Lunar. There's increasing the difficulty, and then there's just ruining it. None of the ones you listed ruined any games.

I beat Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts on original hardware. I beat the first 2 Mortal Kombat games at the arcade with less than 3 dollars on hand (so no more than 5 tries). I can handle old-school difficulty. I'm not adapting to b***s***.

Hardcore gaming 101 nor websites like the ones you mentioned weren't around in 1993 when these games were originally released. You knew about these games about a decade later when we were in the PS2/X-Box era. With added convenience, due to modern technology with emulators, and rom hacks, you can save anywhere, and have patches to address these issues. It was due to WD that the Lunar series is looked upon so fondly these days, no? Notorious for their difficulty or not, their games are still highly sought after whether it be for the Sega CD, PSX, or Saturn. There are more people with fond nostalgia for these games, than bad. You're one of few exceptions. People think if 5 or 10 people say something about something online, they think it goes for the rest of the world, often forgetting they live in a very small bubble.

Also, did you even pay for these games in the first place? And if so, can you take a pic of your copies? Thanks.

Post automatically merged: Mar 2, 2025

I never found the games that hard though. I know there were some frustrating things. But most weren't that bad from what I recall.

The pop culture references and bad jokes annoyed many people. But since it was Working Designs or nothing I appreciated that the games came to the west at all. Someone who is just playing those games now may not understand that angle. It's very similar to how those of us who grew up with heavily edited and Americanized anime didn't know any better. And if we did then we also understood that was the only way those shows were getting on TV. You just had to deal with what was available.

This guy/gal gets it 100%.

 

[CG4R12I4N]

Look at it this way. It was either bad/questionable translations, or learn Japanese, play the game through trial and error, or print out sheet after sheet of translated dialogues to go through the game. Some ppl are just ungrateful.

So you're grateful when someone not only mistook your coffee order for tea, but also served it late, ruined its flavor and even had the gall to gloat about it to everyone else?