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Assault Suits Valken originally released decades ago on the Super Famicom, and for the 30th anniversary Switch owners can now enjoy the title through Assault Suits Valken DECLASSIFIED. This Switch release marks the very first time the entire game was given a full English translation, and in an interview with Nintendo Life, M2’s Masanori Yagi spoke about what went into the process.

“We’ve already had a number of successes with porting Super Famicom games to the Switch, so it wasn’t too difficult to get the game to work. However, our aim this time was to provide a complete English version of the game, so we had to make sure that all the Japanese texts in the game were converted into English.

The basic nature of the game is an action game, so the volume of messages itself is not that large, but in some scenes the texts are displayed without stopping the progress of the game, so we could not allow the display area to be expanded or the number of pages to be increased just because the game had been translated into English. So we decided to apply a proportional font for English, both to increase the number of characters displayed and to improve the appearance. Although it is not that difficult just to display the characters, it would affect the playability of the game if it affected the execution of the game itself, so the programmers had the hardest time finding a way to achieve this without putting too much load on the game. Of course, even so, there was not always enough room for the number of characters that can be displayed, so I think the translators also had a hard time.”

[M2's Masanori Yagi]

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Comments (1)

mamba909

1y ago

Huh? IIRC, this game was released as Cybernator on the SNES. I didn't get very far in the game, so I'm not sure which text they didn't translate. Maybe there were certain dialogue they had to cut out in the original release due to censorship?