Thirty-Two Bits, New Horizons

Even today, Final Fantasy VII is an inescapable pop culture presence. It almost single-handedly introduced Japanese RPGs to millions of English speakers worldwide and is considered one of the greatest and most influential games of all time. A work of cutting-edge production value compared to its predecessors, Final Fantasy VII utilized the 32-bit Playstation’s polygon-pushing processor and copious CD-based storage to transition its graphics from 2D pixel sprites and backgrounds to 3D characters exploring hyper-detailed, pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. And, most impressively for the time, CD storage allowed for beautiful 3D animated cutscenes that became the centerpiece of the game’s marketing campaign.

While Squaresoft sunk a fortune into marketing Final Fantasy VII in America, the company pinched its pennies in localizing the game. According to game writer Wesley Fenlon, the task fell to Michael Baskett at Squaresoft’s North American headquarters. A persistent urban myth suggests that Baskett translated the entirety of Final Fantasy VII’s script; but according to Richard Honeywood, who kickstarted his career localizing classic Playstation-era Squaresoft games, he had support from a team of freelancers.

“The translation was rough, full of grammatical errors and weird turns of phrase that have become an integral part of the game’s legacy,” Fenlon wrote. “But considering how the game was localized, it’s surprising there weren’t more errors.”

Writer, Japanese-English translator, and game developer Tim Rogers explains in his video series “Let’s Mosey: A Slow Translation of Final Fantasy VII” for game website Kotaku that the text in the game’s mammoth script is crammed into small on-screen boxes, and it needed to fit regardless of word-size disparities between the two languages. For instance, “washing machine” requires 15 English characters versus only three Japanese characters.

Of course, Rogers delves into his theory behind the fan-favorite typo, “This guy are sick.” He believes the error resulted from the confusing nature of some Japanese plural words and the arrangement of text blocks in the spreadsheet. According to Rogers, the translator likely believed the line referred to an entire town rather than an individual, changed “these people” to “this guy” upon realizing the error, and forgot to change “are” to “is.”

Learning its lessons from the Final Fantasy VII localization process, Squaresoft set about bolstering its capabilities. “We built it up to a team of over 50 people by the time I left 10 years later — all internal — plus, we had the US office as well,” Honeywood told MultiLingual in 2022.

“I learned all the best practices, like planning a proper schedule and working out the speed of each translator,” he added. “You figure out what type of text each person excels at — some could be good at sci-fi, and some could be good at classical text, whereas some just aren’t good at system text.”

Honeywood would need all the experience he could garner, as future Squaresoft RPGs and business decisions would test his capabilities.

Burning Ambitions

According to Moher in his Washington Post article, “How the greatest Japanese RPGs of the ‘90s came to the West,” Honeywood took over the localization of Squaresoft’s next major RPG, Xenogears.

Even with the benefit of modern translation tools, Xenogears would present a decision-making challenge. A wildly ambitious sci-fi saga encompassing thousands of years of history, Xenogears draws influence from sources as varied as Freudian psychology, Nietzschean philosophy, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Japanese mecha anime, and classic sci-fi literature and movies like Soylent Green. If its density wasn’t challenging enough, the game explores sensitive religious themes that Honeywood’s localization team worried would draw controversy from the West’s majority-Christian populations.

“Xenogears … presented a hell of an uphill battle for Honeywood, [and his colleagues] Nobby and Bell — so much so that Nobby left the project, fearing the response from religious groups in the West to the game’s scrutiny of religion,” Moher wrote for the Washington Post.

Xenogears’ anime cutscenes were another obstacle. One of Squaresoft’s first explorations into voice acting, later expanded in games like Playstation action-RPG Brave Fencer Musashi and the Playstation 2’s groundbreaking Final Fantasy X, Xenogears’ cutscenes presented the puzzle of matching English voice acting with the animation’s lip movements. But it was invaluable experience that codified the next phase of Squaresoft localization, including the implementation of a familiarization and glossary creation period and direct translation from Japanese to French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

As luck would (or would not) have it, Xenogears flew too far under the radar to generate much religious controversy, although it enjoys a cult-classic following and several spiritual successors today. Its ambitious narrative was far from an existential crisis — that would come toward the end of Honeywood’s Squaresoft tenure courtesy of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Remember those beautiful 3D cutscenes that made Final Fantasy VII an international megahit? Well, Squaresoft only improved its artistry through its work on myriad titles, including Final Fantasies VIII-X, Parasite Eve, and Chrono Cross. Recognized as a global leader in 3D animation by the dawn of the 21st century, Squaresoft, helmed at that time by Sakaguchi, turned its ambitions beyond video games to the film industry. With the creation of Square Pictures, the team began work on its first — and only — feature film: Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within.

While as visually beautiful and polished as one would expect from Square’s 3D animation team, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within failed to find an audience, bombing at the box office and dealing a grievous financial blow to Squaresoft. The subsequent turmoil saw Sakaguchi’s resignation and labored course correction. Once the company recovered, early discussions began regarding a merger with Japanese RPG rival Enix of Dragon Quest fame. The deal was finalized in 2003 with the two companies reborn as Square Enix.

But it wasn’t all sunshine, at least not for Honeywood. The merger unleashed chaos upon his team as they scrambled to recover as much of their work as possible, even finding game source code for Final Fantasy I, II, and III stored on molding LP-sized floppy discs.

“A major job was salvaging source code that was being lost before our very eyes — we actually did lose the entire source code of Final Fantasy III,” Honeywood told MultiLingual. “It was too moldy to save, and that’s why … [re-releases were] all emulation. They couldn’t reprogram it because they lost the source code.”

Honeywood eventually moved on to the next stage of his career at Blizzard Entertainment — now Activision-Blizzard following yet another highly publicized merger — in 2007. But he values the experience he acquired at Square Enix and still sees the fruits of his work in titles today. For instance, he can see the direct links between his work on Squaresoft’s first massively multiplayer online RPG, Final Fantasy XI, and its highly acclaimed successor, Final Fantasy XIV.

“I actually trained up the guys that took over not just Final Fantasy XI but moved on to Final Fantasy XIV,” he told MultiLingual. “So all the know-how from XI is there, and they’re using a lot of the linguistic background systems and the other technology that I implemented on that game.”