Since then, the majority of the games produced by the companies have been localized for Western audiences, although the process was not given a high priority at Square until the international success of Final Fantasy VII.
The localization staff at Square Enix works mainly from Japanese to English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, as well as Russian, Korean and Mandarin for a number of titles.
[4] To that end, Square tasked Richard Honeywood, originally a programmer, with creating a dedicated localization team in the Tokyo headquarters.
Once the company greenlights a localization project, a period of brainstorming starts in which glossary, style, naming schemes and fonts are chosen.
[5] Challenges for the localization teams include space limitation (due to data storage and/or on-screen space), achieving a natural dialogue flow despite multiple plot branches and script lines being stored out of order, and, when voiced footage is not re-recorded for lip movement, dealing with file length and lip-synch limitations.
[10] Many early localizations, like other RPGs both then and in more recent years, made heavy use of antiquated speech patterns and archaic nouns such as "thee" and "thou".
The former method was adopted for Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels, although some alterations were made in order to make the English dialogue sound natural.
[6][19] He said that he started to change the company's approach to localization after that game, moving booths to always work very closely with the original development teams, improving communication with them, and introducing full-time editors.
According to Slattery, the lack of deadlines, poor communication and synchronization between the various departments, and continuing changes to the script and to cutscenes led to a turbulent development.
[23] In contrast, Alexander O. Smith, who is often associated with the Ivalice games, had a good working relationship with Yasumi Matsuno during the localization of titles like Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII and the 2010 remake of Tactics Ogre.
[5] The localization team for The World Ends with You chose to preserve the Japanese elements to ensure the game's cultural aspect remained intact.
[4] Similar space issues frequently motivated character renames in older games, such as Chrono Trigger's Crono and Final Fantasy IX's Amarant, originally named Salamander.
[30] During his localization of Secret of Mana in 1993, Woolsey was forced to trim down vast amounts of character dialogue due to an awkward fixed text font, later stating that he was satisfied with the final result.
[39] Censorship can also affect the localized versions of the games and require obscuring mature themes, rewriting risqué remarks or phrases, altering graphics or removing parts of some scenes.
[5] Original Western releases of early games in the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest featured multiple occurrences of this form of censorship.
[41] Less commonly, this also goes the other way, for instance with Final Fantasy XII, in which a sequence involving violence against a female character was censored in the Japanese version but restored in the American and European releases.
The Western release of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII was delayed by over two months because of the large amount of dialogue, which changes due to the game's time mechanic, that needed to be translated and recorded.
[55][56] The company has also recently started releasing Japanese voice tracks as downloadable content, as in the case of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII[57] and one of the titles it has published, the Access Games-developed Drakengard 3.
For example, when Honeywood found contradictions in the story of Chrono Cross in 2000, he worked with Masato Kato, the director and scenario writer of the game, to rewrite sections and add explanatory dialogue which was not in the original version.
For Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, voice-overs and orchestral music were recorded for the Western releases in 2005, while the original Japanese version did not have them.
Generally, gameplay content left out of the original game due to time constraints may be completed and added in the localized versions.
[62][63][64][65][66] 1UP.com's Wesley Fenlon praised Square Enix for the high quality of its translations, especially as space allocated for text and dialogue had been expanded with new and re-released versions of games.
Xenogears, the company's first game to feature voice acting, drew criticism in regard to its audio presentation,[68][69] while The Bouncer received a fairly positive response.
[75] The English release of X-2 ended up receiving the Seventh Annual Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award in 2004 for Outstanding Achievement in Character Performance.