zephiX, did you write this?
Peculiar Translations of PS2 Manuals - Final Fantasy X (5.3.2026)
You can check out the full scan of the manual on Archive.org
First of all, I'm very, very sorry for the month long delay. I didn't lose any interest in this, just had some personal stuff that couldn't wait, but honestly, I was also deep into some other games in the meanwhile,
especially Ocarina of Time and the original Silent Hill 2. A new passion project that may or may not be somewhat related to this has started in that time as well :).
So, Final Fantasy X, the second mainline game I've completed thus far, with VIII being the first one. Although it isn't as in depth with some mechanics and the lack of a semi-open world, it compensated with a more interesting
story and lore to the world. But this isn't a breakdown of the game, I'm far more interested how they butchered the local release. Starting with:
This isn't as big of a fuckup compared to the Kingdom Hearts description, but it isn't far off. It's still a faithful translation, but the biggest error here is that they've "misgendered" Sin, calling it in a feminine manner. I understand completely that the couldn't have known this kind of info, althought just using neutral terms for Sin would eliminate this kind of thing. Also, my previous assumption with the cover art and manual translation teams were separate, has somewhat been disproven with this, but it could've still be a posibility, since this game released a year before Kingdom Hearts.
They've stuck with this even in the manual, which was surprising for me. Besides this error, I think this was a far better translation job, because it didn't rely heavily on another, more recognizable IP, but it is still a Square game, so some things are present
in both games. That doesn't mean it's perfect though and some terms are rather questionable, like this one:
At first glance it may not look bad, but it is. The word "zavést" doesn't really mean to load something, no. It basically means to introduce / to lead somewhere, so maybe in caveman, more archaic terms it may work, as it "leads" the save file into your game, but I believe the word "načíst" was already in the know 25 years ago. Moving on:
This sentence really got me, it says that Wakka plans to retire from the sport after the next planned game, but they've used a local saying, roughly translating it to "hang it up", but I would really like to imagine Wakka hanging his ball on a hook of sorts without a thread.
As I said earlier, there isn't really much that went wrong, so it may be nitpicky in some cases. Being on the topic of blitzball:
(original: Blitzball is an underwater sport popular among all peoples of Spira)
There isn't really nothing wrong with this, although it sounds robotic or something a child would write as their first essay. If I had to translate it back to english, it would sound like this: Blitzball is played underwater. This sport is favored by the whole nation of Spira.
I think you can see the point I'm making with this in particular, I'm only guesssing that since it was on the tail end of the manual, they just rushed through to get it done quicker.
This one was just funny, because the word for switching in this case was more akin to like channel switching on a TV. The sentence is technically still correct even when with that word, just thought it was good to point out.
So, that's it! I told you there wasn't that much to go through unlike last time, but was still surprised that some "inconsistencies" were found after all.
Next time, we're gonna look at a game that I got ahold of the local release purely by accident: Parappa the Rapper 2! But I'll tell you right now, it's not gonna be soon, since I have many unfinished games that I would really like to finally complete before I tackle this, but I will atleast upload the scans soon, promise.