How to Localise your Game for Japan
Japan is the world’s third-largest market for video games after the US and China. Japanese gamers spend the most money, the per-user average being at around $371 per annum. Such statistics — along with the strong mobile gaming market in Japan — make the nation a perfect target market for the developers of video games. Localization offers the best deal to involve the avid gamers from Japan.
Cultural and Ethnic Factors
Translation and localization are different. Translation is about converting the text from one language to another and localization adapts the whole user interface to suit the local audience. Thereby taking both cultural as well as linguistic complexities into account when creating a video game.
Keeping this in mind, there are a number of topics that are censored and a taboo in Japan.
· Religion — Shintoism and Buddhism are the two main religions in Japan, but the general population is fairly secular. Games that depict or encourage specific religions are usually avoided.
· Violence — Murder, torture, gore, and other graphic portrayals are censored in Japan. Neither are players advised to step into the shoes of a murderer nor are children and innocent people projected as victims of violence.
· Drugs — Drugs in Japan are particularly a taboo and have stringent sanctions enforced on them, including substances that are legal in other countries (eg cannabis). Hence, video game content which represents or promotes drug use should be discouraged or excluded.
Japanese, the language, is continuously changing and the Japanese Ministry of Education updates the official spellings for words every year using all three Japanese writing systems (kanji, hiragana, and katakana). Therefore, having a native Japanese team based in Japan should be your first step to handle the translation, thereby assisting the localization.
Most popular game genres in Japan
The #1 game genre in Japan is RPG. Simulation gamers are heavy spenders; games for simulation rank high in top-grossing, but relatively low in top open.
A smartphone is the main medium of games, with iOS as the Japanese gamers’ first choice of platform. The main reason is that when commuting, consumers have plenty of time to kill, and they take this opportunity to play their favourite games. Monster Hunter from Capcom had great success in Japan and pushed forward the market for portable devices.
The most downloadable game genres in Japan on mobile devices were battle royale (party battlers), hypercasual, puzzle, and action games. Battle royale amounted for the highest money generating genre in terms of game revenue followed by match-3, MMO strategy, and action games.
How to Localize Your Game to Japan
· The best course of action is to consider the position of Japan as early as possible in the development process of video games. This will help you avoid some of the complications of the taboos and text windows mentioned in the previous section. Mere translation of games won’t be sufficient, they need to be localised. Cultural specifications and norms need to be addressed, and developers need to plan the app with local time, name format, date formats and versatile text segments for internationalization from the outset.
· The text that appears in the game should be designed with translations and localization kept in mind, such as on the user interface or subtitles. For example, a list of all unique items appearing in the game should be primed for the localization team and should mention all terms and synonyms used to define each item (e.g. gun = handgun, pistol) as well as similar terms referring to separate items to avoid confusion.
· Japanese is a language of extreme regulation. It has different levels of politeness depending on the interlocutors’ Hierarchical status, their relationships, social status, etc. The so-called “neutral” Japanese may sound like a sterile, polite language. On the contrary, English source language tends to be fairly informal, making a direct translation impossible for the Japanese market- making the text too abrupt. In Japanese, an imperative form is too heavy and may give the wrong impression.
· Localized variants should also adhere to strict linguistic quality assurance ( QA) especially for the Japanese market where precision and attention to detail are of the utmost importance. A fluent Japanese-speaking team preferably based in Japan would be required to do the QA. It will be easier for native speakers to recognize distinct linguistic incoherence.
· One should make sure that the localization team plays the video game from start to finish at the beginning of the localization process. This acquaints the team with the tone of the video game, how text works, and any specific concerns which surround the localization process. It is important to recognize the full scope and tone of a project early on because it can have a huge effect on the localization strategy and its success.
· Whenever a character speaks in slang or a specific accent in the game it would be appropriate to use a correlating local Japanese lingo or accent when doing the Japanese voice-over for that character. For example, the Kansai dialect — spoken in the area southwest of Tokyo — is a popular go-to replacement for characters with a regional accent like a New York or an English-language Southern accent.
Coming to the Conclusion
It is important to do some research about the Japanese market before dwelling into the localization process. Role-playing games are the most common form of games in Japan, with many gamers playing on their smartphone or tablet. Several games made available via Google Play and the Apple App Store are becoming popular in Japan.
It’s up to you how you want to carry out localisation for your video game in the Japanese market; however, if you bear in mind the above guidelines and follow the best practices, you’ll be on your way to successfully localizing your video game for a Japanese audience.
- Prajal Narain
Team Loc-N-Apps
