why do american covers for games usually suck compared to the Japanese (and some PAL)

[Elin]

I was talking about game titles like Project Zero/Fatal Frame.
And Jack Spicer mentioned Biohazard.

I don't understand Japanese at all, but I always thought games like this had their titles changed for no reason I can fathom

I always thought Biohazard to Resident Evil was quite a good one myself. Resident Evil might be a little silly sounding, but it's also rather unique, and easily one of the most memorable videogame titles out there for me. In contrast, Biohazard, while cool to a Japanese person, just sounds fairly bland and ordinary to me as a native English speaker. I don't really think a game with a title like that would catch my eye at all, so I can see why they changed it, even if I'm not generally a fan of name changes either. Different strokes for different folks, I guess~

As for Fatal Frame, it's a tricky one. I agree it's a crap title, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how they translated the Japanese title, they would have been losing some meaning. In Japanese, the series is called Zero. But the title is intentionally written using a single kanji with that meaning instead of the much more common transliteration of the English word into katakana script or use of the number. Why? Well... because of this, basically:

rei2.jpg

Screenshot'd a text document in case you don't have Japanese text support. As you can see, the kanji in the title looks very similar to the one for ghost, and unless you told a Japanese speaker that the title was read "Zero", they'd probably even pronounce it the same. Which is fitting being that... er... it's a game about ghosts. :'D In short, the Japanese title was chosen largely based on a pun that doesn't translate unless you have a knowledge of kanji characters. And in light of that, I think they figured leaving it as it was was rather meaningless. Personally I still would have just gone with Zero, or even Project Zero as it's called in PAL territories, as I think both titles are kinda cool in and of themselves. But the name change in that particular case was far from just an arbitrary choice.

I don't know. I used to be really down on English game translations too. Then I started learning Japanese and doing some translation myself. And the more I did and the more I learned, the more I came to sympathise with professional translators and understand the logic behind some of their seemingly meaningless decisions. Don't get me wrong, there are some terrible localisations out there, but I think more often than not, professional game localisation houses are far, far better than many people give them credit for. It's just that a lot of the time, people don't really understand the reasons behind the changes that they're getting up in arms over.

So I'll go ahead and point out to Saturn games instead. All of them. They all have artistic JP covers, but US ones are just generic box art.

A particularly egregious example being Panzer Dragoon. From beautiful hand drawn artwork to HAI GAIZ CHECK OUT MY 3D GRAFIX.