Context: Working Designs was a studio that localized several Japanese games for western markets in the 1990s. Besides translation, they would often increase the difficulty of the games they translated
From my western perspective, home video game systems like the NES were mostly viewed as expensive kids toys in the 80s and early 90s. Not that adults didn’t play them, but that was not the norm so to speak like it is today.
Most of the game libraries of these systems were very clearly made to appeal to kids, and yet it was very common for them to be much harder than they had any business being considering that target audience. For every “hard but fair” game I played, it seemed like there were 5 others that were just hard for the sake of being hard with terrible controls and cheap gimmicks to make it more difficult.
From what I recall, some developers/publishers were making games intentionally very hard as a hedge against the rental industry, and looking back, that seems to track.
As for the original Super Mario Bros 2, which IIRC was known as The Lost Levels when released here – By the time it came out, it seemed lame and dated to us kids. I couldn’t even tell you if it was hard because it was boring (by kid standards). It looked just like the old, tired “original” Super Mario Bros and right from the start it didn’t appear to offer anything new, improved, or different like the Super Mario 2 & 3 games as well as Super Mario World gave us.
TIL what The Lost Levels was. Young me assumed they just had some extra storage space on the Mario Allstars cartridge and needed to fill it with something so just stuck any old shit in.
Might go back and play it and maybe appreciate it this time.
It’s my understanding that the decision to not localize SMB2 for the West was made at Nintendo of America. SMB2 isn’t merely hard, it’s unfair. They put invisible hazards in the way, warp pipes now take you back instead of forward, some of the mushrooms are poisonous now. SMB1 is beginner and child friendly, SMB2 is for serious enthusiasts. The West found a taste for that, but it kinda took Twitch streaming to explain to gamers what they’re in for. Nintendo wouldn’t have gotten any points for tricking hundreds of thousands of parents into handing a Kaizo ROMhack to all the little Joshuas and Tiffanys of 1986. So they Doki Doki Panicked.
I think the real insult came not from Nintendo but from Squaresoft. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for the SNES was marketed as a simplified, “Entry-level” JRPG, made specifically for Americans, written in English from the start and not translated from Japanese. Simplified combat system, no random encounters, added action elements. Because Americans might not “get it.” It’s not like Japan got the idea for RPGs from imported copies of Ultima and Wizardry, which are themselves based on DnD. Being more charitable, you could see the angle they were coming from: the Japanese do virtually all of their gaming on console, while Americans tend to play more action-oriented games on console and more cerebral games on desktop computers, so they were trying to make an RPG for the American console gamer. Which still failed miserably. After all, Final Fantasy 1 on NES sold well here. So. I don’t know, maybe try not having bad ideas?
Also have to take into account that the early 8-bit systems from Japan were often marketed towards children in the US. They would ramp up the difficulty of games - which were usually too expensive for kids to purchase on their own - to bring more longevity and perceived value. Games were viewed as expensive at a time where “Kill your television” was a common mantra, when parents wanted their kids playing outside as much as possible, and the consequences of Reagonomics was coming into full effect.
So Nintendo played it safe for a very long time (even more than they do now) and still got a lot of pushback and flack from conservative parents.
I actually like Mystic Quest and have played through it several times since picking it up a Toys R Us with Christmas cash as a kid. Yeah, it’s simplified a bit but the systems work, there’s some interesting ways the devs integrated weapons in and out of battle, and the soundtrack is killer.
I know you weren’t shitting on the game, I just like to talk about it. :)
They didnt make games harder. This is what they were known for:
Working Designs became known for its incorporating quirky, distinctively American humor in its translations. President Victor Ireland maintained that the company has always adhered as closely to the original Japanese text as it could while making it understandable to U.S. audiences, and said the addition of American-style humor was necessary to replace Japanese jokes which most Americans would not be able to understand
They definitely made games more difficult as well
In Lunar, for example, the EXP payout was reduced by 15% compared to the japanese original, the silver output was reduced by 11% and the infamous feature that boss enemies leveled with the main character was also made harder.
https://www.rpg-o-mania.com/coverage_companies_workingdesigns.php#5
And lets not forget adding a game over trigger during the finale that just wasn’t there originally. Because screw you, the player, I guess.
How about this gem from their localization of Vay:
In the US version, Sirufa’s dialogue has been rewritten. Now, her wind powers are due to a bet she lost with an unexplained “Thaldar”, as a result of which she “received the curse of eternal seimic flatulence.” This is then used to create a mechanic whereby, if Sirufa’s teleportation is used without having all party members equipped with “Filtration Masks”, the unequipped members will be “overcome by the noxious fumes” and remove the rest of the party’s masks before dying, causing an instant game over.
Text from TCRF.
Between that and the “gold vortex”, looks like they thought “just” translating was boring (no matter how much of a messy process it really was back then)… So they just thought they’d mess with the game as a challenge and for the hell of it.
Oh for real? I’ve played Lunar and didnt even know it was made harder. I mean it was hard, but I thought it was just like that.
I kinda loved Working Designs’ sometimes hammy script for the PSX Lunar games.
“Ghaleon, no…”
“Oh no, ha ha ha… Ghaleon YES!”
Man, I would be insulted, too. They wrote that game in assembly, and that language was actually created in the US.
What has that to do with difficulty in video games?
