GAF - Interview with Victor Ireland

Interview with Victor Ireland

We'd like to welcome the Dr. of Gaming Love, Victor Ireland(VI), the head of popular video game translation company, Working Designs (WD). Its a great honor to have him as our first interviewee here at GAF. On to the Q&A!

GAF: Clearly, the only question we can ask is how do you think Arc will do on the Xbox and just how many fans do you expect to lose? :P

VI: Surprisingly, that April Fools joke really caught people! We made it a really gentle, broad joke this year, and some people still fell for it! We were pretty amazed. The letters we received about it are up on our website.

GAF: All joking aside, Lunar was the last big project you did, released at PlayStation's prime. Arc will be released at what the Sphinx might call PlayStation's "three-legged" phase. Even though Arc will be playable on PS2, do you think this will affect sales?

VI: It will definitely sell less than it would have two years ago, but preorders already put it around Alundra's sales (our #3 seller). I'm pretty sure it will be the new #3 for us, and if word of mouth on the Collection is as strong as I expect it to be, it might overtake LUNAR 2 for the #2 sales spot. Not too shabby, considering where we are in the PS1's lifespan. Of course, full compatibility with the PS2's fast load option helps, too. On a PS2, the loads are, like, one second!

GAF: In the Lunar games as well as others, you've taken a rather whimsical approach to translating NPC dialogue--inserting pop culture references left and right, and generally filling it to the brim with zaniness. There is certainly some of that in the Arc games, but it's been toned down extremely. Why is that?

VI: People never get our MO, really. The translations are done in accordance with the general tone of the game. Most of the games we do are fairly light in tone, and thus, have a fair amount of humor. However, "darker" games like Alundra and Arc I and II have far less than average to keep the tone consistent. Yes, there's humor in even the darker games, but there's far less than an "average" WD RPG.

In the beginning, of course, the amount and placement of humor was more inconsistent. I'm positive that we've gotten better at maintaining the overall tone in a game as time has marched on. We've listened to the fans as we've gone along and I think we're at almost the perfect balance now.

GAF: There are a lot of unique things about this game including the battle system, the extra games, and of course the many extras the WD has added. What attracted you to this game in particular?

VI: Pretty much what you just identified. Well, that and the story. I think Arc Collection has perhaps the most amazing story of any console RPG. It's very, very satisfying, especially Arc II. The fact that they're interrelated is a huge bonus, and not very common in RPGs these days.

GAF: WD is a small company, and yet translating a huge project like Arc. To top it off, you've decided to release enormous strategy guides for them as well. What's been included in these to make them take so much space on our shelves?

VI: We didn't have much of a choice with regard to the strategy guides. To do the games any kind of justice, they had to be big...really big. In fact, I think that the Volume I, which covers Arc I and II, is the largest strategy guide ever released at 570 pages. Add to that the 300 pages that it looks like Volume II will end up with and you have close to 900 pages of guide/artbook for Arc Collection. There's a LOT of gameplay in the box.

Each strategy guide has the walkthrough and special checkpoints like Animechecks that detail the cutscene action, Storychecks that detail story progression points, a new "Secretcheck" that shows hidden or cool secret things you can do with the game, Jobchecks that detail jobs in Arc II and III, and finally new "oops!checks" that detail goofs in the Japanese or US released games that weren't or couldn't be fixed. It's extremely comprehensive.

GAF: Have you seen anything on the upcoming Arc the Lad IV or Arc the Lad Online? Is WD interested in bringing either of these titles to the states? What are your impressions of them, if you have witnessed them in action?

VI: We'll have to wait and see what happens with them. The producer of I-III isn't involved, so I'm not sure how they'll turn out. Of course, if Arc Collection sells well, we'd like to continue with Arc IV, but Arc Online is probably out of the question since we don't have the resources to manage something like that at this time.

GAF: In the past, WD has brought a few shooters of note to the US. Are there any in the works right now, possibly Ikaruga?

VI: Shooters have all been money losers, regardless of publisher, for about the last 5 years. The genre is dying, and I don't see it coming back. I would love to see Ikaruga here, but if someone else will take the hit for me, great. I just want to see great games like that seen here. Of course, if no one will do it, we'll definitely make sure it happens.

That said, I just hope people aren't disappointed when they play it. It's definitely much simpler than Radiant Silvergun. Kind of a very simple cross between that and Silhouette Mirage.

GAF: You guys hyped Silpheed: The Lost Planet as the second coming of Radiant Silvergun before its release but it ended up being a major disappointment. How do you feel about the game now and would you still publish it here knowing how it ended up and the reaction it received?

VI: I don't think we ever compared it to Radiant Silvergun. As I said before, I think even Ikaruga will fail on that count. The only regret I have with Silpheed is that it took almost 5 months for the Japanese side to fix a fairly simple technical problem with the game that prevented it from being published. The game was done, save for the one problem in October. We didn't get final discs until late March. THAT sucked.

Other than that, Silpheed is a great shooter. It's simple, but it's Silpheed! That's what Silpheed always was. Our version is definitely better than the one released in Japan. Far less slowdown.

GAF: Many fans obviously still feel scorned by WD from the Saturn era. There were plenty of quality titles that could've been released here under your label, but because of disagreements with Sega, you choose not to. I'm not going to criticize your decisions, because I'm sure there are a lot of circumstances that everyone is unaware of. I am, however, curious as to whether or not you ever looked into bringing games like Grandia, Dragon Force II, the Shining Force games, Radiant Silvergun, or any other countless titles even after your dispute with the company.

VI: Once it was clear Bernie and Co. were actively trying to kill the Saturn, we stopped ALL licensing for it. We actually had a shooter megapack planned with 4 Japanese shooters in it that we canceled the day before E3 because of what we discovered the real plan was at SEGA.

GAF: What are your impressions of Lunar: Legend? Do you think it's worth WD's time to localize yet another remade version of the same game? Have you talked with anyone at Game Arts about such a possibility?

VI: We're not doing it. This will be the 6th or 7th version of LUNAR 1 (in Japan), and I feel that everyone that should see it has. We're much more excited about genuinely new games that we're doing at the moment.

If someone else wants to localize LUNAR Legend, great. I think it will be very interesting to see what another company would do with the translation, don't you?

GAF: Lastly, any chance you could let us know about any of your mystery games? If not, when are you planning on announcing them?

VI: We initially planned on announcing the first one back in January, but then Arc III met with two long delays. Now that we're so close to E3, we'll probably just wait and announce most or all of the games we have underway at E3. It'll be a great show!

Again, we thank Victor Ireland for taking the time to answer our questions. As he has stated many times, Legend will not be translated by him, but we at GAF agree that it will be interesting to see who does. And yet again, Vic's comments reassure us that Arc the Lad is a must buy for those of you who have a PS or PS2. We'll have more information on those mystery games when its available.

Interview with Victor Ireland

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