Nich Maragos should be a familiar name to just about anybody involved in the field of “videogame journalism.” His work was first featured on the fondly-remembered Gaming Intelligence Agency. After it closed in 2002, he went on to write for various outlets, including Gamasutra and Ziff Davis’ 1UP.com.

A few months ago, Atlus offered Nich a job as a localization editor. He jumped at the chance to work in the game industry rather than just write about it. We are eagerly anticipating the fruits of his labor in Shin Megami Tensai: Devil Summoner (PS2) and Yggdra Union (GBA), both hitting American soil in October.

Atlus’ Official Website
Atlus Portable 2006 Previews
Skellington Parade – Nich’s personal blog

Join us now as we ask him a few questions about his localization work for Atlus and some of his past experiences in game journalism.

4cr: Many people will recognize your name from the work you did for the Gaming Intelligence Agency. What have you been doing since then?

Nich: After the GIA ended in ‘02, I finished out my last year or so of college before turning to professional gaming journalism with a founding position at the fledgling 1UP.com. I was originally the PlayStation 2 editor there, before there was an organizational change and I became reviews editor. I had fun there, but unfortunately there was a company-wide wave of layoffs in 2004 — the first of two that year — and I got the axe. After that, I led the glamorous freelance journalism life in San Francisco, chiefly doing news for Gamasutra.com and features for 1UP.com, before finally finding full-time work again at Atlus in March of this year.

Outside of my professional life, I was into taiko drumming as a hobby for a little over a year, and I’ve tried to get a comic book project or two off the ground, but no luck yet finding a publisher.

I understand that you got into a bit of a spat with the makers of The Guy Game. Want to elaborate on that story?

I actually got into a spat over that not just with them, but with the site’s editor-in-chief; I was reviews editor at 1UP at the time and argued that the Guy Game didn’t deserve the coverage it was getting, much less a review, because I considered it interactive porn and not a game. I lost that battle, and vented a little steam over it in my 1UP blog (which had just launched on the site, if I remember right) where I shared a few choice opinions on the game.

It was that post, and not a review — I never reviewed it, because the layoffs weren’t more than a week or two after that — that got quoted in Topheavy Games’ “Dim Bulb of the Week.” This was before the reviews came out, which mostly gave the game what it deserved — apart from Jeff Gerstmann’s 7.5 — so I was the only journalist really trashing the game, which gave me the honor of being the inaugural entry in the series.

It turned out to be the only entry, too, what with that exploiting a minor lawsuit they got hit with after it came out. I definitely took some satisfaction from that. Incidentally, had I stayed on at 1UP, my plan was to see if I could get one of the Suicide Girls to handle the review. Ahh, what could have been…

What’s the job of localization editor like? What do you do on the average day?

On an average day, I’ll handle one or more files relating to various parts of the game. Even if you play lots of RPGs, it’s easy to underestimate how much text there is in each and every title. Not just dialogue but also item names, location names, menu selections, descriptors, and generally every single piece of text you see onscreen, large or small, has to be translated and edited.

I solely handle the “editing” part; I minored in Japanese in college, but that was a while ago, and I’ve lost most of the meager reading skills I once had. So when I’m not directly editing a file, I’m consulting with the translators and project lead to better understand the context of anything I don’t quite understand. It’s important to know what’s happening onscreen during the lines you’re editing, so they don’t end up seeming inappropriate or bizarre.

What projects have you been part of at Atlus?

I’ve only been here about four months at this point, so not that many. My first big assignment was Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army, which was a real dream come true for me. As anyone who read my GIA stuff knows, I’m a huge Shin Megami Tensei fan, and getting to work on one of the series’ high-profile entries right out of the gate was almost too good to be true. I split duties on that one with Tomm Hulett, the man responsible for the Digital Devil Saga games; as the senior editor, he handled all the storyline dialogue and main characters, while I did pretty much everything else. I personally think I got the better end of the deal, because while Devil Summoner’s storyline is interesting, it also has tons of funky NPCs with constantly-changing dialogue and personal stories you can follow through the game, all of which I got to edit.

Once that was taken care of, I moved on to Yggdra Union, Sting’s strategy-RPG follow-up to Riviera. What with schedules and deadlines being tight around here as we prepare our holiday lineup, I ended up as the only editor on the project, so almost all the text you see in Yggdra will be mine. GBA titles are always a challenge because of the character limits, but Yggdra was an extra challenge on top of that because its stylish look is achieved by having half the text in the game as graphics rather than easily editable text. I’m still kinda anxious to see how the final English product will look.

Between those two, I pitched in on a scenario file or two for Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation 2, but I contributed so little to that game’s staggering amount of plot that you shouldn’t buy it looking to see my work. You should buy it to support the first Super Robot Taisen games coming to the US after 15 years, of course.

How close to the original Japanese script do you stay? Do you provide a direct translation or do you change a few things to appeal to a Western audience?

It really depends on what you mean by “close to the original Japanese script.” I don’t like to change meaning; so far I’ve only once changed the substance of what a character said, which I’ll explain in a minute. As I explained before, I don’t provide *any* sort of translation, but when I do get the direct or raw translation from our team of native Japanese speakers, I change a lot. As I see it, my job is to remain faithful to the spirit of the game, not the letter, and the most important thing is to make sure everyone in the game sounds natural.

The simple fact that Japanese grammar, word order, and phrasing is very different from English means you have to edit a lot to avoid sounding stilted. Then, too, Japanese has words that we don’t, and we have words that they don’t, so sometimes you have to make a best approximation rather than avoid a long, unwieldy phrase. I wouldn’t say that I change things “to appeal to a Western audience” because I don’t go around changing “sake” to “beer” in Devil Summoner or that kind of nonsense.

That said, there was the one time I mentioned that I’ve really changed something. In Yggdra Union, during one of the tutorials, a major party member had a single line that was so far out of character that I thought it might have been damaging, causing the player to see that character in a different light from then on — and it was in an optional tutorial, so it wasn’t an intentional part of the storyline or anything. I softened that so it was truer to the character, but that’s all. I love the games I work on, and any change I make, large or small, is to serve the game and not me.

What kind of personal touches do you bring to the localization of each game?

Again, I suppose it depends on what you mean by that. I’m not the type to throw lots of pop culture references and jokes into a game, though I’m not above doing it once in a while, so I don’t make things “mine” that way. But every writer has his or her own personal tics and quirks, and those inevitably find their way into the games I work on, because that’s just the way I write. Turns of phrase that are uniquely Southern, for instance, might crop up because I was born and raised in Louisiana, and as far as I know everyone will understand them. I’m also pretty well-read with a large vocabulary, so I enjoy using esoteric words and terms where applicable.

Some other editors disagree with that stance, and I can definitely see where they’re coming from. However, I fondly remember exploring the cultural references of RPGs from when I was younger. Being a Final Fantasy fan, I had an interest in Orff and Wagner as a result of composer Nobuo Uematsu, and I actually read the Epic of Gilgamesh after playing the infamous fan translation of FFV. Maybe I was just a weird kid, but I like to think someone out there playing these games enjoys looking this stuff up as much as I used to.

Do you get to choose which games you work on?

I wish! No, even the most senior editors don’t get to pick. We’re assigned by the higher-ups, which is probably the best way to handle it, or else everyone would be fighting over the highest-profile games.

These days, it seems that a higher percentage of games eventually make their way to American shores. What are some of the factors that go into deciding which games get localized and which get cut?

We consider a lot of games, you’d probably be surprised how many, and we look for specific but hard-to-define things. Quality foremost, but even a smaller company like us does have to consider the Western audience for games so we don’t lose our shirts on a project that would never sell.

What kinds of difficulties do you encounter during localization?

Character limits are probably the only real problem. I have room to phrase dialogue however I want on console games most of the time, but even there, item and location names can be difficult. A four-kanji phrase in Japanese can mushroom into 20 letters in the English translation. And of course on handhelds, even the dialogue is cramped for space.

What advice do you have for people who want to break into the gaming industry by getting a job in localization?

I was dreading this question, because I do have an answer, but it’s not one most people will want to hear. Nobody I know “broke in” to the gaming industry. You won’t get a job as an editor, or as a designer, or as a journalist, overnight. Tomm, for example, spent years as an Atlus tester and contract employee before he moved up to his current status. I was hired right off at Atlus, but that’s not their usual way of doing things, and I had already proven myself with years in the trenches of gaming fansites and professional journalism.

If you want to work in games and you don’t now, either become a tester or start making mods for Neverwinter Nights or your FPS of choice. If you want to be a journalist, start a fansite. The way to get paid to do something, in my experience, is to be paid little to nothing to do exactly that for a long time first. If you really love the work, then you’d do it anyway; the industry has no room for people who wouldn’t literally give everything they have to be an editor, or designer, or journalist, or artist, or any position you could name. I probably put $1000 of my own personal money into the GIA over the years, and that’s a fraction of what founding editor Andrew Vestal did. It’s not a coincidence that we both have very good jobs now.

Do you have any horror stories that you’d like to share with us about the localization process?

There was that time I wanted to write something a certain way, and Tomm said no, and I was mad for minutes on end. No, the day-to-day stuff doesn’t have a lot of horror stories — and the ones that do exist, I couldn’t tell you about because the games aren’t out yet. Sorry!

So, what have you been playing in your free time lately?

Anything I want, which is pleasant after so long having games assigned to me. I’m about halfway through Indigo Prophecy right now, which I picked up for cheap after reading an interesting postmortem of it in Game Developer. I’m finally getting around to playing MGS3 Subsistence, which got lost in the shuffle of my move to the OC earlier this year, and loving it. Apart from that, though, I really haven’t been gaming as much as I used to. I read more now.

Do you still plan to do a bit of journalism on the side?

A curious side effect of leaving game journalism is realizing that now that I’m outside of the industry, I have no desire to read traditional game journalism. As much as I sneered at “New Games Journalism” when I was a freelancer, I recently came to the conclusion that it’s the only kind I’m now interested in. Reviews and previews don’t interest me because I know what’s coming out and I know what I plan to buy already, and the rest is just so much hype. So I’m more interested in well-done features like the kind Jeremy Parish manages at 1UP, and personal/insightful stuff like The Escapist or Gamer’s Quarter. If I do any more journalism, and I have been thinking about it, it would be something unpaid for one of those two.

Finally, I just have to ask… Pirates or ninjas?

Pirates, because they have all the fun. When was the last time you saw a ninja smile?

Thanks again for taking the time to talk to us. I look forward to seeing more of your work with Atlus and I wish you the best of luck in the future.

Shin Megami Tensai: Devil Summoner will be released in America for the PS2 on October 10th and Yggdra Union will make its debut on GBA this October 24th. Both are shaping up to be excellent games and it will be exciting to see what Nich can bring to these two titles.