DsiderThe fucking kids who've never seen something like this before. THAT'S NOTHING NEW. There have ALWAYS been pokemon that look feminine but can actually come in either gender, or as the article points out in Hitmonchan's case, ONLY in male for whatever reason. I didn't see any of this outcry over Braixen last gen, and it couldn't look like more of a fox girl if it tried.
Poor Popplio can’t catch a break. First people hated Sun and Moon’s water starter because it was considered ugly. Yesterday, Game Freak revealed Popplio’s evolution, Brionne, leading some fans to feel like they have even more reason to dislike the evolution line.
Earlier today, one of the largest No Man’s Sky community hubs temporarily shut down, causing a small communal panic before the subreddit was reopened under new moderation. Though brief, this incident was the latest episode in an ongoing saga of fan drama surrounding the title.
DsiderYeah okay whatever you say guy. I'll believe it once it's actually out.
Beyond Good & Evil 2 was first announced in May 2008. That was over eight years ago. Now, today, in October 2016, series creator Michel Ancel says the game is “in pre-production”. OK.
Today on Highlight Reel we have helpful Rainbow 6 Siege players, WW1 Dukes of Hazzard, giant Fallout babies and much more!
DsiderThis is all news to me, whoa
After the success of Mega Man 2 in 1988, Akira Kitamura, creator of the character and director of the first two games in the series, left Capcom. This is the story of the struggles the team he left behind had in carrying on without him.
Welcome to the Kingdom of Galekin, one of the most impressive Minecraft creations I’ve seen in a long time.
Persona 5 won’t be out in South Korea until next year, but the game has already caused some controversy there online.
DsiderHERE COMES THE C&D
Super Mario 64: Last Impact is the result of 4,000 hours of work by Kaze Emanuar, and it looks incredible.
Netherland authorities are taking Niantic Labs to court over an influx of people swarming and searching the protected beaches of Kijkduin for Pokémon.
Read Pokémon GO Developers Taken To Court By Netherland Authorities Over Players Crowding Protected Areas on Siliconera!
Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire is newly released Steam game that fuses fighting games and visual novels. It’s a game about choice, something that even extends to its pricing model.
Streamer Vinesauce was surfing a parade of trucks in the new physics platformer Clustertruck when, on screen, these words appeared: “Hello Vinesauce. We are in control now.”
DsiderHoly shit, I REMEMBER these pieces
Back in the mid to late-90’s, Naomi Chiba expressed her die-hard Nintendo fan love in the pages of Nintendo Power magazine. And many young Nintendo fans, myself included, looked forward to seeing her latest drawings.
DsiderUnfortunately you have to go through Facebook to see the others (which isn't happening), but the comments show Robin and Brook at least.
At 6:39 am EDT today, a spacecraft weighing over 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) with the wingspan of a Boeing 747 crashed gently into a comet’s surface, following 13 hours of free-fall. These, my friends, are the last, fleeting glimpses of Comet 67P that Rosetta managed to capture before its instruments went dead.
DsiderI can't wait to see this twitch integration in action. Surely your play experience will be enhanced by the timely outburst of "PPMD" or "CHITOGE" on the screen.
Amazon finally showed their hand last night during TwitchCon, announcing a trio of new games that their studios have been developing over the past few years. A couple of them sound pretty damn cool.
Oh hey, it’s the Super Mario Kart development team in 1992. Lookin’ sharp, Mr. Very Young Tie Clip-Wearing Shigeru Miyamoto. Via Ninty Memories.
Have you ever tried to get something that you shouldn’t through US Customs? Frankly, I don’t know how people summon the nerve. Whether it’s illegal drugs, exotic animal meat, or counterfeit purses, people will try to smuggle just about anything. And everyone seems to have their own favorite hiding places. But if any of your favorites are on the list below, you might want to rethink your life choices.
Since it came out 20 years ago, Super Mario 64 has been cracked open, turned inside-out, and put back together in all sorts of weird configurations, but people keep figuring out new ways to warp its candy colored reality. The latest is being billed as the biggest speedrun breakthrough since 2007.
Year of the Dog is a slice-of-life game about owning a Shiba Inu in San Francisco, and it looks wonderful.
A reader’s girlfriend works at Disneyland, and sends word that it looks like management is having some trouble with staff playing Pokémon Go on the sly.
America is getting the Mini-NES
. Japan, naturally, will be getting a Mini-Famicom to match.
DsiderHAHAHAHAHAHA
The underperforming hero shooter Battleborn will go free-to-play within the couple of months, a person familiar with plans for the game told Kotaku. Word is the announcement will come by mid-November, but that could change. (We hear the move has already been delayed a couple of times.)
DsiderThe hero we deserve.
Of all the weird and wonderful characters in Nintendo’s pantheon of talking animals/plumbers/fungi, I think I like Animal Crossing’s Resetti the best. Even if he is a big ol’ meanie.
DsiderLadies and gentlemen, Poland.
Zelda dungeons are, as a general rule, extraordinarily well-designed. Everyone knows that. What you might not know is just why they’re so well-designed.
DsiderYou might be wondering why in the hell I would share this. Well, I stumbled upon it from that article with the beautiful Euphonium pictures and thought it actually made some good points, and was an interesting look at translation/localization practices. Am I going to watch the dub? Nope. But I respect their efforts.
Last week, Crunchyroll added Aniplex of America’s English dub of Your Lie in April to its streaming catalog. You can watch the dub in North America, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. If you live in any of those regions and haven’t seen Your Lie in April yet, what are you waiting for? You now have an extra reason to watch this excellent show.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this anime, the story follows Kousei Arima, a former child prodigy who lost his ability to play the piano when his mother died. But after he encounters the beautiful and eccentric Kaori one day, his life begins to change. Over the course of twenty-two episodes, Your Lie in April tells a touching story about dealing with grief and the power of music.
Arguably, what makes Your Lie in April so impressive is not its script, however. The anime is at its most powerful when it lets its music and visuals do the talking. I think that Patrick Seitz, the director and writer of the English dub, must have realized that too, because the English dub audio never sounds intrusive. There’s an air of natural ease about the voice acting, as if nobody is pushing their voices too hard. I think that understatement was the best approach Seitz could have taken with a Japanese script that was, in my opinion, somewhat ungraceful at times.
There are, admittedly, some missteps. Sometimes, the English actors speak too quickly, or their lines sound a bit muffled compared to the crisp Japanese audio. But overall the dub is a fantastic effort. After watching the subbed and dubbed versions of the first episode carefully, I can confidently state that the dub script is a remarkably smooth and accurate adaptation of the Japanese. There are the usual tweaks in the dub script to make the lines easier for the actors to read aloud, but few of these changes involved radical changes to the Japanese script. For example, consider this conversation from 11:39—11:46:
In the dub, the conversation goes like this:
Tsubaki: “Tomorrow’s Saturday, so I’m guessing you’re free, yeah?” (公生、明日の土曜日ヒマでしょ？)
Kousei: “You can’t just assume that.” (決めつけるなよ。)
Tsubaki: “Tell me about your big plans.” (じゃあ、予定あるの？)
The biggest difference here is Tsubaki’s final “Tell me about your big plans,” which sounds drier and more sardonic than, “Oh, so you have plans, then?” But not only does the joke still land, the exchange arguably flows more smoothly in the dub.
For example, Tsubaki’s “Tomorrow’s Saturday, so I’m guessing you’re free, yeah?” feels like a more presumptive thing to say compared to her line in the sub. Putting “right?” at the end of the sentence makes her sound uncertain; that’s not in the Japanese line at all. So you could also argue that the intent of this conversation is conveyed more accurately in the dub; at the very least, the comedic timing certainly comes off better.
There’s another occasion at 11:22—11:23 where the dub is closer to the Japanese dialogue than the subtitles are. In the Japanese, Tsubaki is saying that it's a Goose House song, which is true—they’re listening to the anime’s opening theme. The dub also says the same thing. But the subtitle says it’s a song by “The Millions.” It turns out that in the manga, Tsubaki also says “The Millions,” which makes me wonder if the subtitles in this case were based off an earlier version of the script. It’s not a major inaccuracy or anything, but it’s an interesting thing to note.
On other occasions, the dub translation was subtly differently from the Japanese original. I get the feeling that the dub script was different because the voice actors’ interpretations of the characters were also different. Here’s an example from 8:18—8:25:
The context of this scene is that Kousei and Tsubaki are walking home together when Tsubaki tells him that his outlook on life is too bleak. He’s fourteen years old; he ought to have some sparkle in his eyes. Kousei responds by telling Tsubaki that her eyes sparkle.
The subtitles here are a fairly literal translation of the Japanese: 椿の目には、きっと風景がカラフルに見えているんだろうな。僕とは違う。
Now compare that to what he says in the dub: “For Tsubaki, I bet the world looks pretty colorful. How could it not? Must be nice.”
The comparison between Kousei and Tsubaki is much less direct in the dub. The indirectness of the script also matches the spoken delivery of the line. Max Mittelman sounds more nonchalant than Natsuki Hanae does. Hanae’s lines sound more like a self-conscious soliloquy, while Mittelman merely sounds as if he’s musing.
Yet despite (or maybe because of?) that offhand tone, that “Must be nice” made a deep impact on me. One can sense a deep emptiness that Kousei himself can’t fully comprehend, which is all the more painful because he doesn’t know anything different.
In comparison, Kousei’s monologue at 10:03—10:15 makes his sentiments more explicit, but it also lacks the subtlety and quiet power of the example above. The “tell, not show” tendency is in the Japanese script too, however, so there’s not much that can be done about it. The scene of him playing piano in an auditorium as a child and then stopping abruptly, clutching his head in his hands, is nevertheless very powerful.
Soon afterward, the English dub deviates slightly from the Japanese script:
In the dub, he says: “There, in that moment, I knew… my days of playing were done.”
There’s no reference to autumn or being eleven here. Instead, the line emphasizes the primacy of this particular moment, and invites the viewer to fill in the gaps with the context. On its own, the line is striking and full of pathos, and I really loved the calm and measured way Mittelman that delivered it.
Nevertheless, I’m sad that the autumn part was removed from the dub. The seasons play a huge symbolic role in the anime, and the significance of “autumn” in this context is very clear. At the very end of the episode, Kousei even directly calls back to this line, saying (in the sub): “The spring of my fourteenth year… I… I’m taking off with you.” In the dub, he says, “Spring is blooming all around, and I… am taking off with you.” The seasons are no longer used to mark the passing of time, and since that’s plot-important information, I can’t say that I approve of the omission.
On the other hand, the “There, in that moment, I knew… my days of playing were done” is a good line in another way. In the Japanese, Kousei says, “ピアノが弾けなくなった” to refer to the fact that he has stopped playing the piano. The grammar here is a bit tricky to express in English. He is emphasizing the fact that he became unable to play the piano, or that the piano itself became unplayable. This sense of fatalism comes across very strongly in the English dub, but feels comparatively weaker in the subtitled translation.
All in all, the English dub of Your Lie in April is a very well-composed product. The only complaints I have it with it are minor. I personally enjoyed how the dub doesn’t “over-translate” the script, and that it leaves some things unspoken for the viewer to interpret. In some ways, the writing even feels more nuanced than the Japanese script. If you enjoy a good English dub that has a strong sense of rhythm and flow, I recommend that you check it out!
Have you seen the Your Lie in April anime? What did you think of the scriptwriting and voice acting? It doesn't matter whether you've seen the dub or sub. Feel free to share your thoughts on the anime below!
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Frog-kun is a freelance writer and translator. He writes about anime, light novels, and Japanese culture on his blog Fantastic Memes. You can also follow him on Twitter at @frog_kun.
