Comments on: Game Overview: Editorial: Instruction Manuals and In-Game Tutorials

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:45:28 +0000

I would wager that it’s part of the original script. Despite some infamous choices (the “spoony bard” comes to mind) someone like Ted Woosley, translator of most of the SNES Squaresoft games, stays close to the original script.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:08:42 +0000

I wonder if that’s in the original script or something they add in the translation to english….

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:10:10 +0000

A lot of times they don’t bother with the fourth wall breaking, there’s just a nameless dialog box that just tells you to how to save or something like that.

I kind of like it when they cleverly will point out how ridiculous a character sounds when their dialog includes stuff like “press ‘X’ to view the menu” and someone goes “what the heck are you talking about?”

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:42:44 +0000

I guess you’re right. As I was thinking a few days or weeks ago, video game manuals used to have the story of the game in them and if you didn’t read the manual you were just controlling some weird looking dude who liked to step on roaches and turtles and break bricks with his head.

Nowadays they just tell you how to control the game and what some of the powerups do. Although they always seem to get lazy and not tell you what all of them do.

I’ve been noticing more and more that games put people into a tutorial level first so they can learn the controls. Even Second Life does this.

HOWEVER, I used to love the ones in Final Fantasy. Even though nothing in Final Fantasy has changed that much since FF6, they always seemed to word it very cleverly. I mean, how can you show someone how to use a save spot without breaking the suspension of disbelief? I always thought they did a good job with that. But then again, I’m still not done with FF8, so maybe it’s declined in quality recently.