Dear Reader:
Gotta Protectors was localized by one person, dev talks staying true to NES limits
A portion of a Michibiku interview with localizer Brian Gray...
M: So was Gotta Protectors a solo effort, or were you part of a larger team?
BG: 8-4 had their usual — awesome! — team looking over everything and handling the bulk of communication with Ancient, but the translation was entirely me.
BG: The game is designed to work within NES-era limits. That means the graphics are tiled. They’re on a grid. In the Japanese game, all the dialogue is spaced out as text, blank row, text, blank row. But we quickly realized we wouldn’t be able to fit the dialogue in the same space, so we asked Ancient if they could slide the rows around to make room for one more. But after talking it over, we decided keeping it true to the NES limits was better.
So we ended up putting the extra lines of English dialogue in between the existing rows of Japanese dialogue. (Where there were 2 rows in Japanese, we got 3. If they had 3 rows, we got 5.) Problem is, that meant there was no actual space between the letters. The tiles literally touch each other.
M: What was the solution?
BG: So I actually went back through the game and rewrote anything where a lowercase “g” or “y” was directly above a capital letter, for example. I’m not sure I caught them all, but that was a thing. (laughs) Honestly, it was a lot of fun. It’s been years since I’ve had to come up with that kind of puzzly solution in localization work.