To be fair, many are much more knowledgeable than me in the community, as I'm always reminded when playing the Teensies' Quiz.Hugo wrote: Wed Jun 12, 2024 5:50 pm First let me say I'm bowled over by your knowledge of Rayman history, but maybe that's to be expected from an admin of PC! It also surprises me how seriously they took cultural sensitivity back then, since there are many examples of no care towards localization from those days. Maybe they took it seriously because it's hard to break into such an unfamiliar market.
But you're right, this extra effort is unique to the Japanese market, making its localizations all the more interesting.Those are good points, thanks for the insights. It is true that there do not appear to be many Japanese fan wikis, even for popular local franchises. They have a big Wikipedia though.Hugo wrote: Wed Jun 12, 2024 5:50 pm To be honest, it makes more sense to me to archive information about the JP localization history in English (indeed I found a few facts there myself) because Japanese gamers may simply not find it at all.
Firstly, Japan does have its own wiki fan sites format which is a kind of wiki/blog hybrid. This one here for example neatly summarizes core info about the game, goes on to make a subjective breakdown including "pros and cons", and ends with some trivia.
https://w.atwiki.jp/gcmatome/pages/8213 ... d_db4f9282
But the reason I am concerned they wouldn't find it is I have a sneaking suspicion the SEO optimization will favour those sites if say they looked up something about Rayman. Perhaps if Japanese streamers play Rayman, more people will catch on? I feel that the people have to come first and the "culture" follows, as it was with PC.
Anyway, documenting the foreign localizations in English should indeed be our priority, and it is a prerequisite for extensively documenting the series in other languages anyway. This may prove challenging, as older games handle non-Latin scripts in ways that make their extraction rather complicated, but we'll see how this goes.
