Yu-Gi-Oh cartoon, someone help me get a clue?

[hero4hire]

It'd be like if Samurai Jack was a D&D cartoon, and evertime he went into combat he and his opponent started spouting lines like "Haha! I rolled a 20, and made my critical threat roll! Now, rolling for damage and multiplying by 3 for my Elven Ninja Uber-Katana, I strike you for 237 points!" "Not so fast, Samurai Jack! You forgot my Gnomish Clockwork Armor of Leetness! Taking off the points for Damage Resistance, and activating my Feat of Boofoo Warrior, you only strike me for 12 points! Haha!"

I'd watch it!

 

[WizarDru]

Not to hijack, but why would you want it to be?

Speaking for myself, it depends. I understand some Japanese (sometimes enough to question a particular translation, but not much), but I'm not fluent. However, the issue is often more to do with dramatic readings than anything else.

Ten years ago, I couldn't conceive of a good english-language anime dub being anything other than an oddity or fluke. Hideous visions of "Warriors of the Wind", the mangled and poorly dubbed version of Miyazaki's "Nasuicaa of the Valley of the Wind" come to mind. Today, the voice acting is often equal to the task of the Japanese language dubs, or not far behind. For example, I have no desire to hear the Japanese dubs of Cyborg 009, Master Keaton, InuYasha, Big O or Princess Nine...the English casts define those shows for me. But for Samurai 7, Gungrave, Trigun or Last Exile, the reverse is true.

Sometimes the factor isn't the voice actors, but the script/translation. Some shows are very inelegant about translating the dialogue, and produce a mishmash of characters running off at the mouth....creating exactly the kind of ridiculous dubs that I want to avoid. Sometimes the translator fails to interpert the dialogue properly, and is too literal. They need to know when to use a local idiom, and when to use an equivalent but different phrase. Since so much of Japanese is contextual, literal translations don't always make much sense unless interpeted.

To date, few shows have won me over to the English cast from the Japanese one. One of the few is the English dub of Lupin the Third. One of my favorite characters, Lupin's had more than a few Japanese voice actors in his time...but his US dub is just spot-on: a reinterpetation that's equal to his original, IMHO. The fact that they've reworked whole chunks of dialogue to make it more topical and funny in english (since japanese puns, idioms and cultural references wouldn't work well) could have been a disaster...but good writing kept it from doing so. Considering the show is over 25 years old, for some episodes, that's pretty darn good.

More than you probably cared to hear, I'm sure.

 

[wedgeski]

I can't claim credit for this, even for finding it. Someone reposted it on rpg.net (without providing a link back to its forum of origin), and it's darn funny for me even if I haven't watched Yu-Gi-Oh.

Holy crap that's the funniest thing I've read in ages *dabs watering eyes and wipes spittle from monitor*

I watched the entire first series of Yu-Gi-Oh because, well... erm, I don't really know, but I must have Liked Something About It. And because I Liked Something About It, me and the wife bought the two starter decks and gave it a shot. We also Liked Something About the Pokemon cartoon (when it got good, er, better... whenever it didn't suck), and bought a few decks of that, and actually we both thought the Pokemon CCG was rather good, so this whole Yu-Gi thing might be good as well.

And while I can kind of see the appeal of the cartoon, I cannot possibly see the appeal of the game. It does, in fact, follow quite closely the meta-thread of all those episodes, in that it is impossible to predict who is going to win until the game is over (unless one of the combatants is Yu-Gi). I have never played another game in my like that relies so heavily on blind luck, and which has so many options for obliterating your opponent's entire strategy with one move. We got so peed off with the ludicrous, strategy-destroying cards, that we stopped playing.

Was it just me?

 

[Desdichado]

More than you probably cared to hear, I'm sure.

Actually, no... I think that's a big reason that I struggle with so much anime. I'd much rather watch an English dub, in general, but many are poorly done. I tend to assume that that's the writer's fault more than the translaters, but maybe not.

Then again, are the subtitled translations any better, or are they simply less obtrusive when done badly?

 

[WizarDru]

Then again, are the subtitled translations any better, or are they simply less obtrusive when done badly?

It really depends on the individual show/translator/writer/production team.

For example: many of the shows I watch these days fall in one of two categories, access-wise: download or DVD. For some shows (such as, say, GadGuard or Lost Exile) I see them advertised here in the US, watch some previews and then purchase it on DVD when released here. However, when I'm feeling experiemental, I go out to any number of bittorrent locations and download the latest in fansubs, which may be six months to two years ahead of the market.

I point this out because I've discovered that certain groups translate show much better than others. For example: in the case of Samurai 7, I've seen the show dubbed by two different groups of fans. Each one approaches the material differently, and their translations reflect that. In one group's version, the peasants who've come to town (hoping to hire the samurai to defend their village from the bandits) are translated in a fairly straightforward fashion. The other group, however, translates them more accurately...because the peasants speak an odd regional dialect. Listening to the actual speech of the original voice-actors, you can clearly hear the differences in their speech patterns, and the translators try to capture the oddity of their speech patterns. You don't need to know Japanese to hear the very different cadence of the language. Which is better? I don't know. The more accurate translation doesn't necessarily help me as a viewer, even if more accurate. But is that a function of their choices or the source writing?

So you've got three levels of abstraction: quality of the actors, quality of the original writing and quality of the translation. Combine this with archetypes and social tropes which are from a different culture, and what might work for a Japanese audience doesn't work for a US audience, necessarily. Consider the incredibly self-referential anime Magical Shopping District Abenobashi: it's a series that features characters with Osakan accents (as opposed to the standard Tokyo accent most commonly heard and used in Anime), has tons of cultural in-jokes and very sly references to other anime that only hard-core anime fans would get, and features lots of humor that just wouldn't translate well without liner notes. (example: if learning that one of the characters was Abe no Seimei means nothing to you, and his having an Osaka dialect would be considered a joke in and of itself, consider an episode of the Simpsons featuring the Marge and Homer talking about a barn-raising, and Marge saying "Thank goodness it wasn't those good-for-nothing Mennonites", and then they show some Mennonites in an alley playing dice and smoking...)

Most shows aren't that extreme, of course. But sometimes it's hard to make that distinction between the translation and the writing. Big O II, for example, is clearly (to me) a case of really, really obtuse writing. Was it bad? I'm not sure...but I know that the original writing is to blame, not the translation. By the same token, watching an episode of One Piece or Shaman King, I know that the problem is the translation, as the comic is not nearly as annoying.

And finally, let's be clear: the US is not seeing the full breadth of anime and manga in the big releases. Master Keaton is a great series, but very understated....it doesn't have the big flash of a Gundam series or the fanboy fantasy aspect of a Love Hina. But even that's changing, so we'll see. I'm still thrilled daily at the new releases, and the state of anime in the US. I still remember paying $35 per tape for VHS copies of anime from Laserdisc, back in the early 80s. Yikes.

 

[Desdichado]

Heh. I guess the best deal is to be intimately familiar with Japanese culture and language, then. My neighbor, fellow boardmember shadowlight, occasionally downloads anime without subtitles or dubs, because he speaks Japanese, lived in Japan for a while, and does it primarily to stay "in practice" with the language (not much call to use it around here, I'm afraid.) Ironically enough, he's not a huge fan of anime, he thinks it often has great concepts usually marred by flawed execution.

I usually feel the same way, but I always have to wonder if a big part of the "flawed" execution is simply an artifact of the translations, or my distance from Japanese culture, with which I have very little experience.

And this whole discussion comes at an interesting time for me personally; I've kinda been deciding again that maybe I need to give some more anime a shot, based on the simple expedient that I found a DVD copy of Plastic Little in our public library, so I checked it out. Again; I thought flawed execution; it was a bit too rushed feeling, the villain was incredibly cardboard, and it suffered from occasional exposition dumps in the form of rapid dialogue. The gratuitous bouncing boobies was more "cute" than annoying, which actually kinda surprised me; I expected to be annoyed by that when I saw that one of the special features of the DVD was a "Jiggle Counter."

But, the bottom line was, I still enjoyed it enough to spark me to look into some other shows I could get via Netflix; I think I put Najica on my queue based on a review I found out there somewhere, and I put the Street Fighter movie on, although I've seen that before, just because I like Street Fighter. I'll probably start another thread where I can ask for some recommendations. Also, any good outlets to catch some anime on cable TV? I know the Sci-Fi channel used to show some on Saturday mornings early, and doesn't the Cartoon Network have a regular anime hour or something like that? It'd be a great opportunity to catch a show that I otherwise wouldn't have thought of.

And to not be completely off-topic, at least the Yu-Gi-Oh series tends to have decent translations. I'll give them that; that's one flaw the series does not have, to its credit. Unfortunately, it seems to suffer from plenty of others. Even my 8-yo kid, who's a bit of a Yu-Gi-Oh card shark, doesn't get very excited about the show.

 

[Uzumaki]

Just curious; do you speak Japanese, or do you just like to hear it?

I don't speak Japanese. I just understand a lot of vacabulary and the basic sentence structure. I've never been there, but I want to go.

I just find that the Japanese voices suit the characters better in my mind in most cases. If there's a character who's 7 feet tall, and exists to beat down on everybody in sight, I would rather he sound like Mister T and speak Japanese, than sound like Michael Jackson and speak English.

It's true that YGO could be much worse. I've heard people complain that the 'Yami no Game' is called a Shadow Game instead of a Dark Game, but I don't really care about that; just people being picky. But they did change some dialogue around completely, which bothers me because many times there seems to be no reason for it.