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Old Sep 20, 2008, 10:52 AM
layzee's Avatar
layzee layzee is offline
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While we're on the subject of titles...

Since 悪魔城 is あくまじょう, should it not be Akumajou or Akumajō (with macron) to take into account the longer ending sound? (Akumajou Dracula also brings up more search results than the other two on Google)

Anyway, this is how I think all the titles should be displayed, in the case of Japanese albums:

line 1: Display Name (ignoring what it is known outside Japan)
Romanisation of Japanese (Kanji) game title, if game title is displayed in English already (e.g. Final Fantasy), then use that. If the game title has a subtitle (e.g. Gekka no Yasoukyoku), then romanise it. If subtitle already in displayed in English, then use that. Any katakana will be translated to English. (If you like emulation/roms, then this is exactly [I think] how No-Intro goes about naming the titles of Japanese games)

I'm debating whether we should imitate the font casing as well. So if the erratic game album title (assuming it's in English) had a bunch of words with lower-casing and another bunch of words with ALL CAPS, then it should be the same on the display name line, as visually displeasing as it is.

line 2: Original
Title as it exactly appears on the cover (Kanji, Katakana etc).

line 3: Full Romanisation
Everything fully romanised, even katakana like Original Soundtrack. Probably modified hepburn romanisation method without use of accented characters.

line 4: Full Translation
A full translation of the title on line 2. E.g. Seiken Densetsu becomes Holy Sword Legend/Legend of the Holy Sword, Akumajou becomes Demon Castle, etc... same goes for the subtitles.

line 5/6/7/etc: Official English Equilavent (if any)
Now we get line 1, replace the game name and game subtitles with what it is officially known outside Japan. So "Seiken Densetsu 4" becomes "Dawn of Mana", "Tales of Eternia" becomes "Tales of Destiny 2" etc... In some cases, a game might have different names in both Europe and USA so we might need several lines for this. For example, "Estpolis Denki II" becomes "Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals" (USA) and "Lufia" (Europe), "OZ" becomes "The Sword of Etheria" (Europe) and "Chains of Power" (Korea apparently). No USA release. Maybe we could have flag markers here to specify what the game is known in which region.

I think the above is pretty informative and since line 5/6/7/etc is searchable, most people should find what they're looking for, whether they're looking for the English or Japanese title.

As for English-language music CDs, it will simply involve line 1 and line 5/6/7/etc.

Anyway, that's just the way I think it should be done.

Last edited by layzee; Sep 20, 2008 at 11:01 AM.
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