The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is filled with little pieces of dialogue tucked away in secret moments. You can trigger them by talking to a character at a very specific point in time, getting an item out of order and seeing how characters react, and various other ways. There are dozens of interactions that are really easy to miss: I’m on my third playthrough of the remake and am still stumbling into lines of dialogue I didn’t see the first two times around. During a launch event at Nintendo’s New York retail store, I spoke with Nate Bihldorff, Senior Vice President of Product Development and Publishing at Nintendo of America, and asked about how the localization team approaches these small moments.

“My group handles the localization of these games," Bihldorff said. "And I can tell you that the localization team, absolutely, puts the most importance on those single lines that are really, really hard to find. And you know, of course, they are murder on testing teams because finding that specific line and making sure that it appears correctly in the game is super important… But there was always something special about localizing those lines and knowing that only a few people were going to read it, that it took a specific course of action to get there, whether it's in a Zelda game like this or you’re sequence breaking in a Metroid game.

"Knowing that the person who's experiencing that line did something special to get it and wanting to make sure that it had that little extra oomph, I guarantee you the localization team would love to hear you say exactly that… You feel like you're connecting with the developers in those moments.

Source link