Member wrote:
Part of the dialogue seems awkward to me, if I may be frank.
An example is:
"How do you propose we raise the bounty?"
"Yep, we couldn't even raise money to hire a three-legged guard dog!"
'Yep' comes off to me more as an affirmative than an agreement that it will be difficult to raise the bounty. It... doesn't feel like something that would be said in regular dialogue between two people.
In tense conversations, a lot of "thinking out loud" (represented in the dialogue here) is truncated from the "thinking silently" aspect. Although we could certainly fill in the blanks, I do not see full statements of the crisis as being necessary whenever a group of people under duress cling to a general consensus about a major problem.
The "Yep" speaker is simply uttering an affirmative response to two consensual points among the group at the table: (1) that the village is threatened and (2) they have no money for a mercenary. The following "dog" statement is a metaphor of their despair over the hopelessness of the situation.
The preceding bounty question drips with irony, because everyone in the village knows the obvious. They're poor. So, the respondent is essentially saying, "Yes, I agree that we have no money, not even for a cheap solution, let alone the funds to pay a high-priced monster exterminator." This is the way an intimate group on the same wavelength usually converses. Since their underlying emotional reactions are the same, they rarely convert every thought into spoken words, especially when danger is imminent.
I'm not trying to give a professional writing lesson here, but I am never offended. The best help Slayers fans can offer me is to draft alternative lines of dialogue to consider. These don't need to be professionally rendered and polished by a New York editor. If I understand the gist and it better clarifies a segment of a scene or the culture of the series, I can clean it up and use it.
Two other considerations: Space is always a concern in video game scripts, especially in the beginning when we haven't defined the total amount available, so we try to conserve words wherever possible. Also, in dialogue, "less is sometimes more", especially in tense, dramatic scenes. A captain going down with his ship doesn't have time to recite his life story as the crew rows the lifeboat over 20-foot swells to safety.
Member wrote:
There's also a lot of ellipses- I presume that's what the Japanese version has, but I've no clue how to read "That's right...!"
Dumped Japanese scripts use a lot of ellipses, that's a fact of life, perhaps an average of at least one in every string dumped, considerably more than I convert to the English stories I write. Frequent use of ellipses has become a convention even in commercial video game writing, as opposed to writing styles used in novels and short stories (
Chicago Style Guide.). Therefore, I have elected to incorporate this feature in my own video game script writing since day one.
But I use ellipses mainly to depict natural pauses in dialogue. Occasionally, I couple ellipses with pause tag code, if available, but these cannot be conveyed in animated gifs. To build the one above, I allowed all of my pause tags to execute and the page to build fully before snapping the bmps. Perhaps the ellipses will work better for people playing the game and witnessing the actual pauses in the story scrolling.
So the basic difference, I believe, is this. In Western prose, ellipses express unfinished statements, omitted words and phrases, and non-verbal expressions of thought. In video games, this device seems to mainly denote pauses and breaks in conversation, an Eastern style, apparently, that we Western localizers have signed on to.
Member wrote:
Connie also remarks "that is" at some point in the dialogue, which honestly feels like it'd sound better contracted.
That's an easy fix in which I fully agree.
Member wrote:
Lina says something about, "Stop whining, huh...?" which when said to Connie (as in, "Connie, you dork, stop whining") feels a bit odd for her to follow that up with "huh...?"
It's a colloquial expression I hear and read quite often, used by kids and even older people that could also be expressed as
already,
will you, or even
will-ya. Do you like any of those options better? BTW, do you live in a English-speaking country such as the U.S., Britain, Canada, or Australia?
Member wrote:
Well, those're my two cents. Hope none of that offends.
Appreciate the discussion.