Hi Alex,

I just stumbled across popularsymbolism's posting recently and agree that it would be great if you could cover the fan-based localization scene. Despite the legally grey nature of this area, I think that it's worth covering in a respected publication like Edge. How the information can be presented is debatable, but I believe that I and all others involved in fan-based localizations would be honoured to take part and educate people about this area of video games. In fact, my localization team was actually invited to talk about the project at a technical "un-conference" called OGGCamp (http://oggcamp.org/) in the UK in October 2009. One of team members from the UK participated on the team's behalf and the presentation, which detailed the development process behind Front Mission 5: Scars of the War's localization, was well-received by the attendees. Some of the audience's thoughts can be read in the link below:

http://thelondoneer.blogspot.com/2009/10/open-weekend-2.html

With that said, it would be amazing to see fan-based localizations getting attention and respect from a professional publication such as Edge.

Angelo Pineda
- Founder and Project Manager of the Front Mission Series Fan Translation Project

Hi there,

is there any chance Edge will be covering the 'undub' phenomenon in an upcoming issue? Basically, this entails being able to play a videogame with the original Japanese audio track while having English subtitles at all times.

Examples of this include 'Final Fantasy X International', 'Final Fantasy XII', 'Persona 3', 'Persona 4' (and tons of other games I won't mention here for the sake of brevity), most of the DS games, and so on. You could tie this into a feature where Edge would cover the latest PS2 Japanese-to-English translations, such as 'Front Mission 5' (which has recently been translated into English), Dragon Quest V for PS2 (also recently translated into English).

Another section that I think is worth repeating: remember back in 2003/2002 when Edge did all these 'retro reviews' and wrote the review as if it was basically written at the time the game was originally released? How about reintroducing something like that but instead covering games like 'Front Mission 5' or 'Segagaga' (being translated into English) which have

a) never been released in the West
b) as a consequence of a, never been translated

Here are some links/references (none of these contain any copyrighted material, so no harm in me posting these I guess):

The guy who is doing the Segagaga translation
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8555790&publicUserId=5772603

A repository and list of all currently available game translations (includes all languages - from Japanese to English even to Dutch, Swedish and other non-English European languages)
http://www.romhacking.net/

Front Mission 5 translation (this guy is also translating PS1 games like Front Mission 2 and Front Mission Alternative)
http://www.frontmission.info/

Dragon Quest 5 (PS2) Translation Project
http://dqtranslations.com/projects/dq5r