Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda

High quality book, unfortunately the content wears out its welcome. It's at its best when it's going over the details, history, and minutiae of Legend of Zelda, but after about the fifth time the author laments how "superior" was translated to "better than" you start to wonder... are there really going to be 200 pages of this? Good for thumbing through, but seems to be more a pedant pet project than an attempt to entertain.

I've to say, I did not knew much about Legends of Localization before buying this book. Living in Belgium, French is my native language, so I guess that's why I never pay too much attention to all those discussions around the weird English used in the first Zelda game. But I should have, because games in the 80s and early 90s were almost never translated in French... As a kid, I played (The!) Legend of Zelda on the NES in English. When you think about it, it's kinda weird. When I talk about retro games with friends, we often forget that all those games were not translated and yet we remember them as if they were. Of course, going back to those games now, I can understand why there are still discussions going on today about the translation of the original Zelda game. Yet, I never went so far as to read the LoL's website. But I bought the book. Because I'm a huge Zelda fan, and in a few day my favorite franchise will turn 30. So I though that this is the perfect time to delve deeper in the history of the one game that has started it all. And needless to say, I'm really enjoying this book so far ! There are some print issues unfortunately, text and pictures are sometimes a bit blurry. It's still always readable though. We can feel Mato's passion while reading the book, and it's always a pleasure to see how Zelda can affect the lives of some people. Also, despite the print issues, the book is beautiful all the way from the first cover to the very last page. Good job!

I'm a big fan of Mato's writing style and have enjoyed his Zelda series on the Legends of Localization website. This book goes even deeper than previous efforts, looking at the bones of the game from the Japanese build to the North American translation. The presentation is beautiful, the writing is engaging and witty. I especially appreciate the fact the author doesn't resort to the crass, lowest-common-denominator game analysis so popular these days. Unlike some of the other reviewers here, the layout and print quality of my book are excellent. I do agree that trying to visually represent changes in sound files didn't really work in print, though I completely understand why the author used the wave files to show the differences. While thorough, a better approach would just to have describe the aural differences and move onto to other topics. Overall, it's a very enjoyable read. It would have been really interesting to get the actual translators involved but I speculate that would have been very difficult to track down the individuals, especially since this isn't a publication printed by Nintendo. I'm looking forward to the next book (Earthbound) and hopefully many more!