Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

The first Intro takes place prior to the title page. That one is already translated in an old patch that is not loaded into our working ROM; therefore, I cannot edit or update it at this time.

This second Intro starts in the opening scene following the title page and extends until Lina's first companion joins her at the bottom of the goblin pit, at which time a gamer gains control of the players for the first time and can march into battle.

This graphic includes all of the dialogue in that 2nd Intro. It might be considered a *Spoiler* by some but not much of one, I don't think. All comments are welcomed at this time, especially from gamers who have knowledge of the Slayers culture.



If we make any changes based upon this posting, I will incorporate those then recompile for a main page update.

Well the only thing I can say is, man you really like to use the word Gal a bit too much for my taste That, of course, is just a personal opinion thing on my part though and shouldn't factor into anything.

Just did a global search of the hundred or so dialogue and misc banks and only got one hit on "gal" and one instance in Block 30 (which happens to be in Intro #2).

So far so good keep going

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.

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...!"

Connie also remarks "that is" at some point in the dialogue, which honestly feels like it'd sound better contracted.

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...?"

Well, those're my two cents. Hope none of that offends.

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.





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.



That's an easy fix in which I fully agree.



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?



Appreciate the discussion.

Reading your explanations, I can see where you're coming from.

The first point, however, was only the 'Yep' part; I honestly thought the three-legged watchdog was a pretty fine joke, and I assume the Japanese script has that literally or something akin to it. I can now see where the 'Yep' comes from, so you can ignore that bit.

The 'huh' I suppose I wasn't entirely clear in. To me, "Stop whining" seems pretty, how do you say it... straight-forward. Perhaps even a little offensive. 'Huh?' is something I link with something more mellow, so it seemed a little contrasting. 'will ya?' sounds a lot more in-tone with "Stop whining", for example.

I don't actually live in an English-speaking country, but I've followed a study as a teacher on English, if that matters any. I'll admit my experiences with English speakers may have been too restricted to formal matters to realise what bits are just more common for... informal conversation? I've just never seen the word 'huh' used that way, so to me it feels a bit odd.

Hope that helps.

Let me step on your toes here. Slayers isn't a 2009 thing. It shouldn't use that hip new lingo all the kiddies trying to look cool in middle school are using. This is originally back from the 90's. The first series is from 1995 and the manga is even older, so I agree that this doesn't sound right.

Second, Lina is very abusive. So, honestly I'd see her saying something more along the lines of "Will you just shut the hell up already!" Remember when I said Lina would rather blow someone up as to deal with them. I wasn't kidding. She is just that abusive to others. There really isn't much of a tender bone in her body. Keep that in mind while writing.

Anothing thing "Aw that really smarts" or whatever should be "Aw! Damn that smarts!"

Do not be afraid of Damn, Hell ect in this game. Lina isn't

I sort of sensed you were a highly fluent English speaker who was not closely connected to our everyday vernacular because I deal with Red Soul on these idiomatic sorts of discussions all the time, who speaks a more precise English than most natives! "Huh" is used in this context frequently in my region and circles of contacts, but realizing that English-speakers all over the world are playing our patches, I will switch to will-ya. I already changed to the contraction.

Lina is abrasive, to put it mildly, although she starts out rather subdued in this game - for good reason. Therefore, I am crafting her to reveal this underlying trait occasionally. More will be disclosed after we release the game and people play beyond this point, so I won't spoil that. Connie's dialogue painted her initially as a ditsy whiner who spews forth an emotional argument for a short period of time, then blows whatever direction the wind goes. She seems to provide an excellent foil for Lina's short chain!

Your input is helpful. I appreciate this exchange of ideas. Don't forget what I said about suggesting alternative dialogues whenever something doesn't feel just right.

Damn! Hell yeah! I see this game starting to take shape. I believe it is / will be headed the right direction.