‘Hollow’ was a big one.
Dark Soulsbegins by creating the universe.
In the Age of Ancients, the world was unformed, shrouded by fog, intones the opening cinematic.
A land of gray crags, archtrees and everlasting dragons.
Those two sentences do a lot of heavy lifting.
I think of the singularity that existed before the Big Bang.
He also shortened the line the world was yet to be defined to the world was unformed.
Tiny details - but in a FromSoftware game, tiny details have long afterlives.
As the intro continues, fog gives way to fire - and with Fire came Disparity.
Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, Light and Dark.
Then from the Dark, they came, and found the Souls of Lords within the flame.
Fascinatingly, this division is mirrored in the act of translation.
Moving between languages splits the one into many.
He used to struggle through English fantasy books like Lord of the Rings in his youth, Morris says.
He is really into western fantasy.
And that’s how he ends up making something like Demon Souls.
It’s his own take, but it’s heavily inspired by western fantasy.
I learned Japanese quite intensely and I learned it all from pop culture.
But it turned out I found the most work in games.
Miyazaki heard about the studio from a mutual acquaintance at Sony during development of Demon’s Souls.
I was on board from the beginning, Morris says.
Even English and Chinese are closer to each other than either is to Japanese.
English has equivalents for this, but they’re much less poetic and subtle.
Japanese people very rarely say ‘I’ or ‘you’, Morris says.
or ‘do you want to eat this?’
It makes for a pervasive grimness, but also, comedy.
Take fan favourite Solaire of Astoria and his legendary catchphrase: The sun is a wondrous body.
Like a magnificent father!
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!
It was a delicate dance.
There are different strategies for kind of doing that.
It’s essentially conjured up from the way the Japanese makes me feel.
It’s not just conjured out of thin air.
Another, more functional difficulty was blindness to context.
Could this actually be a woman?
We assumed it was a man.
Could this place actually be right next door, in which case the language has to be slightly different?
We thought it was far away.
There’s lots of little things like that where it could be interpreted two or more ways.
We don’t need that to be artificially induced by tough circumstances.
It would be very complicated to do that on your own - you’re better off asking somebody.
Miyazaki has incorporated some of Morris’s more adventurous English translations back into the Japanese wording.
There are maybe 100 lines like that over the course of a couple of games.
‘Hollow’ was a big one.
After you’ve gone through enough of the story, it gels.
Similar things can be said of demons in Demon’s Souls.
Using an old word for something new.
[The translation] is correct, but the language is too plain here.
If I translated this today, I would rethink it to make it more world-appropriate while retaining the meaning.
That said, there are obvious advantages to letting players ruin the mood with silly or unsavoury graffiti.
Morris’s latest gig is, of course,Elden Ring.
