There's not long to go until Smash Bros. is finally released in Europe. It will be here on 27 June but considering it's been available in the US since March, many have asked why there has been a hold up.
Well, during an interview with Nintendo's Laurent Fischer, we asked him the big question. Was localisation the reason why Smash Bros. has been delayed?
Fischer responded: "Well, yeah, that's always been the big question: why do we have a delay for Smash Bros? You need to see it title by title. It's the same team, the same pool of teams, that have been localising and that have been proofing. But localisation is only one thing: production is another thing also, because at the moment we are not just producing Smash Bros for Europe, we're producing hundreds of first party games and third party games for locations all over the world.
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"So localisation issues are one part of the delay, but you also have production issues, logistic issues... so a release date is always the result of a large number of factors, and it's a complex decision process. It's not that we deliberately like to be late in Europe, and it's our job to take care of it, but to localise in six languages is always a challenge.
We also asked him if the sheer amount of text in Smash Bros. Brawl had anything to do with the delay:-
"It's not just text," said Fischer. "This is a large game with lots of characters, and you must also remember that the voices of certain characters are different.
"That means we have to record six different sets of voices for some characters. We kept voices in there that the game doesn't let you see, like the Japanese voices and such, but there are a lot of voices that are localised so we have to record the voices for certain characters in the game six times.
"And then it's not only recording, you then have to make the sound work. Every time you go through localisation you then have to put it through a test, which involves making sure that you recorded the proper voice, and that the proper voice is being activated with the proper trigger, at the proper time... so it's not just a case of swapping over some words, it requires some proper extra development processes. And so it takes time.
"I realise that from time to time we have still been disappointing some people, but in general we have also been able to bring to them games which would have never been available before in a European market, and the time frame is slowly decreasing, so I'm positive for the future. We know that we are still not reaching the expectations of all the people, but we're really doing our best to resolve this."
