As we reported earlier in the week, MangaGamer’s release of Kara no Shoujo will not include the voice track in the original Japanese game. Head translator, John Pickett, sheds a little more light on the subject over at the MangaGamer blog (portions of the site may be NSFW).
“Because of the unique way in which the extensive voice cast for this game was chosen, the rights to the voices remained with the voice acting agency, and not [developer] Innocent Grey,” Pickett writes. “While both of us did our best to negotiate for use of the voices, the agency refused to accept any of the alternative options we proposed, and demanded an outlandish fee several times larger than the entire cost of localizing this product otherwise.”
“While some may argue that it would have better not to localize this game at all in light of this, we felt differently,” Pickett emphasizes. “Not only is Kara no Shoujo an excellent work on its own, but it also serves as an important link to the new game which Innocent Grey is currently developing, and since they would like to see that brought over as well, neither of us wanted to see the West denied such great games due to one agency.”
He also reveals that Kara no Shoujo needed to be ported over to a new game engine for its English language release, due to the original Japanese engine not being compatible with English text.
Kara no Shoujo is slated for release sometime in Q2 or Q3 of this year, priced at €24.95.
