XSEED talked about working on Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town’s localization before. In particular, it talked about challenges faced and handling puns in-game. Now, there’s a whole new localization blog. This time, Assistant Localization Lead Lori Snyder talked about how Pioneers of Olive Town characters like Emilio, his family, and Karina were handled during development.
For example, when it comes to Karina, it showed her initial concept art and final design. Snyder noted that Project Director Hikaru Nakano wanted to make a game with “a little more diversity.” The character, who speaks both English and French, had her design change ahead of launch. Snyder noted, “When asked about it, Nakano-san let us know that he and the developers wanted to make Olive Town’s residents relatable to as many players as possible, so he requested a few designs be changed to accommodate for the fact that the game would be released worldwide. Karina was only one of them!”
Here’s the early Karina design.
And here’s the version of Karina people will meet at the salon and tailor shop in-game.
Snyder then talked about Pioneers of Olive Town characters like Emilio, Manuela, and Marcos. In particular, Snyder talked about their language. The family knows Castilian Spanish, which they’ll use among each other in events and sometimes when speaking to the player. In particular, the localization details talked about when all three characters will speak Spanish. For example, the notes shared show Marcos would refer to Emilio as “hijo” sometimes, and Manuela might greet the player with “buenos dias.”
However, when it came to Emilio, Snyder pointed out:
So, as a second-generation son from a bilingual family, I wanted Emilio to speak Spanish to a certain extent as well, but he’s a little more hesitant with his code-switching. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s when you switch between two or more languages during a conversation with others who are familiar with the same language. Bilingual friends and family will often do this. I do this a lot, and wanted to explore this with our cast to a player-accessible level. I wanted there to be meaning in Emilio’s code-switching.
While Marcos and Manuela are pretty open about code-switching, Emilio code-switches mostly in front of his parents or Raul, who he considers family, so you may not notice it as much.
So…what happens when you marry him and become part of his family? You’ll just have to discover that for yourself!
Here are pictures of XSEED’s localization documents for Emilio, Manuela, and Marcos.
Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town is available for the Nintendo Switch in North America and Japan. It will come to Europe on March 26, 2021.
