Not Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, notably. In case you were wondering. That hyphen is the MALK of game titles. The title screen has a lengthy legal attribution for the holding company that handles Hitchcock's estate.
I bought this off GOG on a lark for three bucks, not knowing what I was getting into. I didn't expect an adaptation of the movie, but beyond that, who knows. I was surprised to learn, upon hitting install, that this nothing Alfred Hitchcock game of which no one's heard was a whopping 20 gigs. The possibility of cryptominers crossed my mind. That hasn't yet been ruled out definitively, but much of the explanation is: it's a cinematic choice game, in the style of the Dark Pictures and Supermassive's other stuff.
It begins with the main character waking up on a shore below a bridge. In horrified realization, he scrambles up to a nearby bridge, where a gentleman dressed like Jimmy Stewart's character from the movie - the panicked MC calls to him as his father - is about to jump off.
Despite his son's (?) attempts, Jimmy Stewart jumps, and upon seeing a car overturned at the bottom of the bridge, the main character attempts to follow him. (They do use the famous camera trick from the bell tower in the film when the character looks off the bridge, in case you're wondering.) He is stopped from suicide by a random heroic trucker. Silent Hill Origins came to mind, but the trucker has a very Ride to Hell look, which I tried to but could not capture, as the game causes the capture feature to lag for several seconds.
We then cut to this woman in a theatre. There are popcorn-eating QTEs. There are also numerous prompts to answer your phone in the theatre, which I tried to ignore, but the game won't proceed unless you answer them. Apparently, the woman is a therapist, receiving emergency calls from patients. With her profession's trademark emotional intelligence, she proceeds both to inconvenience her fellow moviegoers and ignore her clients' needs, continually picking up and playing with her phone but refusing to answer messages.
OK, now: I know this is California. And there are certain games that would have the cred to spend to ask you to take Minnie Castavet as a serious and credible psychotherapist. This is not one of them.
Eventually, some time after her movie concludes, Minnie walks in to see the guy from the opening, chilling on a bed shirtless. They conduct their initial therapist-patient interview ("Doctor in what, exactly, Doctor?"). Here is a transcript of their conversation:
Doctor: How do you feel right now?
Guy: Pretty fucking shitty. Like when some idiot comes and pours salt on your wound, hm?
Doctor: If you're only going to give me an hour...it could at least be a fruitful one?
Guy: (pauses) ...Shitty? Does shitty work for you?
Doctor: Keep going.
Guy: Okay. I'll keep going. Shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, and shitty. Got that?
This character is supposed to be a writer.
Speaking of which: we in time flash back to the character's past as a writer, in his home, where he uses a memory of his own words during a book tour public radio interview (on which, perhaps not understanding the purpose of "self promotion," he is being a complete asshole) to cure himself of what he describes as a years-long (???) bout of writer's block. Here is the masterpiece passage his breakthrough produces:
OK, so in addition to animation, writing is also a problem. (The diary segments from Tender Loving Care were not far from my mind.)
His masterpiece is interrupted, however, by some yowling from downstairs: he has been neglecting to feed his cat. Actually neglecting, not "my meows are lies" neglecting. Angered and put-upon that his cat requires sustenance to survive, he furiously rises from his seat and trudges downstairs for an onerous ten-second interruption. How could he have known, though, really. After all, out of all the breeds, he's chosen the notoriously quiet and compliant Siamese.
He's then further interrupted by a knock at the door - the zombie-looking woman from the holding company title logo. She's an injured hiker in search of help, and this is supposed to be a meet cute. Unfortunately, the animators have given her a skeletal face with bedraggled gray hair and eye makeup & shading choices that only accentuate the ghoulish look. The head-to-toe gray costuming only makes things worse. I would say that none of this would have gotten past stage one at a studio with more experience in games, but all of this should be utterly glaring to a cartoonist at well.
The ankle is bleeding, and you're given one of four options to respond. I went with "It hurts just to look at it," in an attempt to express some sympathy of what did look like a nasty injury (I mean, it's a pretty bad sprain if it's bleeding). Unfortunately, "sympathy" and "normal human emotion" are alien to the protag, so he interpreted this in his own unique way:
I don't know yet if the woman is going to chomp his carotid artery in her ongoing quest for BRAAAAIIIIINS, but if she did, she'd save us all further pain.
Final Fantasy Resonance, a game on which I worked as editor in 2024, released yesterday, so I eagerly hit up YouTube to see my credit. Not there. I note the supervisor with whom I worked isn't credited, either.
I contacted the agency with which I worked on the project, and the supervisor told me that Square Enix decided not to include us in the credits. No explanation was given; the English localization is instead credited solely to a support firm offering a variety of QA services and what appears to be an SE in-house group.
Oddly, the agency with which I worked is credited for the non-English localizations and in other capacities, so I don't know what's going on here. The game was long in cooking, so I don't know if they ended up changing the script extensively in the interim or what (I don't have time right now to check, unfortunately).
This is just one of those things that can happen in the industry: credits are completely up to the studio & publisher, and they can cut people at will. It hasn't happened to me before, though, and it kills me that this is the project where it had to strike. Like many, I've loved Final Fantasy since childhood, and it was an incredible honor to work on the franchise. I put forth my best efforts for the game, and it does hurt that those efforts weren't acknowledged in the form of a credit. (I'll also note that one of the translators I was editing turned in particularly fantastic work, the best I've seen as an editor, and he deserved to go on to further good things. I hope he has, regardless of this incident.)
At least the Captain Tsubasa credit came through, according to MobyGames.
The burning heart of Kojiro Hyuga will never let you down!
I spoke of this a few days ago on Tumblr, but it merits mention here: I recently attempted to post on r/otomegames regarding the human-translated Angelique patch - I'd discussed the project on the subreddit previously, and some folks had asked for an update - but my post was removed, labeled as "self-promotion." I messaged the mods for clarification, as my previous discussions hadn't run afoul of this problem and no such rule was evidently being enforced against the AI patch, but received no response.
I don't know if there's been a rule change or if some mod has an odd interpretation of the rules or if someone's just an AI hardliner, but the upshot is that updates on the patch project are likely not going to be forthcoming on that subreddit. I've been posting updates under the "translation project" tag on my Tumblr, so that's the best place for the latest info. I'd also recommend that if you're following any human-powered translation, coding, or patch projects on that subreddit (as it was, previously, a magnet for that activity), follow the creators instead on their social media or blog, or reach out and ask if there's another venue where they're providing updates - just in case they're encountering this resistance as well.
Now, I see there's a bit of a conversation going on with several other untranslated games with human translations in progress having low-effort, straight-from-AI patches released for them. I wanted to wait until my own project was done to comment, but given there is a lot of talk currently, I'll add my own experience. This ran a bit long, so I'll put it under a cut.
A kind person alerted me this evening on Tumblr. The creator of the patch seems to be picking dating sims at random and feeding them into AI translation, seemingly producing one patch a day. I am, uh, not exactly intimidated by this approach.
I've given a further response in that Tumblr post, but just to reiterate: this doesn't change anything for the project. These characters, and this game, deserve a quality translation, and, buddy, if the considerable setbacks that have been copiously detailed in this blog have not deterred me from finishing this project, this certainly won't—not when we're so near the finish line.
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