It took me a little off guard, to say the least, when I was asked if I had any thoughts on localizing the game. Most people seem to think it’s just a matter of ripping out the original language and plugging in the English text - the work’s already done for you, right? Well, for better or worse, what you see on the shelf when we are finished with a project like this may look very different from the original designs we receive from our licensors. Etrian odyssey had a lot of really nice resources, and some solid finished product that came over to us. I mention this only because we do not always get such a nice set of resources to draw from when we begin these projects, and ideas about graphic design and marketing on Japan’s end do not always jive with the angle an American marketer wants to take.

The most obvious place to start is the title logo. The stylized kanji were just not going to fly here, and a literal translation of the original Japanese title worked out to Yggdrasil Labyrinth. Anyone familiar with our company’s work might be more than a little tired of our repetitive use of these two words (we really wanted to call it Yggdra’s Labyrinth Summoner, haha), so after much talking and brainstorming and voting, we eventually came to Etrian Odyssey. We were told that we should try to a least keep the spirit of the text’s design and my final piece did borrow heavily from the original, down to certain parts I cut and pasted onto our Anglified title. I contemplated a few different gothic style fonts, but would eventually twist whatever it was I had used as a base into something a bit more readable, with a vaguely Celtic vibe. But that title would be all we would have for almost 4 months as we waited to get more resources for advertising and packaging.

More images (including final ads and packaging) finally made their way to us around the New Year, closer to the game’s release in Japan. Pleasing as the original cover design was, we wanted something a little edgier and high contrast on the cover. Shelf space is cluttered in any store, and flashier box images can influence your buyer. If he can see it in that sea of covers, he just might buy it. Though not a hard and fast rule, I prefer titles and logos placed higher up on the box, potentially closer to the customer’s line of sight, especially since there’s that nasty little ESRB box at the bottom of the box template to deal with. (No offense to the ESRB gods, but that box can be a pain when you need room to put something down there.) So, the title moves up, and we take a long look at the whole package.

We try to leave no doubt that you are buying a role playing game with a sword and sorcery theme. From the beginning, we knew we wanted something that appealed to your older-school role-laying gamer - and I, sirs, am from the days of 3-sided dice, metal miniatures, and loose-leaf graph paper. I took my initial design leads form the illuminated manuscripts, always solid genre material. Good old graphed-out maps were the theme of the rear cover, complete with goofy simplified map keys for makeshift bullet points. Something I’m trying to do on most spines these days is keep a character image back there. Often, designers go with easily read block lettering on the spines, but in this case, I felt the more ostentatious title treatment was worth keeping, as it would be identifiable by its very uniqueness even next to other titles with more simplified spines.

Hopefully, the fusion of Japanese art with medieval European RPG theme will appeal to you, the fans. If I’ve kept your interest this far, feel free to let us know what you think in the forums.