Playing Final Fantasy VIII (en français)

I will, perpetually, always need to replay Final Fantasy VIII. This is just a fact of life, an eternal truth. It's my favourite game, and I like to replay it fairly frequently. I know this thing inside out, so much so that I don't need the cues of a language I fully understand to play it - which is why I played it in German, back when I was vaguely studying that language.

You'll notice I'm playing the hideous and repulsive remaster this time around.

 

I've also briefly looked at it in Japanese (and I was surprised at how much I could understand, based predominantly on my kanji recognition, which at this point is... okay), but I didn't commit to that playthrough.

No, what it's time for, is to play Final Fantasy in French. Allons-y!

These experiments aren't really about understanding the text as much as enjoying the small linguistic differences and choices in translation. These little decisions are really fascinating to me - why is blizzara simply (glacier+) here?

I do get a little bit of a gauge on my ability to understand sentences, of course, but fundamentally I can't read French very well. I know enough vocabulary to get the gist of a lot of things, but the grammar really eludes me. That's because I like to pretend grammar isn't real and can't get me. But the unfortunate truth is that grammar gets me every day.

Nevertheless, it's a way of just sort of hanging out around a language. I don't really get what she's doing, but I'm watching her (the French language) do her thing.

The Frenchness comes out in interesting ways. The Trepies are now called Trèpistes. Balamb Garden is referred to as the B.G.U. (Balamb Garden Université). Characters keep saying "hum".

So true.

But my favourite thing about the French translation is its preference for literary allusion. Ifrit's attack is changed from Hellfire to Divine Comedie. Siren's attack is now named Andersen, for Hans Christian. Quezacotl is Golgotha, for some reason. Somehow, I feel as if these changes add a slightly more grounded feel to the game. It feels closer to the real world, but also a little bit darker and imbued with biblical horror. Diablos is Nosferatu. Wow.

A fun translation choice is that here, Rinoa's (or... Linoa's) dog-based limit break attacks are now all named after different dog breeds. Cute.

Beware: the dachshund attack.

And of course, we need to know what Seifer calls Zell on their way to Dollet. In English, it's chicken-wuss. In French, it's... blond hedgehog. Perfect.

I enjoy traversing this world in another language. It feels nice to wander Deling City in French. There's that big French archway, Nosferatu's in my brain, and I dreamed I was a clown.

This is how it should be. 

Please, touche pour descendre a l'arc de triomphe.