SUPER MEGA BASEBALL 4 MAKES JAPAN DEBUT

For the first time in Super Mega Baseball history, we’ve fully expanded into Japan, one of the largest and most passionate baseball markets in the world. This included a full custom translation for menus, voiceover, in-game text, and more. We know how much baseball means to fans in Japan, so we wanted to provide everything we could to give you a true Super Mega Baseball experience.

The most significant part of this project was the voiceover script, which has many lines for play-by-play, color commentary, and more. The team had to work hard at finding the sweet spot between the English script and what would make sense to a Japanese audience. The aim was to keep as much of the original taste of the game as possible, to keep that very specific theme of American baseball. We know how familiar you are with American baseball culture, so we could keep many things the same or very similar–but the trick was figuring out what was necessary to tweak.

Somewhat surprisingly, some of the most difficult decisions regarded food. American ballpark food is pretty universal; things like hot dogs, popcorn, and soda are things that Japanese baseball fans would likely know all about. While Japanese stadiums don’t typically sell nachos, the team didn’t want to change that because it’s such an American baseball stadium staple. But a few regional items made things a little tricky. The one that stood out the most? Pork rinds. This gave the team a particularly unique challenge: do they try and find a way to explain the product through the voiceover script, or do they change it completely? In the end, the team landed on swapping out pork rinds for a similar salty, portable snack: beef jerky. They felt that if they changed it to beef jerky, it wouldn’t lose much of the humor or context.

That lands us on one of the key aspects of translating Super Mega Baseball 4 for a new language: the humor. What sets this series apart from all other baseball video games is that while the gameplay is quite realistic and immersive, Super Mega Baseball never takes itself too seriously. Luckily, baseball humor is nearly universal for fans of the sport, so a lot of what makes the series so great wasn’t lost in translation.

But while baseball terms and jokes can often translate well, slang and casual phrases presented a unique challenge at times. When the umpire makes a call, some lines made a play on words–like connecting a call from the umpire with a call from your phone. In Japanese, those are not the same word. In this case, the context was more important than directly translating the joke. In a lot of cases though, the team decided it was better for everyone to try and translate as closely as possible to the original, whether it was a joke or simply a baseball reference.

Overall, the team translated about 50,000 words as part of the localization process, including 1000 lines for the game’s voiceover script. But the team also translated in-game billboards, other background text, and more, because such a major-league move by the Super Mega Baseball series deserved as much care and consideration as possible.

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