Foreign exclusives

[Richmizzle]

How should a game title be handled when it is released worldwide on one platform but not on another?

ex) The Last Blade is the NA title and Bakumatsu Roman: Gekka no Kenshi is the Japanese title. On several platforms it only had a Japanese release. For these platforms, should the NA title be used or the Japanese?

 

The previous question can be extended across a series as well.

ex) NA has Mega Man and Japan has Rockman. For Mega Man & Bass (NA names)/Rockman & Forte (Japanese names), which is more appropriate for this Japan exclusive game?

 

Are English translated titles more appropriate if there is only a Japanese title?

ex) Majuu Ou is the official Japanese title for a SNES/SFC game but it is commonly referred/translated to as King of Demons by English speakers.

[Jakatsu]

1 hour ago, Richmizzle said:

How should a game title be handled when it is released worldwide on one platform but not on another?

ex) The Last Blade is the NA title and Bakumatsu Roman: Gekka no Kenshi is the Japanese title. On several platforms it only had a Japanese release. For these platforms, should the NA title be used or the Japanese?

Japanese one should be used for those platforms that received a release only in Japan.

 

1 hour ago, Richmizzle said:

The previous question can be extended across a series as well.

ex) NA has Mega Man and Japan has Rockman. For Mega Man & Bass (NA names)/Rockman & Forte (Japanese names), which is more appropriate for this Japan exclusive game?

Same as above, if a game was released only in one country/region, use that name. In this particular case, Rockman & Forte since the game was only released in Japan.

 

1 hour ago, Richmizzle said:

Are English translated titles more appropriate if there is only a Japanese title?

ex) Majuu Ou is the official Japanese title for a SNES/SFC game but it is commonly referred/translated to as King of Demons by English speakers.

You can add translated names as alternative, so in this example you would use Majuu Ou as the main title and King of Demons as an alternate title.

This guideline hasn't been updated for a while, but you'll get a better idea how we go about with naming conventions etc.

Edited October 16, 2017 by Jakatsu

[Richmizzle]

Sounds good. I read the guidelines but they place emphasis on NA so I wasn't sure in these situations.

 

Follow-up question: What region should the alternate names be considered for these scenarios?

[Jakatsu]

3 hours ago, Richmizzle said:

Follow-up question: What region should the alternate names be considered for these scenarios?

I'd personally go with NA or US but you can just leave the region empty if you don't feel comfortable with that. I've seen unofficially translated English titles use mostly those two or in some cases World.

[Richmizzle]

Here's an interesting one:

 

In the database, it has entries for Rapid Reload (Europe) and Gunner's Heaven (Japan) for the PS1. They are the same game so one of them needs to be deleted but I'm not sure which it should be. There's no guidelines for region priority if it does not include NA, yet has multiple English names since the Japanese version is an English name. Normally, i would expect Europe to have priority, but the Japanese title is in English so it also makes sense for that to be the title, since it is the original version. Thoughts?

[Jakatsu]

11 hours ago, Richmizzle said:

Here's an interesting one:

 

In the database, it has entries for Rapid Reload (Europe) and Gunner's Heaven (Japan) for the PS1. They are the same game so one of them needs to be deleted but I'm not sure which it should be. There's no guidelines for region priority if it does not include NA, yet has multiple English names since the Japanese version is an English name. Normally, i would expect Europe to have priority, but the Japanese title is in English so it also makes sense for that to be the title, since it is the original version. Thoughts?

IMO since we prefer Western releases over Japanese ones, it should go like this: NA > EU > Japan. So in this case you would add Gunner's Heaven as alternate name for Rapid Reload and delete the Japanese entry. If we used whichever title the game has originally, we'd have a lot more Japanese titles as the main one.