I
n 1999,JapaneseRPGdeveloperSquaresoftwas
on top of the world. Final Fantasy VII and Final
Fantasy VIII were blockbuster successes and
every other quirky RPG it released seemed
destined to become a cult classic. But even at
the peak of its popularity Square was still releasing
games it decided were too niche, too hard to translate,
or too Japanese to release in the West. One of those
was Racing Lagoon, an RPG that blended trendy street
racing and bizarre, almost poetic writing into a game
that nearly defies description. Imagine if E E
Cummings wrote the script for a Fast & Furious movie
and you’ll be on roughly the right track.
Twenty-two years later, Racing Lagoon is finally playable
in English – and we have a fan translator who goes by the
name ‘Hilltop Works’ to thank for channelling its singular
style into English, in the process coining the best gaming
diss since ‘spoony bards’.
“This lady who’s the boss of Chinatown throws an
insult at you, and I wanted to use ‘green beans’, an insult
no one’s used before, I don’t think,” he says. “But you hear
it and you kind of understand what it means, you know?
‘Green beans’ means someone who’s kind of young, not fit
to be where you are. The line was, ‘Get it, green beans?
Chiantown has rules.’”
InJapanesetheinsultissomethingsimplelike‘brat’,
but the goofy localisation works in a game that’s
famously quirky even in Japan. Hilltop says Racing
Lagoon has had something of a rediscovery at home in
recent years, because even there there’s nothing else like
it. “They call the speech Lagoon-go, ‘go’ meaning accent,
where every character adds in random English words
and speaks very poetically.”FAN UP
Hilltop works in videogame QA by day and on the Racing
Lagoon translation in his spare time, aided by a team of
volunteers who are divvying up the hefty script. He
discovered the game by chance when someone brought it
up in Twitch chat and soon became enamoured, taking it
on as his second-ever fan translation project after Dr
Slump, a PS1 game based on the comedic manga Akira
Toriyama created before Dragon Ball. In both cases he
decided to translate them himself because he wanted
other people to see them.
“This game is wild. This game is absolutely nutters
crazy. There is just nothing like it, at all, and people need
to see it,” he says. “I think of this game like a beautiful
diamond. It’s a pure crystal – no part of it could really
ever be recreated.” The late ’90s street racing aesthetic is
intensely nostalgic for 30-somethings who grew upTune up
PancakeTaicho
cites Racing
Lagoon’s music
as the main
reason he fell in
love with the
game. “The
soundtrack is a
world unto itself
that I just wanted
to hang out in all
the time,” he
says. If you want
to buy a super
rare CD of the
jazz fusion
saxophone
wailing over
techno, be
prepared to pay
as much as
$1,000.CAR TALK
An aspiring full-time fan translator finds his calling with Square RPG RACING LAGOON
PCG INVESTIGATES
Special
Report