Have you ever been excited for the latest installment from your favorite foreign franchise, but when you finally check it out, something is just … off? You can't put your finger on it, but it doesn't seem quite right?

Localization is critical to reaching an audience, and good localization makes for a truly authentic experience. Of course, game design, art, and a release's overall creative design are absolutely critical to adapting a Japanese franchise to a Western trading card game, but it's the linguistic and cultural aspects that truly give it its soul. It's not easy to adapt something in a way that is believable and natural to a totally different audience and culture, yet it's so important that the new audience can understand the creator's original vision and be fully immersed in that world.

That is why I want to talk about the main topic of this article: how for the first time in Magic history, Wizards of the Coast, an American company, and SQEX, a Japanese company, made this entire set in both English and Japanese—one of the most difficult and incompatible languages pairs—simultaneously.

My name is Joseph Leis, and I was the program manager for Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™. My main responsibility was to manage our relationship with SQEX and be the primary point of contact. Additionally, because of the English-to-Japanese language barrier that existed between the two companies, I was also the main lead translating emails and interpreting in meetings every day so the two companies could communicate directly with each other.

The Challenges of Developing a Set in Both English and Japanese

Wizards has created nearly 170 Magic sets over its history, and by now, the development process is a well-oiled machine! This process assumes that the set's entire development is done in English, which makes sense, since Wizards is primarily based out of the USA and many of its staff are native English speakers.

However, with both Wizards and SQEX having the shared goal of making the set as accurate to the original series as possible, Wizards needed to communicate and receive feedback from SQEX's creators in Japanese. The standard process of finalizing a set in English, localizing it into various languages, and sending the set in Japanese for feedback wouldn't work, since no changes could be made at that point. That commitment to authenticity is what led to developing the set in both languages.

Now, when language becomes a focus, it's challenging to balance translation (accuracy) with localization (intelligibility). While I have been using the two terms interchangeably up until this point, there is a pretty big difference between the two. Basically, do you prioritize direct accuracy with minimal changes (translation), or do you prioritize the intent or meaning behind the message, finding the equivalent of idioms, dialect, slang, and more that hold a similar place in both culture and meaning (localization)?

It's incredibly hard to balance the two since there are pros and cons to both! More accuracy to the original sounds good on the surface, except when you sacrifice intelligibility and the result sounds robotic and unnatural—it defeats the purpose of creating immersion. On the other hand, when you focus too much on the meaning and adapting to make sense to a culture, there is a very real risk of diverging from the original creator's intent. There is no right-size-fits-all answer; the best solution changes depending on the situation.

While Wizards and SQEX decided to strike a balance between the two, in the end, we landed on putting slightly more emphasis on the "accuracy" side of the spectrum and trying to make the English and Japanese match as much as possible while localizing to match each audience.

What to do when the English and Japanese don't match?

However, even though we were generally aligned on the guiding principle, there will always be interesting conundrums and exceptions that challenge the rule!

Summon: Good King Mog XII/召喚：蛮神善王モグル・モグXII世

What about card names that fit in Japanese but not in English. Summon: Good King Mog XII is a great example of this. In Japanese, the card name is 召喚：蛮神善王モグル・モグXII世. That is seventeen characters, which fits on a Magic card.

0026_MTGFIN_CommNew: Summon: Good King Mog XII

However, if we just focused on the most accurate version and translated it word for word into English, it would be 33 characters: "Summon: Primal Good King Moggle Mog XII," which overshoots the space limit of the card frame! There is no golden rule that we can tell partners, like "Oh, seventeen letters is the max," since English's alphabet has different widths depending on the letter (i.e., a card name with a bunch of i's might fit more letters).

In this case, what is the best solution? Do we sacrifice the original creator's intent and shorten the Japanese card name? Do we keep the Japanese card name the same and shorten the English version? Do we break our rule and let English and Japanese diverge? What happens when accuracy conflicts with Magic's physical card limitations?

After much discussion with SQEX and testing some other options ("Summon: King Moggle Mog XII," "Summon: Primal Moggle Mog," "Summon: Good King Mog"), we decided that keeping the Japanese name as is and shortening the English card name to Summon: Good King Mog XII by removing the words "Primal" and "Moggle" would be best for this situation. For those eagle-eyed FINAL FANTASY XIV fans, this is the only Primal where we were not able to fit the term into the card name.

Cloud, Midgar Mercenary/ミッドガルの傭兵、クラウド

Now, with Cloud, Midgar Mercenary, we took the opposite approach!

0001_MTGFIN_ProPromo: Cloud, Midgar Mercenary

Originally, SQEX's creators wanted to go with "なんでも屋、クラウド" for the card name. The problem: an English equivalent to "なんでも屋" doesn't exist; there is not a single translation that comes close to capturing the meaning!

So, what is a なんでも屋 (nandemoya)? The term is a combination of two words: なんでも ("anything") and 屋 ("someone who does something"). A なんでも屋 (nandemoya) is basically someone you can go to with any request in the world, and they'll help you solve the problem. Is your pet cat missing? The なんでも屋 (nandemoya) will help you find it! Need help putting up a fence? The なんでも屋 (nandemoya) is there to help! Oh, no—a ton of monsters have spawned, and no one can use the highway! Never fear, the なんでも屋 (nandemoya) is here! Anyone who has played FINAL FANTASY VII would say that it's a great description of who Cloud is. No matter what the problem or request is, you can rely on him to help.

What happens if you try to localize なんでも屋 into English? If you look it up in a dictionary or the internet, you'll likely find translations like "Handy man," "Contractor," and "Jack of all trades." There are no one-to-one translations, and the closest choices are … not ideal. What happens when a translation doesn't exist or the word has an inapplicable connotation in English with a positive connotation in Japanese?

We really wanted to find something in English that captures the awesomeness of the original Japanese card name. But even with everyone at Wizards and SQEX racking our brains, we were not able to find a satisfactory solution.

As a result, this is a case where we decided to prioritize localization over translation and changed the Japanese card name to ミッドガルの傭兵、クラウド to align with the English card name, Cloud, Midgar Mercenary. This still conveys the SQEX creator's original intent, since "mercenary" serves a similar role, while ensuring the English card name is cool and accurate to the character.

Suplex/メテオストライク

For the final example, I want to talk about the card Suplex. This is a card where we very intentionally chose to have English and Japanese diverge. In English, the card name is Suplex; in Japanese, it's メテオストライク (Meteor Strike).

0164_MTGFIN_Main: Suplex

Why, after going through several hundred cards one by one to make the English and Japanese names align as closely as possible, did we go against our own guiding principle?

I am sure many FINAL FANTASY VI fans will recognize the scene depicted in the card art, but for those unaware, Sabin's ability to use suplex on the phantom train boss is a very popular in-joke within the fandom. While the Japanese name of the skill has always been メテオストライク ("meteor strike"), the skill was first localized as "suplex" in the original FINAL FANTASY VI. The English translation was then updated to "meteor strike" to match the Japanese-language name when FINAL FANTASY VI was rereleased in 2022 as part of the pixel remaster series. Thus, the English localization is different depending on the version of the game.

After some discussion, Wizards and SQEX agreed to prioritize the latest rerelease localizations whenever we encountered divergences in SQEX's own localizations for terms from older titles, so initially, SQEX's creators and Localization team suggested that we call the card "Meteor Strike." However, this was something that Principle Narrative Designer Dillon Deveney went back and forth through multiple rounds of negotiations with SQEX, explaining how important that scene and the name "Suplex" would be to English-speaking FINAL FANTASY VI fans, how kids growing up would yell "suplex!" at the top of their lungs while playing at the playground, and how the nostalgia of the term was something that he wanted to keep as an Easter egg for English-speaking FINAL FANTASY VI fans.

In the end, SQEX agreed with Dillon's reasoning, and that is why this card is Suplex in English and メテオストライク (Meteor Strike) in Japanese!

Wrapping Up

Those are just three examples I picked from many, many conversations between Wizards and SQEX when developing this set. I could pick a hundred more; the creative process is iterative, and things changed several times before resulting in what you see in the final product. But I just want to reassure all Magic and FINAL FANTASY fans that, throughout the entire four- to five-year span of development, the daily late-night calls and thousands of emails, every piece of art, every single card name, piece of flavor text, and flavor word was reviewed multiple times by so many people in both companies.

We also went to meet SQEX in Japan multiple times throughout the project. One highlight was a play test where, halfway through the project, we took cards to Japan, showed Square some of the game mechanics we were working on, spent hours playing with the SQEX staff, and got feedback on the set's design.

The final point I'd like to make is that, while this article focused on the authenticity Wizards strived for, another secret ingredient that made this set such a success was the passion, love, and respect SQEX staff has for Magic: The Gathering. Some SQEX staff have been playing Magic for more than 15 to 20 years! Their deep understanding of the game was crucial to how this set turned out. One of the first times I played Commander against one of SQEX's staff, I got smacked for an infinite amount of damage by his Urza, Lord High Artificer commander on turn five. It was a great "Welcome to working on the set, hahaha!"

A lot of care and attention went into making this set authentic to FINAL FANTASY, not only in its card design, art, and creative text but from linguistic and cultural perspectives as well. I'm sure you'll hear more from some of the other people who worked on this set, but I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain of what it was like working on Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY and how we brought this awesome collaboration to life!