BlueMue wrote: Shenmue just had WAY too much text for the time to provide multiple languages. It would've required a ton of work from many people to type it all up. Disc space management and integration of a system to have multiple subtitle files for a cutscene would've also required a good bit of extra work.
Depending on how much they could or couldn't work on it while the US version was still in the making it may have caused a huge delay for the PAL version and I think they really wanted to avoid that.
Back then we were used to getting games a good 6 months to a year after the US and Japan though because of translation so I'm not sure if it would really have been that much of a problem.
Tosh wrote:Subtitles and text for every language is super expensive.
Is it really though? compared to the overall costs it seems to be one of the least expensive things.
What I really don't get is that a system defining game like shenmue didn't get translated while skies of arcadia which I doubt is really that much less text heavy did. Maybe they just treated Europe as an afterthought and cared primarily about the American and Japanese markets (but then the notebook in shenmue 2 was translated in to French in the DC version while I don't think it was in the xbox version so who knows)