It’s fairly common knowledge that localizing the original Animal Crossing for the West was a massive undertaking, but now we know the prospect was daunting enough to make Nintendo legend Satoru Iwata erupt in a fit of laughter.
Animal Crossing, released as Dōbutsu no Mori+ in Japan (Animal Forest in English) on N64 and later on GameCube, famously required English localizers to translate thousands of lines of text, create new items and entire holidays in place of Japan-specific ones, and rename every character and their unique catchphrases.
Then-Nintendo of America localization manager Leslie Swan told Time Extension the entire process took somewhere between six months and a year to complete. She also said that when then-producer Takashi Tezuka approached her about the project, he explicitly warned her that it would be a sizable undertaking.
“He basically said to me, ‘We’d like to have you localize it’ and I said, ‘Sure’. But then he said, ‘No, Leslie, I’m not sure you understand, it’s going to be difficult’. And I kept having to assure him that we would make it happen,” said Swan.
And make it happen, they did, but not before Iwata laughed in their faces.
“I was in a meeting with Mr. Iwata and some other heads of the development group, and we were just kind of going around saying, ‘Here’s what we’re going to be working on’, and I just said, ‘Well, Mr. Tezuka is asking us to work on Animal Forest’ and he just burst out in laughter,” Swan said. “He just laughed and said, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do this.’ And it’s true, just everything in that game was so specific to Japan.”
Animal Crossing’s many Japan-isms aside, one only need look at Tom Nook – the anthropomorphized tanuki who loans out a house to the player character and runs the nearby shop – to understand what Swan’s saying here. And while that’s a big reason we all love Animal Crossing to this day, I don’t envy Swan and her team for having to translate it in a way that makes sense and appeals to us Westerners.
These days, Animal Crossing is one of the best Switch games you can play.