Bop's comes in 2 flavors

On November 11th, Publicity Producer of Square Enix, Kazunori Inoue, attempted to unshroud some of the mystery surrounding the two separate Black Ops Japanese release dates that have been doing the rounds in recent promotional materials.
On November 11th, Publicity Producer of Square Enix, Kazunori Inoue, attempted to unshroud some of the mystery surrounding the two separate Black Ops Japanese release dates that have been doing the rounds in recent promotional materials.

                                          （Subtitled Version) Due out November 18, 2010)
                                              (Dubbed Version) Due out December 16, 2010)

While the version with original English voices and Japanese subtitles is earmarked for a November 18th release, just 9 days after the North America street date, the dubbed version with full Japanese voiceovers won't be touching down till December 16th, a full month away. On November 11th, Producer Kazunori maxed out the 140-character Twitter limit 7 times consecutively; in order expound on the difficulties the localization team faced in bringing these two flavors to the market.

Why not have both versions on one disk? Kazunori explained, were they to allow players the ability to toggle between Japanese dubbed voiceovers, and the original English voices with Japanese subtitles, they would’ve run the risk of triggering unexpected multiplayer bugs that could’ve potentially affected on-line players worldwide.

To reconcile this, he said that the localization team opted to make the game available in two separate versions instead. Kazunori attributed the dubbed version’s late release to scheduling. Kazunori tweeted, “Square Enix enlisted top voice talent for the dubbed version, and so in interest of keeping the dialogue and performance consistently high in quality, we ended up working till the last possible moment. The decision to work up to the wire is what caused dubbed version to get pushed back by a full month.”

Why did they decide to have two versions in the first place? Kazunori cited a recent poll that asked previous Call of Duty purchasers whether they preferred dubs or subs. The results revealed that 40% of the respondents fell into the voiceover camp or 吹き替え派 (fukikaeha) as opposed to the 60% in favor of subtitles or 字幕派 (jimakuha) They felt that 40% was significant enough to warrant having two versions. “It took a lot of convincing before we could finally persuade the developer to grant us special approval to prepare two separate versions”, tweeted Kazunori. Unlike Europe, Japanese consumers are well-known for having a penchant for Japanese subtitles rather than Japanese Dubbing. Toda Natsuko, one of the most famous Hollywood movie subtitle translators has commented about this on numerous occasions and in her paperback autobiography 字幕の中に人生 (Jimaku no Naka ni Jinsei - Life Inside of Subtitles). In contrast to movies, Square Enix’s poll results no doubt reveal that the hectic gameplay in FPS titles like CoD leave scant time for players to savor the on-screen subtitles while they are firmly ensconced in the throes of combat.

People not in the know may naively assume that subtitles and dubbing are easy tack ons. The fact is that localization often entails changing the code to compensate for the increased use of memory. Kazunori stressed that he wanted to avoid any unforeseen issues that could adversely affect overseas players. Also, it is an unavoidable fact that the compiling of audio data and debugging work takes a lot of time.

Kazunori Inoue wrapped up his 7-tweet train on an upbeat note, “If there is a next time, I think it would be best for the game to be a simultaneous (worldwide) release and contain both dubs and subs together. For now, I just going to hang in there and focus on selling this game and producing solid results so that next time we are better positioned to have our needs addressed by the developer. All I ask for is your warm support. Well actually if I’m allowed to wish, then I would like to ask that you support us by buying one of the Japanese versions of Black Ops.” (laughs).

Source: Blog livedoor