Scott Strichart

Finally

Going to Japan for the first time in 11 years tomorrow! It’s a business trip and I’ve got wall to wall meetings all week, but drop me a line if you wanna say hi and I’ll uh… try to make it happen

A hand drawn map of the original NES Castlevania game.

The full map to the original Castlevania. This is a brilliant map. Despite seeing a map in between stages, you don't really think about how it all connects, but the flow lines up almost perfectly making one cohesive castle.

Growth is a good thing!

Man, that’s fair. Some really cool gameplay and whole series celebrations that are unfortunately wrapped in the cringiest dressing. Some characters are more tolerable than others and they’re the ones I kept alive haha

Wings of the Goddess! I went in expecting timey-wimey nonsense at the scale of the crystal war and instead got a bunch of more intimate storylines of war and sacrifice MIXED with timey nonsense 🙂

A crappy topsters image of the 18 games I finished in 2025

The smattering of games I finished this year. It was neat to escape my JRPG enclosure for a few of these and clear some things I’d meant to do 5-25 years ago. I remain adamant that playing games years late is the way: less discourse, fewer bugs, and whole content updates!

Fired up an old iPad and got to read about 8 tweets from 2022. Man

Google Photos: remember that time you captured the perfect shot of the golden hour?
The shot:

Isometric fanart of multiple Majima Everywhere encounters from Yakuza Kiwami. Majima runs into Kiryu in different parts of a Kamurocho street corner in various disguises or hiding spots. Goromi, Hannya-Man, and 24-Hour Cinderella are among Majima's disguises.

KIRYU-CHAN! 🔪✨
#yakuza

If your game has voice acting, then working with the voice actors is half of your writing process. It's not complete until you've heard it interpreted and reimagined by a voice actor. And they always reimagine it in ways that elevate the writing, in ways you never would have imagined yourself.

I love them all actually but putting a few moments out there that have stuck with me

Bless the fine people at Square Enix who decided to put the actual logo of FFT on the package spine instead of that terrible “arial black on white” that they’ve defaulted to for a decade plus. You have some of the most beautiful art, logos, and fonts in the industry!Keep using them!

I was a QA tester on the PS2 version that became the Wii port! It was miserable, lol. I’m so confused to be seeing it back in the TL, time is circular

This is an amazing bit of localization history, touching on A Link to the Past, Super Mario 64, Pokemon, and Animal Crossing!

To this day there is a certain subset of people who seem to think that Japanese is a sterile, wooden language (and thus, wooden translations are more “”accurate””) when the real Japanese is infinitely more creative than they could ever imagine

10 years ago my boss asked me if I’d ever want to dub Yakuza 0 - I was like, Nahhh. But life comes at you slow, and I’m glad we had 10 years (in the joint) to prepare for the challenge. THANK YOU to the entire team, cast, and crew who made it possible, and enjoy the game!

A graphic asking “Which Frodo are you today” featuring 9 ridiculous Frodo faces as depicted by Elijah Wood in the Lord of the Rings trilogy

Having a real 8 day so far, will be 9 by the end

Haha that was a major catalyst, yes

No, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 wasn't "made" by 30 people Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's credits are a lot bigger than "30 developers".

Food for thought. External QA, animators, voice actors, and musicians deserve to be part of the narrative of game makers.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter (I did)

I can’t believe you’ve done this but THANK YOU GREG

Great write up!

Every store: Great, thank you for taking our survey. Now, if you would like to opt out of receiving an email every 10 minutes, please check the box that says "Yes, subscribe me!" And don't forget about your free *terms and conditions apply* taco! We'll just need to ask you a few more questions

Every store: Thank you for taking the time to complete our survey! We see you bought [product], but is there a reason you didn't buy [other product]? Price? Package Appeal? Can you quantify your interest in [other product] on a scale of 1 to 10? [Jeremy] did mention it was 20% off... didn't he?

Every store: Oh, four stars? You do realize [Jeremy]'s livelihood depends on that 5th star, don't you? We base our incentive program on customer satisfaction, and you do want [Jeremy] to be able to afford groceries this week, don't you? Now tell us, what can [Jeremy] do to earn that big 5?

Every store: Thanks for shopping with us! Now if you would kindly leave us a 500 word, 5 star review essay on Yelp, rate your customer service associate, [Jeremy] with another 5 stars, and take this short (15 min.) survey about your experience for a chance to win a FREE taco? WE VALUE YOUR FEEDBACK

And that human symphony, experienced by voters and jury members of the Game Awards in a *downstream language* was still found worthy of the Best Narrative accolade. I hope you'll celebrate it as victory not just for Sega/Atlus and our team, but one for the power of and a case for good localization.

Nevertheless it's an accomplishment, dare I say it, for the whole profession. As translators fight for living wages, to be credited for the their work, as AI threatens livelihoods, Metaphor's narrative was written by humans, translated by humans, and performed by humans (...heh if you know you know)

I don't mean to go back to the Game Awards; we all know the troubles. BUT — Metaphor winning Best Narrative is the first Japanese to English localization title to achieve that in the show's 10 years. And yeah, "down year", dearth of "prestige" AAA titles to compete against, I know all that. (1/3)