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Welcome to Dragon Quest VIII – YouTube
Yutaka Sano, then Square Enix’s localization manager, feared the Britishisms would alienate the American audience. The resulting compromise was bizarre: the team was permitted to use only two out of three regional markers—punctuation, spelling, or phrasing—while the third had to remain strictly American. Honeywood recalls this as a particularly illogical restriction, noting that a dialect is rarely an “either-or” proposition.
For titles like Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, the team applied British phrasing and punctuation but stuck to neutral or American spelling to avoid confusion. To navigate these linguistic waters, Honeywood hired British English specialists but was required to maintain a single American voice to act as a “sanity check.”
Matt Alt, a veteran of Dragon Quest 7, took on the role of the team’s U.S. barometer. “He was our gauge, specifically for the characters Cash and Carrie in the town of Baccarat,” Honeywood says.
“These characters were designed as brash American archetypes—essentially British writers poking fun at their cousins across the pond. Matt embraced the parody; he found the satire hilarious and encouraged us to lean even harder into the exaggerated Americanisms.”
Source: gamesradar.com
