Good localisation is a treat. It’s an art. And few games do it better than the Dragon Quest series. When they make the jump from Japanese to English, the mainline Dragon Quest RPGs always get the royal treatment and Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age is no exception. In fact, Shai Matheson’s performance as the flamboyant circus trickster Sylvando could well be my favourite piece of video game voice work ever. Dragon Quest 11’s script is also a princely masterpiece. But judged solely on the translation, and despite a much smaller budget, the peculiar, Minecraft-esque spin-off game Dragon Quest Builders 2 might just steal the crown.
The English translation in Builders 2 is . It’s a non-stop barrage of flawless puns, knockout one-liners and perfectly pitched pop culture references. It’s also a song to British linguistic diversity. The game is split into several acts. Each has its own island sandbox to play around in, its own story, and its own cast of characters who, in true Dragon Quest style, speak their own UK dialects. There’s very little voice acting and, as dialects are tricky to recognise when they’re written down, meeting a new character becomes a game of ‘guess the accent’.
Could that be… West Country?
Hang about! That’s London, innit!
That’s… okay, that’s… wait, what that?
That was Jules, a friendly monster with a penchant for shiny – in Jules’ words ‘zhooshy’ – things. And Jules peppers every sentence with a bevy of weird slang terms. Some of them are familiar: ‘ogle’, ‘mince’, ‘naff’. Some of them are novel: ‘ajax’, ‘meshigener’, ‘varda’. And rather than making things clearer, each new word only deepens the mystery. No matter how hard I squinted, I had absolutely no clue what dialect Jules was speaking or sometimes even what Jules was saying.
So I did a little research. As it turns out, Jules speaks something called ‘Polari’. And if you find it hard to follow, that’s very much intended. Polari is what’s known as a ‘cant slang’ or a secret dialect. You use it when you don’t want to be understood. Polari had its harlequin origins as a language of buskers, sailors, merchants and showmen – itinerant wanderers who lived on the fringes of society. It borrows words from Italian, Yiddish and Romani then mixes them together with a generous dollop of Cockney rhyming slang. Polari was used in Britain in the 1950s, 60s and before to allow LGBTQ people, most often gay or bisexual men, to communicate in secret. But why did they need to?