This interview was originally published on Reddit on March 21, 2022 via our BreathofFireFans account.
Dragnier is proud to present an interview with two former American staff who worked on Breath of Fire II! Chris Kramer and Justin Berenbaum both used to work for Capcom USA (known back then as Capcom Entertainment) and are given special thanks in the Breath of Fire II Authorized Game Secrets Prima strategy guide.
We had the pleasure of chatting with them over e-mail about the first two Breath of Fire games and their English localization for the Super Nintendo.
How did you come to work for Capcom USA, and what was your role at the company?
Chris Kramer (CK): Pure dumb luck. [In 1993], I had just graduated from San Jose State and went in for a terrible temp job, when I noticed the Capcom logo on a building across the street.
During my lunch break, I walked across the street into the doors of Capcom USA and said to the receptionist “Do you have any job openings? I’ll do anything to work here. Sweep floors, deliver mail, whatever.” She laughed and told me that there was an opening that might be right for me and told me to come back the next day with a resume. Within six months, I was hired as a “game counselor” at Capcom, answering the phone and helping people who were stuck, needed a little encouragement or just someone to talk to about the game they were playing.
After a year of this, I managed to finagle my way into PR and my career took off from that point. I left Capcom in ’96 and went on to work for a lot of other great game companies, eventually returning 2006 – 2010 to help relaunch the Street Fighter brand, as well as a lot of other amazing games.
Justin Berenbaum (JB): I actually answered an ad in a newspaper for a store manager. At the time, Capcom owned a series of retail stores called G&G Software and they were looking for a manager for one of their Bay Area stores. I went in and interviewed with the CFO and was then offered the opportunity to take the store manager position or work at G&G Corporate and try to build out their mail-order division. I took the latter as I believed it would give me more exposure to the execs and the ability to build out something.
A year or so after starting at G&G, Capcom was selling off the division and I didn’t want to go so I took a bit of a temporary demotion in title (not pay) to move into Capcom’s C.S. department. Lucky for me the more senior folks in C.S. all moved to other roles within a short period of time and I quickly was moved to manager of the team.
Both of you are mentioned in the Special Thanks section of Prima’s Breath of Fire II Authorized Game Secrets strategy guide alongside Isao Kanamori. How did you come to be involved with Breath of Fire II and what was your (and Isao’s) role with the game?
CK: Isao was part of the Capcom Japan “away team” to the US. I’m not sure what his actual title was, but he was more or less a multi-purpose fixit guy. I offered to help him out with BoF, but by the time BoFII rolled around I was too busy with other work within the company so Justin was a natural fit to take on the project. Justin was running the Game Counseling group at that point, having managed to turn it into a profit center by revamping the 1-900 tip line (the internet was still not a thing), but he did A LOT of other things within the company.
JB: I still have the BoFII guide somewhere I think. I did a lot of editing and correcting in the guide to review it before release. Bunch of small little things. My C.S. team handled a bunch of functions including a bit of localization Q/A and testing for some of the games that came over from Japan and we even got to test a bunch of the arcade machines. I don’t remember the exact series of events that led to it, but one day a few other Capcom folks came into my office and said “we need help”. They held a stack of paper (don’t remember exactly how many pages but it was huge, we joked it was 1,000 pages) that was literally the raw translated text from Breath of Fire II. It was a straight literal translation.
I was asked to do my best to make it into conversational English in 3-4 weeks. It’s a good thing I didn’t have much of a life at the time because I sat and played through the build while reading the script and made notes, edits, and adjustments the best I could as I played the game. I recall at the end of these 2 week periods getting the largest paychecks I had ever received at the time (I was still hourly). Within a month or so of this, I was moved to salaried and given a raise (probably to save the company money, ha ha).
We noticed this part in the guide where they mention you by name, Justin. It sounds like you didn’t want to tell gamers about the Gold Bar carpenter cooking secret in TownShip for maxing out your money! The internet found out eventually, though.
JB: Ha ha – Remember, when this game came out the Internet wasn’t quite that much of a thing for most people yet. We knew it would come out. Frankly it made the game just too easy but we did like hinting at it.
Were you familiar with the first Breath of Fire prior to working on Breath of Fire II?
JB: I actually was. When I was building out and running the mail order division of G&G Software, I had developed genre lists of customers who were interested in particular types of games. One of the largest lists at the time were RPG players. I was an RPG fan myself and really liked the Dragon Quest series as well as other traditional RPGs. So I had actually played Breath of Fire when it was published by Square as I played most of their RPG’s at the time along with the stuff coming from Koei and a few others.
The first Breath of Fire game was published in the West by Squaresoft. Why didn’t Capcom USA publish the first game in the U.S.?
CK: I can’t recall exactly why — I think there was a concern that a game like BoF might not sell well in the US (in the early 90s, a lot of salespeople I worked with would say things like “This game/box art is too Japanese for our retailers”), so Square seemed better equipped to release it. SNES cartridges were really expensive for third party developers like Capcom, so you really needed to be confident that there was an audience for your game because production and shipping costs were immense, oftentimes millions of dollars out the door before you saw a single penny in return.
JB: That’s a really good question and I don’t have an answer. I can only speculate that as part of the relationship between Square and Capcom Japan, Capcom probably felt that having an RPG published in the West by Square made more sense at the time as Capcom wasn’t really known for RPGs. There could have been a ton of other factors so this is just a guess.
Was Capcom USA involved at all with the first Breath of Fire, or was it all handled by Squaresoft?
CK: As far as I know, Capcom USA’s only involvement was Isao and I checking the English translations and helping with the strategy guide.
JB: I do not believe we were involved to any extent in the publishing; at least not that I was aware of. I do recall getting a few C.S. calls but having to refer those to Square.
What led to Capcom USA handling the publishing for the sequel?
CK: Money. The first game did well enough in the US that the company figured there was some gold to mine.
JB: Unfortunately, most of us were not really involved in those decisions. I can speculate that a combination of factors like the sales of the first game in North America, the growing U.S. office importance (in terms of sales and revenue) and the ability to have a larger portfolio all contributed to the decision.
Is there any insight you could give as to how the English translation of Breath of Fire II was handled?
CK: I was involved in the first BoF, not the second. I know that because we had a lot of dialog — including some of the first emails I ever sent and received professionally — with Ted and the Square team about the game. I know for sure that Isao had a Japanese to English dictionary and was checking endless pages of translations that I helped him on, but I don’t know if the English translation work originally stemmed from Capcom or Square.
[The English translation was handled] horribly. At one point, I noticed Isao was struggling with a huge ream of paper and asked what he was up to. Turned out he was translating and checking the entire script and dialog for the first Breath of Fire using a Japanese to English dictionary. I offered to help as I had some writing experience and spent the next couple of weeks checking hundreds of pages, making suggestions for grammar and localization changes, offering a few bad jokes and trying to squeeze everything into a challenging character limit for each dialog box. We had a huge amount of raw text with zero context — the dev team didn’t send us videotapes of the game being played, I didn’t have a ROM or cart of the game to play, nothing but pages and pages and pages and words and words and words. No connection to the characters or what was happening on screen. Keep this in mind if, as you replay BoF, you get to a section of the game that makes absolutely no sense, where the dialog becomes nonsensical or random or doesn’t match either the storyline or what’s happening on screen. Sorry!
This was a very “dawn of video games” approach — there were no companies like 8-4 to turn to for professional help, there was no (real) internet, everything was very much “figure out how to do this for no budget.” It was not a fun process but it was ultimately very rewarding to have my name listed in a game’s credits for the first time.
JB: I’m not sure what translation company was used to translate the original Japanese text/script into English. As mentioned above, I was handed a huge stack of paper and given a fairly short amount of time to try to have it all make sense. I often spent 4-6 hours a night after working 8 to 9 hours during the day, playing through the game and making notes on the printouts. Let’s just say mistakes were made. Sounds funny to say, but localization has come a really long way. We didn’t really have a lot of video game translation specialists back then.
(Editor’s Note: While Isao Kanamori did not respond to our e-mails, he has a resume posted publicly that mentions he started working at Capcom USA on July 1994 (one month before Breath of Fire’s release in North America), and mentioned working “with outside consultant to translate 700 pages of text in a timely manner. Created tool to have text available to read while game was being operated”, which we believe refers to the localization of Breath of Fire II; however without Mr. Kanamori confirmation, it is unclear. His roles at Capcom USA included “Inventory Control Manager / Consultant”, “Operations Manager”, and “R&D Coordinator / Liaison”.
In Breath of Fire’s SNES credits, the translators are listed as “K. Brandjord, R. Yamaji, Y. Orimo, and Ted Woolsey” and no Capcom USA staff are mentioned. In Prima’s Breath of Fire Authorized Game Secrets strategy guide, only Squaresoft staff are credited, and not Capcom staff. Meanwhile, Breath of Fire II does not have traditional developer credits, but Isao Kanamori, Justin Berenbaum, and Chris Kramer are thanked in Prima’s Breath of Fire II Authorized Game Secrets strategy guide, along with Masa Sekiya for “translation work”.)
What were some of the challenges faced with bringing an RPG like Breath of Fire II to North America in the mid-90s?
JB: Well, beyond the translation and slight culturalization issues of the time, bringing any large SNES game had its challenges. The logistics (bringing the carts over from Japan took a long time) so your sales forecasts had to be really accurate or it could take 6-8 weeks to get more units. The cost of goods was extremely expensive at the time and all the other Marketing/PR/Sales and distribution concerns of the time.
In particular, there were a few things that were culturally acceptable or popular in Japan that the game made reference to that were not all that well understood in the West. While I worked on converting the literal translation into conversational English, the team really could have no impact on the actual gameplay, animation, design.
We understand that Justin worked on editing the translated English script for Breath of Fire II. How was this process done, and what challenges did you run into when you inserted the translation into the game?
JB: The biggest challenges were time and character/text limits for much of the text. Because of the text boxes you had a very limited number of characters you could use sometimes, and therefore had to take some liberties with abbreviations and even make some stuff up to the best you could to make things work.
Was there any editing done to the text? If so, what lines were altered and why?
JB: As mentioned above a lot of little edits were made because of specific constraints of the platform and text boxes. Mostly abbreviations, word changes, and such. I had tried to keep things as close to original as possible but there were instances where a few liberties were taken for the sake of expediency. At some point I’m pretty sure I got slap happy and that’s where some of the inside jokes and other names came from. In some cases adjusting to social norms also came into play.
Were you involved with the renaming of the Breath of Fire II characters at all? “Boche” became “Bow”, “Rinpoo” became “Katt”, “Tapeta” became “Jean”, and “Aspara” became “Spar”.
JB: To be honest – I’m not 100% sure. I believe I helped rename [them] (Katt in particular seems familiar and the others). We tried to adjust a bit so as to culturize the names slightly in the West after much debate, but left as many alone as we could. This could just be my old mind putting random data there though as well. HAHA.
Was there any contact with the Breath of Fire II development team in Japan? Were they involved with the North American release of Breath of Fire II?
JB: Very little actually. I believe our marketing team had more interaction because of artwork approvals and such. I’m not even sure if they reviewed the localization or if the development team was just responsible for putting the English text back into the game. Most of the team that I knew did not really speak English at the time.
Was there a concern about some Japanese dialogue being too risque? For example, when Ryu is sneaking Bow out of HomeTown via the trash can, you can tell the guard you’ve got “comic books” you’re looking to throw out. In the original Japanese version, the “comic books” were actually referred to as “dirty magazines”. Can you recall any other dialogue or scenes that had to be changed?
JB: Well we couldn’t influence the actual gameplay at all so we had to try to stick to the original script as best we could or risk losing context with what was happening on screen. There were some things that were culturally acceptable in Japan (that the art and animation remained in the game) that we had to tweak the language around to make it less obvious or controversial. A few things certainly slipped through and some things we tweaked if we were really concerned. Parts were just changed by the translation team before I got them as certain words or phrases just didn’t have great literal translations available.
Breath of Fire II is known to have a story that goes into some very religious themes, including a church that is actually a facade for a demonic cult. There’s even a scene towards the end with Ryu slashing the demon god Deathevan in the face, accompanied by blood. Were there any concerns about the religious / violent content in the game being too controversial?
JB: There was so much going on in the industry at the time. Congressional hearings, lawsuits, attempts to ban video games or hide them in the back with porn (seriously, before E3 all of the game company booths were downstairs at CES next to all the porn booths). Strangely I think some of us had concerns but no real ability to make significant changes especially to the design or animation. I think if the story had been different with regards to the protagonist’s mission maybe there would have been more issues. I’m also guessing most of the folks looking to ban games were focused on the blood, gore, and over the top realistic violence than playing 40 hours into an animated RPG to find something to be offended by.
On Twitter, Justin mentioned a few inside jokes he had added to the game, including renaming some items and equipment like “SaladBwl”, “JahAR”, “KramerBR”, “Unagi”, and “Noe’sRB”. Do you happen to remember the backstory behind these inside jokes, and are there any other changes/jokes you can think of?
CK: Justin, being a total pal, snuck in thanks for several members of the US team by renaming a few items here and there. I was very pleased to learn that the “Romero Bracelet” in BoFII, which prevents you from becoming a zombie (haha, get it?) was renamed to be the Kramer Bracelet. This is the sort of nonsense we lived for that would not be possible in the 21st Century game industry. Mega Man boss robots would usually be renamed after our group had a few beers over lunch…
JB: I’d have to look at all of them to try to remember some of them. From my recollection it really came down to character/space limits, time, and running out of words to use. I tried to have fun with some things and [in reference to the item “Unagi”], I was a huge sushi fiend at the time (although I couldn’t afford to eat it that often) so I couldn’t resist putting some of the translations back into Japanese words that many Westerners knew. Several of the names were people we worked with or knew because we ran out of names to call items and couldn’t repeat. I may or may not have been a bit incoherent from exhaustion towards the end as well.
Right: The Super Nintendo box art for Breath of Fire II, released on December 10, 1995. According to Chris Kramer, the American box art was likely designed by the long-defunct Moore and Price Design Group. The design (featuring some of the character lineup) is reminiscent of the box art for the first Breath of Fire for SNES. (Images: Capcom / Mobygames) (1) (2)
The cover art for Breath of Fire II is noticeably different from the game’s Japanese art. Who designed this artwork, and why did it deviate greatly from the original Japanese artwork? Also, what is your take on the artwork?
CK: As I mentioned, Capcom USA had this really weird aversion to using Japanese art on box fronts and ads. There was a lot of pressure from sales to not appear to be “too Japanese.” As a result, almost every Capcom box cover throughout the 90s was created by Moore and Price Design Group, a marketing agency based in the Bay Area. Almost all of those covers are hand-painted;, this was all long before digital production and art became commonplace.
Moore and Price was trying to take the artwork coming from Capcom Japan and “American-ize” it for the US market, which is why so many of these boxes looked like Japanese art but only if viewed through a fish tank or the bottom of a beer glass. Personally, I disliked this style and made a lot of noise about it while I was there.
I was your stereotypical nerdy 90s kid working in video games: in love with all things Japan, huge anime and comic book fan, lots of toys and transforming robots on my desk. Wait, this is still an accurate description of me. Anyway, it wasn’t until after the debacle of the Street Fighter Alpha US cover art that we — the cohort of younger, louder kids working in the company — were finally able to get the US sales, marketing and production team to come around to using the amazing artwork coming from Capcom’s stellar internal art teams. You’re welcome, fellow nerds.
JB: The BoFII artwork was obviously Westernized to make it fit with what the team thought were expectations of the US market. It was a bit strange because a lot of other RPGs kept the original anime look and feel. I wasn’t really involved in that side so one of our other coworkers at the time, Corey Tressider or Scott Smith, might have way more insight on those things.
(Editor’s Note: We reached out to Scott Smith regarding the Breath of Fire II box art, however he noted that by the time he joined, Breath of Fire II had just released and he was not involved with the title. Likewise, Corey Tressider mentioned that he had no involvement with Breath of Fire II. According to Moby Games, Moore and Price Design Group was involved with Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Resident Evil. In 1999, they appear to have split into Moore Design Group and Price Design Team Inc., however neither company appears to be active nor have a running website.)
About the Moore and Price Design Group, what other art/covers were they in charge of besides Breath of Fire II and Street Fighter Alpha that you can recall?
CK: Just about every game that Capcom released in the US in the 90s: NES, SNES, Genesis (not too many of those) right up until the start of the 32-bit era. Mega Man X, Street Fighter II series, on and on. I can’t say for certain if they produced the cover art for every box but they did a whole lot of them. If you look through a gallery of box art from that period, you’ll notice a certain similarity in style amongst them. That era came to a definitive end in 1996, when images from Capcom’s in-house artists in Japan started to make it on to box fronts for games like Darkstalkers and Street Fighter Alpha 2 (although we did decide to go with the crazy Bill Sienkiewicz artwork that Marvel helped us to produce for the original Resident Evil on PS1 that year).
Justin, how long did you work on Breath of Fire II? Was there any additional work you have done for the second game?
JB: My only real work on the game itself was the localization editing and some light Q/A to point out some bugs that should be fixed. Because I knew the game so well after meticulously playing through I did help edit the strategy guide, and a few marketing/sales materials. So for the game piece, 4 – 6 weeks then additional time on the strategy guide.
If you could go back and change things about the localization, what would you have done differently?
JB: At this point in my career I’m not sure I’d go back to change too much of anything as it’s all been a learning experience. I mean, mistakes were made, without question. It would have been nice to have a little more time I suppose to try to get things done more accurately, but that’s about it. Well, in hindsight, maybe adjust some of the inside jokes or make a few more of them.
What was the perception of Breath of Fire II after it came out in North America? Do you recall it doing well?
CK: I know I loved it when I played it. The sales and reviews were good enough for the series to continue for many more years and on a few different platforms.
JB: I believe it did pretty well overall. I know that our CS team took tons of calls for months and that we sold out of the strategy guide, and our 900 hint line was always busy. I don’t have any hard data on the sales numbers though. I do recall hearing that BoFII outsold BoF pretty significantly in Japan and that our numbers for North America were very favorable in comparison.
Have you tried the Breath of Fire games for yourself? How did you like them?
CK: Final Fantasy III (VI) blew my mind, so I was into JRPGs for a few years. BoF came along at the right time for me. I finished the first and second game but had started to drift out of JRPGs by the time BoFIII came along.
JB: I was an old school RPG fan before I was introduced to the BoF series so I did play Breath of Fire. I enjoyed the first one but it is difficult to remember anything in particular at this point. I believe I ended up playing through BoFII 3-4 times in total not including all the starts and stops. We had no access to a debug build or any way to skip to certain portions at the time.
What other information can you share about working on the Breath of Fire games, such as the working environment, the group you worked in, and working on this game and seeing it released in stores?
CK: The US office was very collaborative because it was also very small at that time. The entire marketing department was less than 10 people, including PR and design services. Everyone was involved in projects that didn’t necessarily line up with their job titles because the work had to get done somehow. This is how you get a random customer service employee helping with game localizations or approvals on licensed comic book content.
JB: There was a core group of us that all were busting our butts on different aspects. The marketing team, PR team, sales team, and our C.S. team. There were not a lot of us but we all worked really well together probably because we had to get up and go talk to each other. There were no Zoom calls, we didn’t text each other on our phones, etc. So we had to all get into a room to talk and update each other. The advantage to having worked so closely on the translation, playing through it so many times, and more was that our C.S team was able to handle the hint line calls and support calls with such a high degree of knowledge on day one.
There was a sense of pride and accomplishment seeing a game you had even a small role in being on retail shelves. I remember holding a finished sealed box of the game and just being really happy. It’s a little bit of a drug in a weird way.
Are there any other topics we haven’t asked about that you would like to talk about?
JB: I find context is super important. It was a bit of the Wild West in the industry back then. I’m not sure most of us really knew what we were doing. We were all having fun, working hard, and trying to do the best we could. Our C.S. team would get some of the most amazing and random calls, questions, and even shouted at or verbally attacked. Part of me really wishes I made notes or we had recorded some of these. It could have been turned into a sitcom or something.
I recall having to speak to a congressman one day and a priest another. The team [was] being interviewed about a day in the life of working in games and staying super late to playtest the latest arcade version of Marvel vs. Capcom or Darkstalkers and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. A lot of mainstream people really looked down on games and players back in the day, so you never knew what you’d get when you picked up the phone.
We had a great group of people and I’m proud to say that many of them I still keep in touch with today, and a few are friends and haven’t disowned me after 25+ years. This experience really shaped my career in games and made me realize even being more of a “business” type in the game industry was still super valuable and you could help shape games and get more of them made. This may be why I’m such a fan of indie developers and like to try to find ways to help them get funding now.
Chris Kramer continues to do video game PR. You can follow him on Twitter @chriskramerpr.
Justin Berenbaum is the GM and VP Strategy of Xsolla Funding Club and you can also follow him on Twitter @sclug.
Note: We reached out to Isao Kanamori for this interview via e-mail, however we did not receive a response.