Pokemon Crystal was the first game to introduce gender options for the player character, but that made it a touch tricky to localise.
The first question you’re faced with in Pokemon Crystal is potentially a simple one: “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?” Granted, that isn’t exactly the easiest question for everyone, but Pokemon Crystal only gives you the two options, so the process is still simple overall. It’s not something you’d think about much these days, but was a pretty big deal for video games back in the day. However, the original localiser behind the Pokemon games right from the original Red and Blue right through to Platinum, Nob Ogasawara, has shared a neat little behind the scenes look into the process of localising such a choice, which turned out to be a bit more difficult than you might first expect.
Upon seeing the option, Ogasawara initially thought “‘Hot dang, this is progress. It opens up gaming to girls.’ (Yeah, naive. I’m glad they’ve gotten better.)” However, as he notes, “reality sank in. There’s no gender-specific text. No options for, ‘What’s [v1] doing here?’ v1 = he, she.” What Ogasawara means by that, is that because Japanese isn’t a gendered language in the way English is, and doesn’t have specific pronouns that change depending on gender, there wasn’t anything programmed to make the player character’s pronouns change automatically based on whether they choose boy or girl, because that wouldn’t be the case in Japanese.
About Author
