ナムコバンダイゲーム(Namco Bandai Games)

The building looks like a giant aztec pyramid. Inside there are cabinets for each arcade they have released to the arcades free to play. My favorite game is a light gun shooter where you take aim at physical moving alien pigs that come toward you to try and steal your energy crates. If they come close enough they will snatch one up and start pulling back to where they came from. You can still shoot them at this point but the crate will remain in its pulled back position making it easier for the alien pig to snatch next time. Basically you have to be able to kep all your energy crates for a certain amount of time. Normal mode was a breeze but pro is a different story. I never even got close to winning.

The first stop of the tour was going to the sound design department. We went into the sound compiling/testing room where we spoke with the head sound designer for Soul Calibur 4. He played the opening to the game for us with the nice speaker set up. It sounded cool. The game has Darth Vader and Yoda in it as extra characters. Someone asked whethere or not Lucas provided the light saber sounds for the game. The guy said that Skywalker sound did send them lightsaber sfx, but they didn't fit with what they needed to match their video and the sound quality wasn't on par with what they had so they ended up making their own lightsaber sfx. They then sent the sound to Lucas and got the okay.

The guy said that Lucas may even think that the sfx they sent were used in the game even though they weren't.

We then headed over to the motion capture studio. They were filming some stuff for a game while we were there. The only thing that I remember was a girl lying on the ground and another girl running over, kneeling down and shaking her shoulders saying 「しかりしろ！」(Hang in there!)

One of the mo-cap guys said that one of the strangest things they had mo-capped was the producer of a panda sim game pretending to be a panda.

The most interesting part of the visit for me was getting to talk with two Americans who were working there. One was in Strategic Planning and the other in Localization management. I told them that I was interested in finding a job doing translation/localization for games or anime in Japan. They told me that it's a hard job to find since most companies outsource the translation to a place outside of Japan and then have it sent back to Japan. As one of those translators you're pretty much in crunch time once you receive the project until it's done. It gets translated, sent back, and then never seen again by the original translator. (Unless he or she buys the game once it's released of course) There's only one gaming company that does in house translation in Japan and that's Square-Enix.

So they said that most of the jobs in gaming/anime for foreigners in Japan lie in localization management. For that they said that you need to be fluent in Japanese, well organized and be able to keep things running smoothly on schedule. There isn't a whole lot of translation in the job but more managerial skills. Another point they made was that it's very important to not lose hold of your understanding of English otherwise a bilingual Japanese person could easily do your job.

Overall though I don't think I'd want to work there as it seemed a little too large and overbearing for me. I know Square-Enix would be similar in size but I feel if they do in house translation there would be more job opportunities for me. Plus their games have much deeper story lines compared to the simpler action and fighting games that namco bandai makes.