A massive undertaking that established a totally unique and universally appealing tone for what could have been an easily-misunderstood game.

Got rid of the "Warrior", set the tone for all future DQs, had an awesome dub, and helped the series finally get a foothold in the West.

Localizing a full RPG about America from an outside perspective - specifically the perspective of a single idiosyncratic Japanese non-games writer - certainly seems like it would be a tall order for a guy who previously worked mainly on minor Mario spinoffs. Making it coherent to westerners at all would have been a win for him, but Marcus Lindblom managed to do it while maintaining the unique spirit of the original while also injecting enough of his own personality to help make our version the extremely unlikely success that it is.

They localized a concept rather than a game, and the result is pretty much perfect.

A monster assignment for Woolsey and the crowning achievement of his era-and-genre-defining work at Square.

Translating the amount of extremely Japanese concepts, references, jokes, and puns in the original probably seemed impossible, but then they called Alexander O. Smith. Consider this a celebration of all his work, but this one in particular has to be his greatest, even if it features less immediately impressive prose than any of his games for Matsuno.

Would deserve to be on here just for the names of the Pokemon alone. 151 puns good enough to be household names.

One that I remain genuinely surprised that they even attempted. They had to translate not only a Japanese game, but the experience of Japanese gaming itself. Packed with jokes and cameos referencing early American gaming and specifically '90s games press.

Established the distinctive English tone and verbiage of SMT as we now know it.

Faced with a period piece steeped in recent real life Japanese history and era-specific details and attitudes, Sega smartly overhauled their localization process for the series and focused on embracing and explicating the cultural differences instead of avoiding (or, crucially, omitting) them. The strategy worked perfectly and the series finally broke through in the West in part because of its success.