![]() This is why good localisation is priceless. And without Dragon Quest Builders 2, I'd probably never have heard of it myself. It risks being forgotten and relegated to the footnotes of history. Even so, most people have never heard of Polari. Moreover, there have been many excellent attempts to preserve the dialect, including Polari dictionaries, short films, and even a Polari bible translation. Of course, Polari's legacy is still felt, and it bequeathed us several words including 'mince', 'naff' and maybe 'blag'. However, as a sad consequence, it stopped being spoken. Gladly, when homosexuality became legal in 1967, it was no longer needed. By the mid-sixties, people began to catch on. The unusual CaPITaliSAtioN? That's a Dragon Quest thing. Charper means search, varda means see and orbs means eyes. For those in the know, well-spoken Polari could even be a form of theatre, and people had showmanly arguments where they'd one-up each other with more and more complex Polari sentences. People adopted new Polari names and identities. Polari was full of wry jokes, acid ironies and sing-song rhymes. And beyond simply facilitating communication, Polari was a language of fun, of gossip, of freedom, hope and self-expression in the face of tyranny. Slipping a Polari word into a sentence and watching for a glint of recognition was a safe way of knowing if someone else was also gay, or at least an ally. As well as a code, Polari was a secret handshake. They used Polari as a cipher to bamboozle police, outwit informants and talk freely, even in public. the police found out, you risked ridicule, jail time or worse. Just 53 years ago, homosexuality was illegal in the UK and if 'Jennifer justice' a.k.a. However, for gay people before 1967, there was much more at stake than simple indelicacy. People have dreamed up all sorts of delicate ways to ask indelicate questions. Well, the language of love is tricky at the best of times and is often just a teensy bit coded. 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. It borrows words from Italian, Yiddish and Romani then mixes them together with a generous dollop of Cockney rhyming slang. Polari had its harlequin origins as a language of buskers, sailors, merchants and showmen - itinerant wanderers who lived on the fringes of society. You use it when you don't want to be understood. Polari is what's known as a 'cant slang' or a secret dialect. And if you find it hard to follow, that's very much intended. As it turns out, Jules speaks something called 'Polari'. Polari can be hard to understand, and that's the whole point. No matter how hard I squinted, I had absolutely no clue what dialect Jules was speaking or sometimes even what Jules was saying. And rather than making things clearer, each new word only deepens the mystery. Some of them are novel: 'ajax', 'meshigener', 'varda'. Some of them are familiar: 'ogle', 'mince', 'naff'. And Jules peppers every sentence with a bevy of weird slang terms. That was Jules, a friendly monster with a penchant for shiny - in Jules' words 'zhooshy' - things. 'MY brothERS LoSe aLL sELf-coNTRol whEn tHeY vArDa SomeTHINGg ZhooSHy'. 'Babs is everyfin' to us, ya see - a sister, an auntie, a niece, a muvver, a bruvver'. 'Oo are 'ee, anyway? And what're 'ee doing all the way out 'ere?'. ![]() 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'. 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. It's also a song to British linguistic diversity. It's a non-stop barrage of flawless puns, knockout one-liners and perfectly pitched pop culture references. The English translation in Builders 2 is sublime. ![]() ![]() 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. Dragon Quest 11's script is also a princely masterpiece. In fact, Shai Matheson's performance as the flamboyant circus trickster Sylvando could well be my favourite piece of video game voice work ever. 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. And few games do it better than the Dragon Quest series.
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