The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Ships in Japan

Bethesda Softworks producer Ashley Cheng stopped by the company’s official blog to announce that the Xbox 360 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion officially ships in Japan today. If you happen to be living there and plan to pick up a copy, here’s what you can expect:

– Knights of the Nine is included along with the entire original game in both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

– Close to a million words were translated (including ALL the books!) and the opening and closing cutscenes were re-recorded in Japanese. The game features subtitles in Japanese, the voice remains in English.

– The text in the game is a mix of Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji (approximately 1,200 characters), and the numbers are in Arabic numerals, like the English and European versions.

– We spent a lot of time adjusting the interface so that translated strings would fit properly. While the overall interface did not change, you’ll find lots of tweaks everywhere.

– Books and scrolls read left to right, unlike written Japanese, which is read vertically, right to left.
The persuasion wheel has been remade so that it is in Japanese.

– Included are all the optimizations and bug fixes from the 1.2 update.

– There is a Japanese version of the Oblivion website with more details, check it out.

– What about downloadable content? Well, we’re looking into it. That’s all I can say about this for now.