Hello everyone! Larrea from the NSG Translation team here. This is my first release leading the team and we couldn’t be more excited to show everyone all the cards that we have spent the last few months translating!
You might have already seen some cards from Vantage Point that were not in English – Netrunner-FR showed off Vertigo in their native French, Jai revealed the Chinese versions of Take A Dive and The Tungsten tailor on his blog, and tradon will be previewing a card in German at 17.00 UTC today. For today’s article, I talked to five different translators about their favourite cards from the new set, which include two new previews!
Chris Yang
I like my translation of Reanimation Protocol. When I was coming up with the card’s name, a card from another game immediately came to mind: Monster Reborn from Yu-Gi-Oh!. It’s a spell that brings a monster back onto the field, which is pretty much exactly what Reanimation Protocol does, bringing ICE back in defense position.
Once I made that connection, I really wanted to reference the Japanese name「死者蘇生」for our card. In the end, I chose to keep「蘇生」, meaning “rebirth,” in the translation. I am very proud of the card title「蘇生協議」that I came up with.
Reanimation Protocol
Weyland Consortium Operation: Liability
Play cost: 2 – Influence cost: 3
Install and rez 1 piece of ice from Archives, paying a total of 10 less. If you rezzed a piece of non-liability ice this way, take 1 bad publicity.
The only blasphemy is to wallow in deletion.
Illustrated by Ferenc Patkós
Tradon
I particularly like Grubber because it is one of those cards that combines various different levels of meaning, through its name, illustration, rule text, flavor text—or all of them at once.
Since I started translating, I’ve been looking at every aspect of each card much more closely than before—and as a result, I’ve often discovered additional, sometimes hidden, meanings or allusions that I might never have noticed otherwise.
In this case, I was not familiar with the term “Grubber” (a specific type of combine harvester) before. At the same time, I love the interplay of rules, flavor text, and artwork to illustrate the mixture of agricultural machinery and a virtual glutton that wants to grab the Runner’s money.
Bast
This card, despite its visual simplicity, has everything I love in a card:
- Short rules text.
Despite being just one line, the rules text manages to capture both the essence of the faction and the theme of the card: if you are rich it’s easy to get richer. You don’t care about the bad publicity, as long as you make lots of money.
The art reinforces the link between the theming of the card and its faction: you have a shark, an old privileged man that the artist has managed to make very vulture-like, and a shady atmosphere (literal and figurative). On top of that, if the disreputable actions at play here are not enough, you have the other Weyland “solution to problems” waiting in the background: physical violence.
Eric Li
I love Synchrocyclotron because its flavor text is practically a complete sci-fi short story. From fewer than fifty words I can almost play an entire disaster movie in my head: a runaway test unleashes a flood of liquid helium that swallows the streets and survivors discover a 13-second “gap” in their memories; the authorities choose to bury the truth and push for an even larger-scale experiment; it all culminates in a far more catastrophic disaster that nearly drives humanity to extinction…
I’ve always been a devoted fan of Netrunner’s short fictions and the flavor texts on cards. They make Netrunner feel like more than just a game—they make it feel like a real, living world.
W4T4
…
When we went to ask our Brazilian translator “W4T4” for his favourite card, we found his place empty. We suspect a Jinteki operative has taken him captive, as he had knowledge of their future plans…
Cultivate
Jinteki Operation
Play cost: 0 – Influence cost: 1
Look at the top 5 cards of R&D. Trash 1 of those cards, add 1 of them to HQ, and arrange the rest in any order.
To nurture perfection is to know when, what, and whom to cut.
Illustrated by Matheus Calza
Vantage Point will be releasing in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and German on March 2nd. Spanish and French will follow shortly, and other languages will release as they finish translation.
Interested in joining the team? Applications for the translator role are open and we will be advertising a recruitment drive sometime soon.
Vantage Point will be released on March 2. It will be available from our online store, our retail partners, and as a free print-and-play PDF immediately, and from our print-on-demand partners as soon as it’s approved.
