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Post by adrius on Jan 11, 2023 16:07:07 GMT
As far as I have seen, the Fighting Fantasy series has not gained much traction in the Chinese-speaking world. Only two Fighting Fantasy titles (the first two) translated into Chinese are known; both translated in Traditional Chinese in 2012, by a minor publisher in Taiwan known as Buqiurenwenhua (不求人文化). Given that the publisher continues to publish other titles, it would appear that any plans to continue the series might have been cancelled, perhaps due to poor sales.
Covers appear to follow Wizard series 2.
Left: 火焰山的魔法師 (The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) Right: 混沌之城 (The Citadel of Chaos)
There's nonetheless an appraisal about FF on the (mainland) Chinese book review site Douban, even if it shows the books in their original English without translated versions.
One could probably attribute the general lack of popularity of gamebooks in mainland China due to it being under economic reform in the 1980s, thus missing the main wave of gamebook furor that permeated the Western world and Japan, though this doesn't account for Hong Kong/Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia/Singapore, and other overseas Chinese clusters that industrialized and developed much earlier.
Nonetheless, mainland Chinese publishers did translate and publish a couple of Give Yourself Goosebumps gamebooks when the Goosebumps series became popular; new generations of visual novels and/or interactive fiction, whether newly written or translated from Japanese, also seems to have some dedicated fans. There might have been other individual domestic-written gamebooks, but none have been famous enough to form a standalone gamebook series.
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Post by CharlesX on Jan 11, 2023 18:13:37 GMT
This doesn't surprise me at all, coming from a country where Star Wars has never been particularly popular. Let's face it, most gamebooks have always been niche and cult, and FF hasn't been most popular (or applauded by critics and audiences) even out of them, that honour would go to Choose Your Own Adventure and like you say Give Yourself Goosebumps. I'm disappointed to hear Chinese audiences mostly haven't warmed to TWOFM and other FF but I'm really not surprised. I'm definitely not saying they don't deserve publication, but, you know, I imagine there's loads of cool stuff unique to China which we in the West just never appreciate.
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