You know how in fantasy worlds, its all english? Kinda breaks the immersion a bit. I wanna find something where they make it as realistic as possible, and make everything in a fictional language, basically using subtitles as the main way to understand the plot.
First thing that comes to mind is the video game Tunic, where the objective of the game is to decipher the language.
Secondly, Stargate (the movie) while not entirely or majorly in a fictional language, the alien characters speak their own language consistently, and part of the plot involves how they communicate. In the TV show they forego of that because it would be a pain to have new languages every episode, so you do have to suspend your disbelief for that, but the movie is golden in that regard.
Then there’s other stuff like Sims or Shadow of the Colossus where everything is in made up languages but it has no impact in the plot or mechanics.
As far as video games go, an obvious answer is the Sims.
Perhaps only slightly less prominent is Shadow of the Colossus. Insofar as I know all of the spoken dialog is a nonsense fictional dialect that definitely isn’t Japanese, except possibly when calling your horse’s name. The language is based off of syllables and random bits from both Japanese and Latin with some of the syllables being spoken backwards, and with a kinda-sorta Japanese style cadence. But it’s utter gibberish, and only the subtitles make it intelligible.
I think Ico and Last Guardian from the same company use the same language
Star Trek and Game of Thrones have some lines in their fictional languages (Vulcan and Klingon for Star Trek, High Valyerian for Game of Thrones).
The games Out There and No Man’s Sky feature a mechanic where aliens talk in a completely unknown language, but as you gradually learn the language, the subtitles gradually become more and more English.
If you count text boxes, not having anybody speaking the language, and having to piece together the language based off of context clues and guessing if need be, Chants of Sennaar might work.
Other than something like that, I personally cannot think of any other work that does what you describe.
Netflix booba, but there are no subtitles.
EverQuest 2 has languages that you can learn and also use in chat.
The Panzer Dragoon series, except for Saga which is only partly in the fictional language.
It isn’t fully in a unique language, but Nell was pretty famous at the time for the weird language Jodie Foster spoke in for…most of the film?
Lol the sims, which also is a completely learnable language.
But no, probably other better ones listed here.
Chants of Sannaar is a puzzle game where all of the text is written in a new language
I. Love. This. Game. SO MUCH.
Devastated when it was over.
Would recommend Case of the Golden Idol for a similar detective vibe.
I specifically liked the linguistics aspect, wrapping my head around the languages, but this does look interesting too so thanks for that :)
Some of the DVD/Blu-ray versions of “GalaxyQuest” have the entire movie dubbed into the weird screeching alien language as a quirky bonus feature.
Thermian. One of the all-time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.
There are plenty of things in “Dutch”, a fictional language based on the Netherlands.
It’s a real language, it’s just German spoken by a person with a head injury /s
Far Cry Primal is completely in the fictional We ja language.
Some notable language-based games:
- Tunic
- Chants of Sennaar
- Heaven’s Vault
- I Mother (not released yet)
Spoilers about Tunic's language
The writing in the game is actually an alternate way to write English phonetically/phonemically. So the game technically is in English but you can’t understand it. There are guides on how to read it, but it always seemed like too much effort for me so I never did.
Star Trek will occasionally throw out the full speech Klingon, but they are usually subtitled…
