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.
There is a language In Final Fantasy X you d9ny understand at first, but you learn new words as you talk to the people who speak it and then understand them more and more.
Technically it’s a cipher, BUT it’s also perfectly constructed to work as a language (by making the cipher easier - vowels only get replaced with vowels, consonants with consonants).
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.
It’s not fully the type of answer you want, but there is an Italian book called “the revolution of the moon” that is 90% written in dialect. The first pages are mostly Italian with some words in Sicilian dialect, then the dialect part gets more and more prevalent until it’s only dialect.
It’s not exactly what you mean in the sense that the Sicilian dialect really exists and that the book clearly exploits the similarities between the dialect and Italian for the reader to understand.
To stray even further from OP’s question (because books), I loved the dialect in Riddley Walker and the slang in A Clockwork Orange.
Thee following are more little/no dialogue for the purposes of Immersion, rather than subtitled
Tunica is an unapologetically difficult isometric action/puzzle game
Animal Well is a metroidvania with little/no dialogue
Other similar games are Fez, Hyper Light Drifter
The original Stargate movie did that, though I don’t think it’s a majority of the dialogue.
Poor entry here, but star wars knights of the old Republic did this for the aliens to save disk space on dialogue. The subtitles come up fine, because your character can speak all the languages, but the aliens have like 4 voice lines each they just repeat.
Stray uses its own language. Your robot friend just translates it for you.
Öxxö Xööx makes all of his stuff in his own language
The movie Incubus is entirely in a constructed language.
The game Chants of Senaar is built around languages you slowly translate/‘learn.’
Watched a good ten minutes of Incubus. I speak a couple Latin and Germanic languages, and it sounded like a weird mix of European languages. Could definitively understand some of it.
It’s in Esperanto!
You covered all kinds of media but music, but Enya sings in a made-up language, but not exclusively. Just five songs are in Loxian, a language her songwriter made up for her after she did the song from Lord of the Rings (with some lyrics in Elvish or whatever the Tolkien language is). So she wanted a language that would suit her style and her songwriter made one for her.
The cool thing is, they wrote this whole sci-fi backstory for it about how the Irish go to space, to the moon, and they jump to a faraway galaxy. Also, Enya only sings the water dialect of Loxian — they have a dialect for each of the four natural elements.
The Enya songs in Loxian are:
- Less Than a Pearl
- The River Sings
- Water Shows the Hidden Heart
- The Forge of the Angels
- The Loxian Gate
The first three are on the album Amarantine; the last two are on Dark Sky Island. IMO Loxian Gate is the best of the lot, followed by The River Sings. If you listen on Apple Music or something that, you can watch the lyrics go by as she sings them, but it will not translate them. There are translations online, though.
For music, you should listen to Sigur Ros. All their lyrics are in a made up language.
Many of their songs are in Icelandic actually, and a couple in English.
Oh shit, really?? My life has been a lie! Thanks for correcting me!
The Expression Amrilato is a VN that’s mostly in Juliamo (i.e. Esperanto with some modifications like a custom alphabet). It’s mostly an Esperanto tutorial though with an isekai yuri plot.
Disney’s Atlantis had a custom conlang specifically made for it, but IIRC the dialogue was mostly in English still.
That’s the most espirantist thing I’ve ever heard
NiGHTS into Dreams has its dialogue written entirely in a made up “dream language”, and that’s when it has dialogue at all. The sequel ditched this angle entirely though.
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.
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.
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
