there's no time for your internalized homophobia, yosuke

I'm one of those bastards who wants to see all the possible dialogue and route splits in games, so I tend to romance every character to see how that affects the characters' stories and development.

Except I really hate romancing multiple characters at once (PLUS the only person I want Yu dating is Yosuke), so it's making me feel really 😬 to deliberately romance the girls in P4G. I really don't want to, but if I don't romance everyone in my first playthrough, I'll never do it and get to see how that affects their story.

His saving grace is that he has shown some better qualities and genuine concern/seriousness in other scenarios, so I'm not ready to completely abandon him in the trash. (Though, to be honest, I'm so in love with him that I'll probably just become a Yosuke apologist no matter what he does in the end... 😔)

"I have family and friends... and you."

In English, Yosuke says, "But thanks, man. I don't know how to say it, but... It sure beat words," whereas in Japanese, what he says is closer to, "But thanks. I don't know how to put it, but... Never mind, you know what I mean."

Absence.

--

For starters, why didn't they properly invert the smart quotes so they're the right ones? They really just left all the dialogue choices bracketed in two closing quotation marks???

And then there's the choice to mix past and present tense in the narrative text. There's something weird about reading actions that are happening in real time written in the past tense. Like, "You washed the dishes in silence" or "You thought about going into the TV tomorrow."

If this text was presented after the screen goes dark, that's fine, but Yu's standing RIGHT THERE, washing the dishes RIGHT NOW, and he's also considering going into the TV IMMEDIATELY after a phone conversation.

Japanese tense to be real loosey-goosey with tenses, so it's less of a problem when they mix them up, but it feels off in English if not used consistently...

And full disclosure, I haven't played much of this game at all in English, but I didn't love the overly literal translation I saw in one of the scenes. A character talks to Yosuke about a "claim" from a customer, the transliteration of クレーム which is pronounced the same way as "claim," but I would've translated that as "complaint." I mean, yeah, you can argue that maybe the customer filed an actual claim against the worker, but it makes more sense if they were just complaining about service and whatnot...

There are some really odd choices they made ("You also hook [the rubber band] on the ring finger and pinky"??? Why is it "the ring finger and pinky" and not "your ring finger and pinky"???), and I found a straight up mistranslation for one of Yosuke's lines.

I can't imagine they didn't translate P4G in-house (and even if they vendored it out to freelancers, the in-house team should've reviewed everything carefully), so they should've had access to all the gameplay and materials, plus LQA should have picked up the mismatch between the tone of the translated dialogue and the expression on Yosuke's sprite. I can't exactly say I'm impressed with the quality of this translation...

The English version of The World Ends with You came out in 2008, which is the same year P4 came out, and its translation was PEAK. Like if I had to give TWEWY's English localization a grade, it'd be an A+

P4G came out in 2012, and I'd probably only be comfortable giving it's translation a B/B-. It's not HORRIBLE, but it could definitely be more cohesive and better.

I know it's not 100% fair comparing two games with different writing styles created by different companies (and maybe it's not fair for me to only judge P4G's translation when I've only seen bits and pieces of it), but there were definitely creative decisions that were made for P4G's localization.

Like I get that we're only human and make mistakes, so of course typos and such will happen, but I'm stunned so many errors got through the LQA process and went to print.