Prince of the Urban Jungle

Testing some more things for my #ntwewyDS project (just a bunch of fake screenshots to fool people)

This time I turned a piece of official concept art into the style of the cutscenes in DS TWEWY, using index coloring and manually editing things.

Official (by Square-Enix):

My edit:

Next time I'll see if I can turn a CGI cutscene from NEO into the same style.

Purification in progress...

Ya ever have a character you both absolutely love but also wanna punch in the face? For me, thats Tanzo Kubo. Hes an absolute asshole but I love him lol

Check out my other social medias down below! (I'm most active on Twitter btw)

To preface- This is NOT a post depreciating the localization choices in NTWEWY. I think the localization is basically good and the flaws it does have aren’t what’s being discussed here.

So i had been hearing a lot of slightly conflicting information about the translation of Neo’s very first secret report. It states that Joshua and Kubo played a game that caused Shinjuku’s destruction, which is something that basically everybody raised their eyebrows over? Lot’s of questions about how that would make sense for Joshua’s character or Shinjuku as a plot point- to the point that people assumed it was some sort of error. If or How it’s an error, though, I was not able to find a comprehensive answer to. Seeing different takes from people without much explanation was confusing, so even though I don’t speak japanese, I had to go take a look myself.

(I’m also making this a post so that maybe this could be something people could easily refer to and discuss on, amongst all that. I’m also still somewhat unsure if i’ve got it right so i’d appreciate it if anyone who knows the language better decided to pitch in. In fact, @gramoturtle, i hope you don’t mind me in ur mentions since im pretty sure u can check better than me)

So here’s what is says in English:

“The Executor first intruded on Shibuya three years ago. Originally from Shinjuku, this Angel started a clandestine Game with Shibuya’s Composer, which ultimately led to Shinjuku’s destruction.” -NTWEWY Secret Report 1, Paragraph 3

And here is what is says originally:

3年前、渋谷にある人物が侵入した。渋谷エリアのコンポーザーとの間で秘密裏にゲームを開始した、新宿エリアの天使であり崩壊を導いた「執行人」である。-NTWEWY Secret Report 1, Paragraph 3 (in japanese)

When you run the above few sentences through google or deepL, it does NOT result in anything intrinsically saying that a game between the two caused Shinjuku’s destruction:

Now translators are unavoidably imperfect and these translations seemed like they had their own issues, but I found it telling enough that neither of them talked about a game destroying Shinjuku that I knew it would be worth it to at least try to pick it apart manually.

The result of that attempt is this XD…

So. I did that. And I stared at it for a long time. And I kept staring because as far as I know, if it were saying Shinjuku’s destruction was connected to a game between Kubo and Joshua there should be a particle relating those ideas. I couldn’t see one there that would serve that. Hell, after looking at it too long i realized that probably if those ideas were related causally they wouldn’t be separated by a comma here?

If my reading is correct then that means it’s not saying “Joshua and Kubo played a game that destroyed Shinjuku” but instead “Kubo started a game with Joshua AND Kubo destroyed Shinjuku.” A more accurate english translation might be:

[Three years ago, a certain person invaded Shibuya. It was the one who secretly started a game with the Composer of Shibuya- an angel of Shinjuku’s who led it’s destruction- the “Executor”.]

I think that might be close enough to the original text while imparting the same information. And thats crazy, if correct. That means that the official english translation accidentally invented a whole impression-changing event in the form of another Random game scenario 3 years ago in this story’s timeline. In the first secret report!!

The misadventures of me and my friends @teaspoonofdragons @munchiebeetle voice acting these dorks, part 2.

NEO: The World Ends With You

youse gonna have a hell of a time fighting me kid!