#ivanthefourth

Sorry but…

and:

I’m just recommending the same thing people with incredibly strong feelings on the topic did when they hated that Final Fantasy IV’s US version omitted a lot of content. Bad stuff is bad. But there’s an option for the people who are over-the-top mad about this, and they should at least consider that. What I’m suggesting even has the knock-on effect of moving more copies of the “original” version of a game. Despite what some of the half-cocked arguments people have tried to send my way today have said, that sounds a lot like consumer choice to me.

Localization has come a long way since the memory limited days of Square RPGs. But you’re still going to have publishers making those cultural changes in an attempt to make their game more palatable to other markets. I get why people don’t like that approach, and the examples going around don’t look like outstanding bits of prose, but plenty of people seem to be enjoying the game just fine. Attempts at literal translations can be pretty awful sometimes, too.

Or, to put it another way, I thought it was lame when Sega made the developers of Stormlord cover up the naked fairy statue’s tits for the North American Genesis release, but I get why they would do that.

But seriously, knowing Japanese would be cool as fuck! Everyone I know that dove into Japanese so they could play more RPGs got up to speed relatively quickly. Most of them are not fluent in it, but they got enough to be able to read most RPGs and all that. It’s perhaps more of a “year of your life” than a “years of your life” thing, but that’s probably more dependent on individual aptitude and just how far down the hole you want to go. I don’t think that’s a perfect solution for every person, but with all the anger and time being spent raging about one translation, I would think that some of those people would finally throw up their hands and just learn the original language for all that stuff. If you learn it once, you’ll never have to deal with this shit ever again, right?

Anyway, keep in mind that the translations you’re calling “bad” were done in an attempt to make it appeal to a wider audience in this territory. People keep whipping this up and trying to make it about “the treehouse” and “agendas.” but the only agenda at play here is that Nintendo wants to make money. And they do these things because they think it will help them make more money.