So Persona 3's localization pissed me off.

Seriously. If you've played Persona 3 yourself, you probably would rather shove knives in your ears than hear Fuuka Yamagishi fire off another "-san", "-chan", "-kun" or "-senpai". I have FES and haven't played it, due in no small part to not wanting to live through Fuuka Yamagishi again. Hell, I haven't even opened .hack//G.U. Part 3: Redemption despite getting it as a gift almost a year ago; G.U. has problems of a much different sort, but it still has problems.

Me, I chalk it up to the "-senpai". That is, Atlus' inexplicable decision that Persona 3 needed to sound like a TV-Nihon fansub read aloud. It's not as bad as it could have been, and Vic "Junpei" Mignogna and Liam "Akihiko" O'Brien are pretty damn epic nonetheless, but the fact remains that for the most part it was bad, and I really don't want to have to suffer through that kind of crap again. Why should I? None of Atlus' other localizations (that I've played, anyway, and I've played a bunch of them) have these kinds of problems. They don't freaking have honorifics.

So, in a quixotic attempt to stave off the inevitable (really, I have no illusions of being able to get Atlus to reverse course on whatever trainwreck they likely have going right now within the four-month timeframe I'm looking at), I started a petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/p4petition/

"Persona 4 in ENGLISH - No more honorifics." There. Laugh if you will. I'm well aware that petitions don't work, and the only one that did fell into the hands of the Evil Genie at Bandai Entertainment who threw out the old Anime Village dub of the Gundam Trilogy when they made the DVDs. But if you even remotely believe that good localization is something worth kicking someone's ass over, you might want to sign it anyway. I mean, who knows? Who the hell knows...*runs off into the night, laughing like a madman*

 

Ugh. I hate crap like that.

Its stuff like that that makes me feel really weeaboo for playing them. I wonder if hardcore Japanophiles actually like this stuff being in the games?

 

meh it doesn't bother me. It's just a game and there is worse crap to bitch about (like where the hell is persona PSP thats been in dev for a while now).

 

I think that Persona 3 dubbing isn't bad. Atlus USA actually does a very good work with their localizations.

 

They market the game to Weeaboos so yeah......it's gonna use Weeaboo speak

 

They do. They just dropped the ball with this one.

 

For me, if it is such a big deal, go out and learn Japanese (or stay in with a book) and play the originals.

I got fed up way back in 1996 that RPGs were not coming to the UK market so I started learning Japanese to be able to play them all in the original.

I would say that it took me 3 years to self study and 1 year at university to get to a level where I could play an RPG in Japanese. Of course the dictionary comes out for weird words even now (and that will probably never stop!) but at least I can play them and enjoy them. Plus after you have the basics, you start to learn a lot from playing RPG and they become lessons of sorts.

So I would say redirect your energy so you never have to complain again!

 

As a guy who was forcibly taught Chinese in his youth, I don't mind the honorifics in Persona 3. There's really no cultural equivalent in American English, unless you want to impose some sort of New England private school ranking colloquialisms.
Can you imagine trying to translate some American terms into Japanese? How would you localize the Detroit Lean, or old 1960s terms of endearment like 'Daddio' or 'ginchy'? You don't, you just import the word whole hog, and in most cases that's exactly what they do. Why should we hold ourselves to a different standard?

 

No voice work is usually better coughsmtnocturnecough

 

Wow, thats stupid. This isn't fucking Japan. I hated it when people said Working Designs butchered translations. Fuck them. I'm not Japanese.

 

Exactly. They call it localization for a reason.

 

I've never played one RPG in English that had good dubbing or dialogue. Being British seeing all the American street cred lines in the likes of the earlier Final Fantasy games was f*ing annoying. Then RPGs went all vocal with things getting even worse. Awful accents and words that I'd expect to come from some Bill and Ted or surf looking dude. That's why I play in Japanese. The last RPG I played in English was Magical Knight Ray earth which I believe the so called "Great and can't do no wrong" Working Designs produced. It was bloody awful. The voices wanted me to hit the mute while the dialogue was what you'd expect some American street hip teenager to speak like. AWFUL!.

Oh, wait a minute, I played the PAL Shenmue 1 in English. that was bloody awful as well thanks to the piss poor voice acting. thank god they subtitled the 2nd one but even then they censored it so back to playing the Japanese original.

I think the bottom line is that the people in charge of western translations just aren't in the same frame of mind as the RPG player. All they see is a translation job. I seriously doubt they choose the voice actors well or bother about the dialogue. Have you ever noticed how Japanese games in English such as the Bio Hazard series don't sound even half as bad as the translated stuff? Could it be that the Japanese makers put more effort in or just know shite voice talent? Probably not on the last point if Yuu Suzuki is anything to go by. He said that the voice talents in the English language version are better than the Japanese one. Needless to say he's either an idiot or just has no idea about English. No one I know who speaks Japanese well prefers the English language version of Shenmue.

Yakumo

Man, that turned in to quite a rant :lol:

 

I think that Ryusui needs to play things like the western version of Blue Stinger to see how bad a dubbing can be XD.

Edit: Ah!, I just remembered the "neutral spanish" version of Halo 2 XD

 

I'm tempted to get Halo 3 in Mandarin

 

I think WD did a good job on the Lunar titles localization.

I normally dislike subs when they really REALLY suck. My tolerance level is pretty high up there.

 

Not to necropost, but I think you should give the more recent releases a chance. Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and Final Fantasy IV DS all have excellent localizations and voicework. Though maybe I'm just a sucker for Elizabethan prose and what I can best describe as "archaeologisms": terms with traditionally bland translations like "The Land of Summoned Monsters" have been rewritten with neat, snappy little names like you might see associated with genuine fantasy fiction, like "Feymarch". FFXII is full of such terms, like "Dynast-King" and "Sun-Cryst". I know there's probably someone out there who has the same argument against such things as I have against honorifics, but they add a sense of authenticity to the script. The Zodiac Beasts' dialogue is written in this awesome archaic style, and if you remember the old "One to be born from a dragon" prophecy from FFIV...well, I think you might be pleasantly surprised with the newest version. :3

 

this brings a chicken and egg sort of theory...

do weeaboos use "chan" "Kun" etc because of this sort of thing?

or is this sort of thing done because they're marketed to weeaboos who use "chan" "kun" and the like?

 

WTF is a weeaboos. man, I hate all this stuff.

Yakumo

 

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?defid=952612&term=weeaboo

See 2, 3, 5 etc.

 

I've also been a victim of these horrible localizations.

Like you may or may not be aware I only got my first ps2 a few months ago so Im starting to build up my PS2 game collection.

And I completely forgot about the english dubs of the Final Fantasy series, I was so eager to replay FFX so I bought my own PAL copy but as soon as I loaded it, I hear that retarded voice acting...
I was able to withstand it for about 10m and then power off-> game back to shelf... (also worth to mention that the PAL is 50hz and with huge black-borders on screen)

And dont even get me started on FFX-2, any dub on this title is just WRONG!

However there are some lucky news for us who feel cheated about our inferior US/PAL ports with horrible dubs!
If you google around a bit on your favorite warez site for "UNDUB" you'll find a bunch of modified versions of games with the original JPN voices.
I think I also spotted an undub version of PERSONA3.

FFX International Undub DVDR > original PAL 50hz bordered and english subbed FFX

Now if someone made a Shenmue Chapter 1 undub or Yakuza undub that would be even more awesome!