I never hear any criticisms about it from people who also criticize the original DS twewy, which has an equally heavy localization and even a character who offhandedly criticizes capitalism, but nobody ever finger points at that localization. NEO flopped because twewy is already niche and SE didn't fucking market it. Twice. Once during it's initial release and again when it unceremonious dropped on Steam. Thank god, honestly. It already got the attention of gormless culture war gamergate faggots who constantly take the same screenshots from the first two hours out of context for years on end, it didn't need bored Persona and Dangan Ronpa avatars shitting up the discourse too.
Everybody likes to post the NEO screenshot with the restaurant owner thinking about cultural appropriation, but never the resolution to that arc where he concludes that the concept is complete bullshit (in an unavoidable main questline, btw) or how every gay character in the series is always some flavor of manipulative psychopath. In NEO there's even a whole gang of excessively flamboyant gays who you repeatedly beat the shit out of for being thieving menaces to society, and the game never chides you for it or tells you how actually epic and based their lifestyle actually is. I bring these examples up because NEO frequently gets painted as this zogbot normietard propaganda outlet even though basic fundamental knowledge of the story and characters completely dismantles the idea.
Not to poo-poo on the thread and be a dubfag or whatever, but I think NEO is a weak and forced example when it comes to the discussion of how faggy and methodically imperialist and destructive modern localization is. Like, I'm not retarded, I see how bad it looks when Fret says sus and galaxy brain, and the stupid nicknames (which were also in the DS game) and why someone would prefer a more literal and subdued localization, but in the case of twewy specifically I feel it's style of localization is a holdover from a more well-meaning place. Specifically, I think that modern contemporary edge and energy (which often very quickly dates itself) are very much in the spirit of twewy's narrative, setting, and characters, and it helps them be more identifiable and relatable for it's intended audience of retarded edgy aimless teenagers. It's not an Ace Attorney type of situation where stupid memes are just shoved in almost as non-sequiturs.
It does suck that some of the original character's personalities are warped from their original portrayal, but there are nuggets of gold in there too which aren't in the original JP scripts to my knowledge, and I don't think warped portrayals and lines are always inherently a worse thing. That might almost always be the case with modern localization, but it wasn't always that way. I still stand by that anyone who says things like Cowboy Bebop or DBZ or YuYu Hakusho or various other Toonami boomer animays are poor localizations has Terminal Head Up Their Ass Syndrome, and that twewy's/NEO's localization fits under that very small umbrella of getting more right than it gets wrong.
