Game Censorship & Localization General Thread

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The entire Fire Emblem series in general seems kind of cursed when it comes to English translators just writing whatever the fuck they want. Fates and Engage get the worst of it, but I've seen multiple questionable stuff in Awakening and Three Houses. FE7 on GBA at least has one ending slide say the exact opposite in English as it does in Japanese. There's one major part in Radiant Dawn where the English version straight up rewrote a villain's actions in the previous game to give it a different explanation. And a fan translator for at least one of the SNES games inserted his fan fiction into minor NPC dialogue because he thought what was there originally was too short and boring. I think that was also the same guy who fan translated TearRing Saga, a spiritual successor to Fire Emblem by the same director, who it turned out rewrote a bunch of the game including completely changing a villain's motivations because he thought the original was dumb and his ideas were better.
They tried so hard to force a ship in the English version of Path of Radiance. Maybe they thought Ike would be perceived as gay if they didn't try making IkexElincia a thing. Didn't work considering how popular the Tellius games are with fujos.
 
Ready or Not
I'm a little late, but what gets me about this is how surprised people are acting, as if this was some kind of unprecedented thing.

Iirc, there was some controversy with the early access (something because of Black Lives Matter? I forget.) and when they immediately caved, I removed the game from my wishlist despite my friends at the time saying it was no big deal and I was over reacting. Now they are not happy with the changes and I get to smuggly say "I told you so".

It's really not difficult. Give a censor an inch and they'll take a mile and demand more. If a company caves on "small things" that "don't matter", they will cave on the big things that do matter with the exact same logic.
 
I'm a little late, but what gets me about this is how surprised people are acting, as if this was some kind of unprecedented thing.

Iirc, there was some controversy with the early access (something because of Black Lives Matter? I forget.) and when they immediately caved, I removed the game from my wishlist despite my friends at the time saying it was no big deal and I was over reacting. Now they are not happy with the changes and I get to smuggly say "I told you so".

It's really not difficult. Give a censor an inch and they'll take a mile and demand more. If a company caves on "small things" that "don't matter", they will cave on the big things that do matter with the exact same logic.
Don't forget their "safe edgy" twitter account, which is peak corporate insecurity.
I think the real problem here is that there is no alternative if you want a SWAT 4 clone, we need another one of those.
 
The Mario RPG games are full of cringe localization moments. There's way too many to count, but I'll mention some here:
  • Adding lines to Paper Jam where the two princesses complain about being damsels in distress
  • "Shufflegate exposed!"
  • "I love going on message boards and complaining about games I've never played!"
  • l33t Hammer Bros. in Partners in Time
  • I think there's an MC Hammer reference in Super Mario RPG
  • Fawful in general (making fun of Engrish is so overdone in my opinion)
Anything I'm forgetting?
 
Fates has my favorite bad localization line of all time. If you side with the evil kingdom whatever they're called one of your adopted sisters is named Elise.

I'm not sure exactly how old she's supposed to be but she looks around ten or so.

If you play MaleMC you can romance her which I guess bothered the localizers because they added this line which is so hilariously grammatically incorrect and incoherent.

"Elise why don't you act like the age that you don't look like but technically are?"

My brain hurts reading that line. Now I'm as brain damaged as the translators. :(
 
Adding lines to Paper Jam where the two princesses complain about being damsels in distress
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This bullshit goes back further than I thought.
 
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This bullshit goes back further than I thought.
Started in 2008.

One of the first examples I can recall is Gamespot docking points from Parasite Eve: The Third Birthday for Aya being "a submissive sex object".

Resident Evil 5 caved to complaints about killing black zombies in 2009.
 
I really do not think that's comparable.

The Third Birthday was legitimately kind of gross, was nothing like the first or even second game, and more or less ruined Maeda from the first game as a character.

The only thing that remotely saves it is that the character you play as is not actually Aya but her adopted kid sister Eve, so you can't really call it ruining that character except for the fact she was killed off like she was.
 
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View attachment 7632480

This bullshit goes back further than I thought.
This all goes much further and deeper than you think. People are noticing now that their noses are being rubbed into it with their entertainment, but progressives have been subverting and ruining everything they can touch for a century now. They simply have much more influence than they used to, and no longer feel to the need to keep their lunacy under wraps.
 
Does it matter? They still condemned the game for not being woke.
Resident Evil 5 was the first one I remember caving to this kind of pressure by adding random white zombies. There's some debate if the black sidekick (Sheva) was a result of the complaining.

But the point is that censoring games has been an issue for a while.

Even when it comes to RPG rewrites, Gunvolt was released in 2014 and had to be completely re-translated for it's re-release because the story was completely fucked by an activist translator who changed the story to be just pronoun shit. Though my google fu failed me on finding the examples. This was in 2014, and I doubt this is the earliest example. It's just the one I remember off hand.
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Started in 2008.
Mirror's Edge is one of the first games where the devs came out and outright stated they made the female protagonist more ugly on purpose to protest "unrealistic" beauty standards.

KOTOR 1's first planet was a bonanza of woke nonsense - from the "subtle as a sledgehammer" social commentary about the rich living in the upper levels and the poor living in dark lower levels, to the parody of a space bigot ranting about aliens "stealing our jerbs" et al.

You could probably hunt down even earlier examples of proto-woke behavior if you dig around.
 
Does it matter? They still condemned the game for not being woke.
I think going to bat for Third Birthday is doing a disservice to anti-censorship. It is a shitty game and an even shittier sequel.

People can dislike things for a legitimate reason that looks woke but is not. I just gave an example of how to do it.
 
This is where I get off the train. If woke wasn't really a thing, then I find it dumb to retroactively declare it woke. eg. Left 4 Dead, Metroid, or Tomb Raider aren't "woke" and I don't buy the conspiracy theory that they were playing some kind of long game.

People can dislike things for a legitimate reason that looks woke but is not.
Correct.

I think going to bat for Third Birthday is doing a disservice to anti-censorship.
It's one thing to say "the gameplay is shit and the story makes no sense, 3/10" and saying "5/10 game, but Aya is too sexy and crys during the plot. 3/10"
 
"5/10 game, but Aya is too sexy and crys during the plot. 3/10"
It depends. For example, I can say that the depiction of Aya and how Maeda talks are heavily disconnected from how the characters behaved in the previous games. I certainly do not remember anything like a "refreshing vulnerability" line regarding the first two.

With Aya, that gets sidestepped by the fact it's actually her adopted kid sister-clone Eve possessing her body all along. Except that makes the line I just mentioned worse, but we can ignore that.

That doesn't justify how Maeda behaves like a stereotypical Master Roshi type drooling pervert suddenly, though, because he was not like that before.
 
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This is where I get off the train. If woke wasn't really a thing, then I find it dumb to retroactively declare it woke. eg. Left 4 Dead, Metroid, or Tomb Raider aren't "woke" and I don't buy the conspiracy theory that they were playing some kind of long game.
To be fair, Bioware games were trailblazers on the PC and woke stuff nonsense, so it kinda applies IMO. Even then they weren't as bad as things are now (compare Dragon Age 1-3 to Veilguard).
 
Being frank, I don’t mind adding British accents to differentiate characters' voices, as long as they're comprehensible and fit the character of course (exceptions apply to jokes in the original about incomprehensible accents), but that Mexican-English accent is stupid for the same reasons why it's stupid in real life.
This reminds me of the Scottish prison warden in Great Ace Attorney who has a comically thick accent to the point it's not funny and just impedes understanding the text.
British and California accents are overused. Give me New York, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Minnesota accents. Give me more Italian, Spanish, German, Bavarian, French, Polish, Russian, Swedish, etc. accents. Literally anything but British or Californian.
 
Does it matter? They still condemned the game for not being woke.
Resident Evil 5 was the first one I remember caving to this kind of pressure by adding random white zombies. There's some debate if the black sidekick (Sheva) was a result of the complaining.

But the point is that censoring games has been an issue for a while.

Even when it comes to RPG rewrites, Gunvolt was released in 2014 and had to be completely re-translated for it's re-release because the story was completely fucked by an activist translator who changed the story to be just pronoun shit. Though my google fu failed me on finding the examples. This was in 2014, and I doubt this is the earliest example. It's just the one I remember off hand.
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I haven't played the game. But reading up on it, it seems that Zonda is actually female and all of this gender nosense is because of her profile:

Zonda is a very formidable adept in Sumeragi’s Adept Hunter Unit who utilizes a septimal power known as "Mirror."

Not much is known about this septimal power at this point in time, only that it is thought to be some kind of illusion-based power.

Zonda’s age, gender, and background are all shrouded in mystery, and much about this individual remains unknown, even among Sumeragi’s top officials. Despite this, Zonda’s power as an adept is quite impressive, rivaling the likes of even Sumeragi’s top dog, Nova.

The Glaive which holds Zonda’s septimal power is known as the "Crow Child.

In the sequel she is explicitly refered to as a girl:

A young girl who appeared before Gunvolt and Copen, she expresses herself with a level of poise and order that does not befit her childish appearance.

She is an Adept, but her abilities are unknown. What could she be after……?

She has a "male" form but it's an illusion created by her special power. Maybe someone who has played the game can explain it better. But it looks more like a Sailor Starlights thing. It's just whatever that game's equivalent of magic is. She's not a tranny genderblob. The woke translators just took great liberties with a few lines of texts and a magical appearance change. Being that her true form looks like a magical girl anyway the devs could have been inspired by the Starlights.
 
Mirror's Edge is one of the first games where the devs came out and outright stated they made the female protagonist more ugly on purpose to protest "unrealistic" beauty standards.

KOTOR 1's first planet was a bonanza of woke nonsense - from the "subtle as a sledgehammer" social commentary about the rich living in the upper levels and the poor living in dark lower levels, to the parody of a space bigot ranting about aliens "stealing our jerbs" et al.

You could probably hunt down even earlier examples of proto-woke behavior if you dig around.
I can agree that people should have thought harder about the causes and consequences of mass immigration instead of so often blowing them off with stereotypes of ranting racists like in KOTOR here or in South Park like you're referencing. At the same time, I can understand writing stuff like that back then without any ulterior motive because there are people who fit that stereotype in real life, I've interacted with them before, where they're too dumb to articulate anything insightful about the immigration problem and can only blindly scream about how much they hate spics and niggers.

I find the idea that class struggle commentary, even shallow and unsubtle stuff like in KOTOR, is woke to be retarded though. Differences and conflict between upper and lower classes is basically just a fact of reality for almost any society in any time or location. There's nothing about pointing it out that specifically links to left-wing ideologies. In fact, the current "woke" stuff is mostly cultivated and pushed by the upper class onto the lower class, so saying talking about class struggle is woke is not only dumb it's counter-productive.
 
Mirror's Edge is one of the first games where the devs came out and outright stated they made the female protagonist more ugly on purpose to protest "unrealistic" beauty standards.
Was that the case with the original, or only once the sequel came out that Anita Sarkeesian was involved with?
 
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