Game Censorship & Localization General Thread

Also here's another thing. Remember Needy Girl Overdose? If you are around the NGO fandom for some time you'll notice that it got butchered off like Skibidi Rizz last year but in a different way.

For context, Nyarla and his entire team pretty much left WSS because the higher up guy (Saitou) or something was apparently abusing his employees, amongst other nasty stuff, effectively gutting WSS. This rendered the Needy Girl Overdose franchise ruined and it was just used as a front to sell figurines from that point on (Nyarla still has supervision rights for the anime however). Localization issues did not happen back then with Needy Girl Overdose (I think) because Nyarla and his team was still in charge of the thing, including the localization team(s).

(P.S. Nyarla has talked about plans on reclaiming the NGO franchise through lawsuits when news first broke out; dunno if he's still trying to do it.)

But back to Yunyun Syndrome. The game was being developed and announced while the old team is still there, but was still being developed (likely under a completely different dev team) following the great gutting. It was very clear that Saitou only cares about money and profit and very little about delivering an entertaining product at all. I am not surprised that he will hire the most dreaded Jew that will do everything he could to devastate Gentile culture.

TL;DR: WSS is shit and ANYTHING coming from them needs to be put into question like Kindly Beast or Invisible Narratives.

Sinner's Sandwich said:
Blaustein is also responsible for the "What is a man?" line in Castlevania. Even tho it's became an iconic line it's a false translation. Dude has decades of fucking up game translation. He never did his job correctly once.
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Localization folks pre-2012 are at least funny. Look at the disaster that is 4Kids and the example you just mentioned. Now it's just all Gentile contempt unheard of since the end of Rome.
 
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CEO of Autism said:
Blaustein did whatever he wanted with the script of MGS and SOTN, and was fired from Konami when Kojima caught wind of several of his fan-fiction insertions. He's always been a hack who was lucky to work on some of the greatest masterpieces in the history of gaming doing the heavy lift for him. To this day he still believes MGS wouldn't have become such a success in the west without his liberal interpretation of it.
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Dear God does this mean he could have raped the original Silent Hill series? Or was 2 just his best work?
 
Coolio55 said:
Silent Hill is more complicated because all the voice acting is in English even in the original Japanese version.
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Same thing happened with the Souls series, but the Japanese devs still internally subtitled their own script with it and wrote the game code in their language. Blaustein was brought in to oversee the acting and shit. Still, very passable but now I'm interested in the possible script differences between the Japanese versions and domestic versions. Especially given their superior cover arts.
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I know that in Silent Hill 3/4, Jeremy goofed hard. He fucked up the name of the Cult. In Japanese it's vague on purpose. Jeremy decided to name it "The Order". This gave rise to one of the most cancerous misconceptions about what the cult even was, that only worsened with the western era.

Blaustein, Team Silent's original translator.

"The Order" is first mentioned in "Joseph's Article", found in the Hospital in Silent Hill 3. It reads as follows:

(...) The cult religion that operates'Hope House' is known by thelocals simply as 'The Order'. (...)

However, this is what the original Japanese text says, written by Hiroyuki Owaku:

「希望の家」を運営する真の団体であるこのカルト宗教は、独自の名前はなく、地元ではただ「教団」と呼ばれている。

In romaji:

`Kibō no ie' o un'ei suru shin no dantaidearu kono karuto shūkyō wa, dokuji no namae wa naku, jimotode wa tada `kyōdan' to yoba rete iru.

The article says that the Cult is referred to locally simply as `kyōdan', which is just the word "Cult", "Sect" or "Religious group".

教 (kyou): teaching, doctrine, religion

団 (dan): group, organization

教団 (kyoudan) literally translates to "religious organization" or "sect."

Jeremy Blaustein simply localized and adapted the term for what he probably thought was a better-sounding name in English. The original Japanese written by Owaku left the Cult unnamed by the locals, given it an even bigger air of mistery.

If you think about it, the media post-Team Silent treats "The Order" as an official name for the cult, while both the English and Japanese iterations of it explicit say that the Cult DOES NOT have a name, and the locals simply REFER to it as The Order/The Cult. Rather fascinating, to be honest.

You can find the whole article here: https://kanzengenkai.com/silenthill/3/textlog.html
It honestly isn't too bad, and it definitely is still a vague label, but it's better to just call it the cult. Assigning a proper name to things that don't really have one or have multiple, is what English translations always get wrong when it comes to Japanese words with multiple meanings. This did not stop western devs running with this dog shit and even the 2006 film.
 
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augment said:
This is the braindead conclusion that big tech is hoping we all arrive at.
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I would like to think there is a conspiracy that bad translations are purposeful to lead to AI, but the translators actually are retarded. The original Xseed translators made a thread on Resetera and got hated on by everybody else including fellow translators for saying they believed in being faithful to the work instead of "correcting it".
 
Slap47 said:
I would like to think there is a conspiracy that bad translations are purposeful to lead to AI, but the translators actually are retarded. The original Xseed translators made a thread on Resetera and got hated on by everybody else including fellow translators for saying they believed in being faithful to the work instead of "correcting it".
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No, Globalhomo is petty, but they aren't this petty. AI is a reverse psyop that removes your trust towards anything.
 
Was game localization always this politically partisan (at the very least censoring outfits or changing items to be more "culturally" compatible makes some degree of sense) or was there a point where brazen misrepresentation of another's work became acceptable?
 
Breadbassket said:
Was game localization always this politically partisan (at the very least censoring outfits or changing items to be more "culturally" compatible makes some degree of sense) or was there a point where brazen misrepresentation of another's work became acceptable?
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Localization has always been a mixed bag in general, and this is not just to game but its extended to other media as well.
If you wanna speak cases tied to politics, you could easily trace it back to NES Contra never getting released in Europe, and instead having to replace all human characters with robots and release as "Probotector" solely because of Germany's draconian laws, and the a similar case happening with Half-Life.
In term of censorship, The Pokémon TCG game for the Game Boy also wasn't released in a couple of arabian nations because the colorless energy symbol looked a little too much like a star of David and still on the topic of trading card games, any Yugioh! player will have a few words ready for you, both when it comes to censoring violent, sexual and religious content.
Some localizers didn't even gave a fuck about the state of the game they released, just look at the PAL version of Digimon World: a large portion of its content was rendered unavailable due to a bug they made and left behind.
Personally speaking, I don't believe the situation was as bad as its today, but you can find the ingredients behind the enviroment that shifted localizers into the shitheads of today.
 
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Nameless One said:
It honestly isn't too bad, and it definitely is still a vague label, but it's better to just call it the cult. Assigning a proper name to things that don't really have one or have multiple, is what English translations always get wrong when it comes to Japanese words with multiple meanings. This did not stop western devs running with this dog shit and even the 2006 film.
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I'd argue that cult is extremely negative in English, so no one would refer to it that way unless they dislike it. The Order is probably the best English equivalent of a tolerated semi religious group operating in secret (The Lodge would also work). The fanbase using it as the actual name is more a sign that they are completely retarded, especially since it's always "The Order of X".

Breadbassket said:
Was game localization always this politically partisan (at the very least censoring outfits or changing items to be more "culturally" compatible makes some degree of sense) or was there a point where brazen misrepresentation of another's work became acceptable?
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Early 2010's where politics saturated everything seems to be tipping point. Beforehand changes were usually to make things more palpable to westerners or to avoid issues with age rating.
 
ono said:
I would be shocked if he did, the whole reason he has minimal online presence is to specifically AVOID drama, hence the ethnic Japanese LARP. He is aware of what being overly online as a creator does. It is still funny to me that he decided to rant about translations at all, but maybe he felt his arm being twisted.
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The irony is he'd do a lot of good if someone of his cult following called out shitty localizers like this.
 
Strangolapreti said:
I don't believe the situation was as bad as its today,
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
Early 2010's where politics saturated everything seems to be tipping point. Beforehand changes were usually to make things more palpable to westerners or to avoid issues with age rating.
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If you look back the old versions of localization are actually insanely bad and likely just as bad as now for today's standards, it's just back then there wasn't really a way to know because of a lack of info (which is presumably a major reason why back then censors aren't really subtle at it) and people's nostalgia bias making them downplay the severity of the censorship.

But at least those were funny in a lolcow manner because of how outlandish and insane they are. The sort of subtle compromises they are doing here are NOT funny to begin with and makes it very clear that their goal is to violate. It's kind of the difference between letting Chris-Chan handle the localization of a game compared to letting 44 year old DarkSydePhil do it. You would rather Chris-Chan do it rather than 44 year old DSP because at least Chris-Chan can be unintentionally funny while DSP will fill it with his usual shit and dick jokes, advertisements to give him money, woke comments and him going on a meltdown mid translation.
 
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Breadbassket said:
Was game localization always this politically partisan (at the very least censoring outfits or changing items to be more "culturally" compatible makes some degree of sense) or was there a point where brazen misrepresentation of another's work became acceptable?
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Only the censorship of gore and nudity outside of Nintendo platforms.

Nintendo were such pantywaists that they took crosses out of CastleVania, where you play as a vampire hunter trying to kill Dracula, for fear of offending anyone!

The political correctness and woke gender shit started around 2014 or so.
 
Oh yeah, related to Needy Girl Overdose and the Yunyun situation, I ended up being in their server and oh god was it infested like the plague. It was proud troonery everywhere.
 
Do Not Touch Me Pls said:
If you look back the old versions of localization are actually insanely bad and likely just as bad as now for today's standards, it's just back then there wasn't really a way to know because of a lack of info (which is presumably a major reason why back then censors aren't really subtle at it) and people's nostalgia bias making them downplay the severity of the censorship.

But at least those were funny in a lolcow manner because of how outlandish and insane they are. The sort of subtle compromises they are doing here are NOT funny to begin with and makes it very clear that their goal is to violate. It's kind of the difference between letting Chris-Chan handle the localization of a game compared to letting 44 year old DarkSydePhil do it. You would rather Chris-Chan do it rather than 44 year old DSP because at least Chris-Chan can be unintentionally funny while DSP will fill it with his usual shit and dick jokes, advertisements to give him money, woke comments and him going on a meltdown mid translation.
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The early Shin Megami Tensei games were horrible translations. It's only in Nocturne that they got good. The fan translation have had to seriously pick up slack and even then most would just tell to get used to reading Japanese.
 
CryptoHermit said:
The early Shin Megami Tensei games were horrible translations. It's only in Nocturne that they got good. The fan translation have had to seriously pick up slack and even then most would just tell to get used to reading Japanese.
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Kind of ironic because apparently DragonBaby.inc was behind it as well (they even blatantly call both Atlus-Sega a "sacrifice"). Note that they are actually translating the games rather than inserting their own woke agenda insanity.

The picture below is from their official site BTW

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They were also behind Needy Girl Overdose but there are people who compared the English script with the OG Japanese script of that game and they aren't doing anything too off unlike with Yunyun Syndrome.
 
shoashuffle said:
The women in the game want to hack out their uteruses since she does. And for fucks sake, just look at this dood!
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Maybe I'm biased because every company I've worked for has had... uh... standards, and god help you if you fell out of line.

But when did stuff like this become "professional"? I mean, where someone looking to hire you sees this and goes "yup that's what I want in a business deal" and not "holy shit what is wrong with this person"?

If I were looking for localization, one look at this profile would tell me that this person could not turn off their own personality to serve the content and tone of whatever they're working on.
 
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