Plagued William "Billy D" Usher / cyguration & OneAngryGamer (oneangrygamer.net) - Joe McCarthy if McCarthy were a self-hating Black Pedophile alongside his Base of Authoritarian Wingnuts who hate The Gays™ & Overwatch; Definitely Not (((Nazis))); From Sperging about Anything in Multimedia to Splurging out Garbage Articles

I agree that there's a lot of room to work with, and most of the first scene (just for the sake of example) in the original release is very faithful with one or two minor omissions. The Royal version is wildly different and effectively scrubs most of the overt, stereotypical homosexuality - because the characters have been completely rewritten to now be drag queens rather than homosexuals. At best, this is "localization" taken much too far; one shouldn't rewrite characters outright when translating. This becomes censorship when it is done because the translator doesn't want anybody to see a more faithful translation.

If memory serves, Atlus USA made minor alterations to the non-canon ending of Full Body purely because of the mini-cyclone of outrage generated by Era. I believe it was simply in the ending credits roll, changing the name from the character's "deadname" to the transitioned name (since the source of the anger was "but they're erasing the trans person and saying it's a good thing!"), but I may be misremembering that. Always open to correction.
 
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Herbert West Reanimator said:
I agree that there's a lot of room to work with, and most of the first scene (just for the sake of example) in the original release is very faithful with one or two minor omissions. The Royal version is wildly different and effectively scrubs most of the overt, stereotypical homosexuality - because the characters have been completely rewritten to now be drag queens rather than homosexuals. At best, this is "localization" taken much too far; one shouldn't rewrite characters outright when translating. This becomes censorship when it is done because the translator doesn't want anybody to see a more faithful translation.

If memory serves, Atlus USA made minor alterations to the non-canon ending of Full Body purely because of the mini-cyclone of outrage generated by Era. I believe it was simply in the ending credits roll, changing the name from the character's "deadname" to the transitioned name (since the source of the anger was "but they're erasing the trans person and saying it's a good thing!"), but I may be misremembering that. Always open to correction.
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IIRC they changed the gay dudes to be like that in the TV series which is where many of Royal's changes originate from. The base PS5 game is before the anime.
 
http://archive.md/HTztk / https://twitter.com/OneAngryGamerHD/status/1246264525831241728

Someone pointed out how awfully dishonest Billy was on the topic of locked RE3 remake threads, as said threads were mostly made up of insults thrown at each other rather than civilized discussions.

Marissa Moira said:
They basically say the same thing in the Japanese version. Japan and English are not 1 for 1 so you're allowed some wiggle room when it comes to intent.

Censorship would be just axing the whole scene together.
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Marissa Moira said:
The Catherine release wasn't censored either. It still made the trannie jannies get their granny's panties in a shanty.

There's about 100 ways to translate the simplest japanese phrase into english, this is how wide the options are when it comes to english translations.
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It's the kind of argument I'm simply going to call out because of how absolutely stupid it sounds. It's also often brought up by people who have very little to zero grasp in japanese, like they believe the language is far too alien to generate accurate translations in english & else. As a result, we get idiots in charge who believe it's okay to make the game's story into their personal fanfiction or mouthpiece by changing dialogues and character's personalities (despite japanese has, for example, specific speech patterns that can be accurately translated into the english equivalent of polite, crude, noble, flamboyant, egoistical, etc). The PS1-SNES era was infamously known to have that kind of localization in japanese games, and that situation hasn't entirely gone away these days despite the proliferation of Internet and voice-acting which can make said localization changes even more obvious.


It even baffles me when english loanwords present in the japanese script & voice-acting get entirely changed in the english text.
 
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BananaSplit said:
It's the kind of argument I'm simply going to call out because of how absolutely stupid it sounds. It's also often brought up by people who have very little to zero grasp in japanese, like they believe the language is far too alien to generate accurate translations in english & else. As a result, we get idiots in charge who believe it's okay to make the game's story into their personal fanfiction or mouthpiece by changing dialogues and character's personalities (despite japanese has, for example, specific speech patterns that can be accurately translated into the english equivalent of polite, crude, noble, flamboyant, egoistical, etc). The PS1-SNES era was infamously known to have that kind of localization in japanese games, and that situation hasn't entirely gone away these days despite the proliferation of Internet and voice-acting which can make said localization changes even more obvious.


It even baffles me when english loanwords present in the japanese script & voice-acting get entirely changed in the english text.
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That was mostly Working Designs doing. The Bulk of any dialogue is going to be NPC text for most games and people thought they could get away with shit.

Japanese is more stilted than english and it does have less words for certain things. Now by talking about tone that does narrow it down on what will count as an accurate translation. The tone for both scenes in persona 5 for the gay dudes is the same no matter the region. It's supposed to be weird and silly and it comes across that way.

Most dialogue for games is intended to be neutral or informative most of the time so that does give options on how to present it.
 
Marissa Moira said:
IIRC they changed the gay dudes to be like that in the TV series which is where many of Royal's changes originate from. The base PS5 game is before the anime.
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This merely defers the fault, rather than erasing it. The fact remains that a simple comparison of the Japanese and English text shows that the English text is effectively not a translation in P5R. If this is derived from a TV series, then it must be asked whether the TV series was itself an accurate translation - and even if it was, localizers have exactly zero business deciding to simply not translate accurately the things they have been given to translate. When translators take it upon themselves to control content, we get stupid shit like Yokai Watch 3 being forced to take place in a fictional country because at the start of the series the localization team decided to arbitrarily alter the country in which the series takes place from Japan to the US, thus making the opening plot point of 3 (in which the protagonist's family moves from Japan to the US) completely impossible to render.

Cease your defenses of shitty localization practices. There's room to work with when it comes to rendering things like tone of speech, but that doesn't extend to simply throwing out the established character and plugging in a different one.
 
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Herbert West Reanimator said:
This merely defers the fault, rather than erasing it. The fact remains that a simple comparison of the Japanese and English text shows that the English text is effectively not a translation in P5R. If this is derived from a TV series, then it must be asked whether the TV series was itself an accurate translation - and even if it was, localizers have exactly zero business deciding to simply not translate accurately the things they have been given to translate. When translators take it upon themselves to control content, we get stupid shit like Yokai Watch 3 being forced to take place in a fictional country because at the start of the series the localization team decided to arbitrarily alter the country in which the series takes place from Japan to the US, thus making the opening plot point of 3 (in which the protagonist's family moves from Japan to the US) completely impossible to render.

Cease your defenses of shitty localization practices. There's room to work with when it comes to rendering things like tone of speech, but that doesn't extend to simply throwing out the established character and plugging in a different one.
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The TV series was farmed out to other companies. Sega and Atlus were fairly hands off on it which is why any of the Persona anime series are not really well liked. They've never been able to incorporate things from the games into them properly because you have multiple choices in the series and that's part of the appeal. This is the first time they've decided to incorporate stuff from the TV series into the games.
 
Judging by what is plainly visible in the Japanese version as compared to the English version, "they" clearly does not include the actual writers of the game, at least in this instance - only the translators/localizers. Atlus USA should not be making such decisions.
 
Herbert West Reanimator said:
Judging by what is plainly visible in the Japanese version as compared to the English version, "they" clearly does not include the actual writers of the game, at least in this instance - only the translators/localizers. Atlus USA should not be making such decisions.
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I've seen people who claim to know Japanese argue this point back and forth. All I know, Persona 5 had a translation and Persona 5 Royal changes it for clearly ideological reasons. Had P5 never existed and P5R being the 1st English version, then maybe an argument could be made that it was "the best they could do" be we have clear evidence that this is a lie.
 
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José Mourinho said:
Let's get over point by point and see how any of these support Billy's point that "homosexuality is a choice, and not natural". Don't take my word for it though...
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I'm not even going to read all these words. All I know is anyone who thinks this much about gay sex is some kind of faggot.
 
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AnOminous said:
I'm not even going to read all these words. All I know is anyone who thinks this much about gay sex is some kind of faggot.
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Wood chipper go brrrrr.

That's my take on the complexities of sexuality.

TheMadAutist said:
I've seen people who claim to know Japanese argue this point back and forth. All I know, Persona 5 had a translation and Persona 5 Royal changes it for clearly ideological reasons. Had P5 never existed and P5R being the 1st English version, then maybe an argument could be made that it was "the best they could do" be we have clear evidence that this is a lie.
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I wouldn't even say they're ideological. More drastic and weird changes were made to the 3DS port of Dragon Quest 8 and for no reason at all other than they felt like it. They added a whole scene of a man eating dog food, there's no ideology behind that other than they maybe felt that it would convey the villain to be more of a threat but it just came off as weird. The two guys in persona 5 still come off as gay as hell.

Now I've played a ton of RPGs and I probably own every single noteworthy game. What changed in persona 5 was less intrusive than them removing the middle finger out of Tales of Xillia 2 and that was a a short scene around 50% into the game. Hell most people forgot how the opening sacrifice was changed in Tales of Berseria because it was before the tutorial stage and there was 100 hours of game ahead of you, that people really didn't care about the changed opening because the remainder was left unaltered.

If the changes for persona 5 were ideological they would have changed far more shit in there, but the apparent scene seems to be the only one in question.

There's a level of acceptance for most people before removing content really becomes an issue. If it's one tiny interaction for a huge game it's not going to be a big deal. Xenoblade X changed Lin's outfit and that was for the entirety of the game for specific attire she could wear. Personally I really only care if it gets to Tokyo Mirage Sessions levels when large swaths of the game are altered.
 
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Herbert West Reanimator said:
The point of the changes is to remove supposed aspersions on homosexuals, among other things (note the express removal of the reference to the homosexual couple as "monsters"). Censorship is not action-based, it is motive-based (otherwise any change could conceivably count as censorship, including patching a game to remove bugs - we wouldn't say the bugs were "censored").

These same scenes were specifically and repeatedly called out by ResetEra during the initial launch of P5. Given how Atlus USA reacted to the Catherine: Full Body storm in a teacup that came from the same place, this is probably not a coincidence.
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3 of Atlus USA’s translators are active members of ReeeeEra.
 
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That was covered in the Era thread not long ago; as we all already know, nothing is ever good enough for ideologues. Era isn't about to screech at one of its own for "well-intentioned" but incomplete censorship (the only time anyone gets off the hook is if they're already kissing the ring), and I doubt Era's hivemind is even actively aware of those translators' memberships (we don't see them posting, we just know they're in the verified-user list). All it sees is "Atlus changed it to try to please us, but they didn't change it well enough and there's way more they should have done", with the inevitable conclusion of "fuck 'em anyway". I imagine the cancerous elements within Atlus have to not be balls-to-the-wall crazy while they're on the job, in order to actually keep their jobs, so they do what they think they have sufficient excuse to do.

Enough about Era, though. This is the thread for the other crazed extreme.
 
Marissa Moira said:
Wood chipper go brrrrr.

That's my take on the complexities of sexuality.


I wouldn't even say they're ideological. More drastic and weird changes were made to the 3DS port of Dragon Quest 8 and for no reason at all other than they felt like it. They added a whole scene of a man eating dog food, there's no ideology behind that other than they maybe felt that it would convey the villain to be more of a threat but it just came off as weird. The two guys in persona 5 still come off as gay as hell.

Now I've played a ton of RPGs and I probably own every single noteworthy game. What changed in persona 5 was less intrusive than them removing the middle finger out of Tales of Xillia 2 and that was a a short scene around 50% into the game. Hell most people forgot how the opening sacrifice was changed in Tales of Berseria because it was before the tutorial stage and there was 100 hours of game ahead of you, that people really didn't care about the changed opening because the remainder was left unaltered.

If the changes for persona 5 were ideological they would have changed far more shit in there, but the apparent scene seems to be the only one in question.

There's a level of acceptance for most people before removing content really becomes an issue. If it's one tiny interaction for a huge game it's not going to be a big deal. Xenoblade X changed Lin's outfit and that was for the entirety of the game for specific attire she could wear. Personally I really only care if it gets to Tokyo Mirage Sessions levels when large swaths of the game are altered.
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This is a good question actually. Why do people get exercised about the changes to Persona 5's implied rape/sexual assault of Ryuji but there was comparatively little backlash to these changes you mentioned?

It's a lot more common these days for people to flip out over costumes (see above) but even that doesn't get to the levels of indignation that people had about removing gay rape from Persona 5. (It also seems to have had no impact on the game's popularity, people are still buying it and are having a great time with it.)
 
haurchefant said:
Why do people get exercised about the changes to Persona 5's implied rape/sexual assault of Ryuji but there was comparatively little backlash to these changes you mentioned?
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As Marissa said, there's a general level of tolerance for smaller changes, especially when translation is involved. A lot of people just don't give a fuck and operate on the "what I don't know can't hurt me" principle. Deliberate ignorance is a poor standard, and not caring about accuracy is a great way to leave the door open for exactly the sort of ideologically motivated folks currently infesting the translation/localization industry, but ultimately most people are satisfied with "close enough" as long as it's conveniently available in the language they already know. A missing costume or other visual change is much more obvious; those can be compared 1:1 by anyone with eyes. The script is a black box to anyone who isn't JP/EN bilingual, and it's much easier to slip changes past most people scot-free in that area. This particular set of changes happens to be getting publicity, because Era made a stink initially, and the games journos think it's important that Atlus is altering "controversial" scenes (despite them not having been remotely controversial outside Era's bubble) - that's really the only reason you're seeing coverage of this anywhere other than Censored Gaming's YT channel.

Importantly, being relatively small doesn't mean these changes aren't censorship; as I mentioned previously, censorship is motive-based, not action-based, and things don't magically start being censorship above a certain significance threshold. People will tolerate minor censorship mostly through not wanting to go to the effort of finding out whether any has occurred (and because minor changes are usually not broadcast loudly, and because people tend to think making a fuss over the little things isn't warranted).
 
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The shittiest thing about this kind of bowdlerizations of localized games is that it’s being done by people who have the attitudes that:
A) only government action counts as censorship. Unless a government tells them to remove something, the game isn’t censored.
B) If you want the uncensored product, it’s only because you’re a degenerate, pedophile, misogynist, nazi
C) If it bothers you that much, just learn Japanese and shut the fuck up

What a bunch of assholes.
 
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