So I am playing through Paper Mario TTYD on my Switch for the first time. I never played these games growing up, and while I kinda enjoyed the Super Mario RPG remake for its quirkiness, I strongly believe that if you don’t have specific nostalgia for it, it just doesn’t hit the same.
TTYD is great. It’s so fun and captures a sense of adventure, with big swings from light hearted comedy into some dark territories. I was not expecting that, but I absolutely was not expecting just how horny everyone seems to be for Marty-o!
All the ladies swoon and mention how manly he is, commenting on his moustache. I was not expecting this coming from a Nintendo game. It’s pretty funny and I love it!
I want to >!fuck!< that mouse
God damn that rat wants the pipe huh.
TTYD crawled so Baldur’s Gate 3 could run.
I feel like this is entirely a localizer-added thing, and the original Japanese version was very different. I could be wrong of course, but this is just my gut feeling considering the time TYD released (and honestly it isn’t too much better nowadays).
Now, people can argue whether drastic changes like that are good or bad (I would say it is a massive “it depends”), but personally I would really prefer localizers stick to something as accurate to the original as possible while still being understandable in the target culture, and then include an altered or changed version as an option.
Like being able to choose between the ADV or Netflix dub for Evangelion.
I don’t mind if someone wants to add their own spin or whatever, as long as that doesn’t become the singular defined version for an entire region as is all too common. The original creators had a vision, and I want to see that vision, not the one a localizer is adding on that the original creators didn’t have.
For example, in a culture that doesnt have bread cakes, but they do have rice cakes, I would want a localizer to say characters ate “a food similar to rice cakes” or “an exotic food.” As an absolute last resort “a rice cake” is okay, but certainly not “the characters ate a big feast of pork and jelly donoughts.”
I never played the Japanese version, but I live in Japan and I have worked with various game localization companies. It’s a pretty fine line on how they handle these kinds of translations, and it is often the developers who give the direction.
A good localization firm will take the original intent, and then culturalize it for the target market to make sure it has the same intended “vibe” rather than an actual 1:1 translation. The first company I worked at here did the localization for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. They were using a lot of old Japanese in that, and they specifically DID want us to get as close to 1:1 as possible, while ensuring that the intent was still very clear. Another game that I cannot say was more free saying “please make sure that the jokes land with the US”, and quite a bit of the actual dialog was re-written, but once again, to match the vibe and intent that the developer was searching.
Each project is different. Each player is different. You aren’t wrong for your wants here, but developers aren’t wrong for trying to make something be more culturally appropriate for their target market, often which will sell more copies than their local market.
Yeah, that’s kinda what I mean. I think we agree. It’s just that recently there has been more attention on more… questionable… changes that localizers have been making to entertainment media, some I agree with and some I don’t.
In the 80s and 90s, it was common for overseas versions to change names to be more Western sounding. Personally, I don’t mind this kind of change. It usually doesn’t effect the overall story much, but sometimes a character might have an exotic sounding name in the Japanese version, I would hope that they also have a similarly exotic sounding name. However, it was also common for the entire story to be altered pretty drastically, even with the entertainment itself being chopped up into something entirely different. Which I don’t appreciate. I want the foreign media because it is different and from a different culture, changing it to match my own culture defeats the point of me wanting to engage with it.
Sometimes though, entire conversations are completely removed or changed entirely from their original versions. I mean, completely different, the difference between a character saying “I love you” and “You will always be my dearest friend.” I believe the Fire Emblem series (which I haven’t played very much so I have only minimal experience with) has had a few of these kinds of changes. In those cases, I believe that is a malicious change the developers may not have known about or may not have fully understood when they approved or signed off on the localization. Or the localization agency may have either thought they had more creative license than they actually had or deceived the original creators to push their own version instead.
Jokes are a bit different IMO, since humor is pretty different between cultures. Jokes in entertainment often rely on an understanding of the local pop-culture, so naturally jokes or geographical/historical references may need to change. It is understandable in those cases.
