Sweet Language Based Vindication

Hell is about to freeze over.  The dead are about to rise from their graves.  The moons have aligned.  The Elder Gods are on their way.  Dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA!  There's an article on Polygon I actually think is really good!

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/20/15356026/persona-5-translation-localization

Now granted it was written a year ago but I stay away from games "journalism"  so hard that it flew right under my radar.  Read it, now, it's really good.

Just for some context on my end, I played Persona 5 in Japanese roughly around the time of release here.  When the English version came out and I watched some of my friends play it I remember pointing out certain bits of the game didn't really match up with what was being said in the Japanese or that certain lines of dialogue were a little "off".  The nicer people that I know were willing to brush it off as just "oh well Localization!" and others responded by calling me a shitty weaboo piece of shit.

Turns out though I'm not the only one who felt this.  That Polygon article is just one of MANY if you Google it.  I think the one take I get from having a quick look around all the other articles (which I'll read in detail after posting this) say kind of the same thing.  It's not that it's outright bad (mostly) but it's amateurish and filled to the brim with stilted dialogue.

Take that line above for example.  It's a throw away comment in the middle of a fight that you might not really notice when you're playing it but if you take a moment to stop, slow down and think about it, it's a bit strange.  It's not "wrong" per se but it's a bit unnatural.  It's the kind of translation you might expect from an anime fansub group or a small group of passionate fans working on it to bring it to a nice western playerbase.  But Persona 5 isn't that, it's a full priced game (Costing 2000 yen more than your average new game here in Japan, by the way) that had a large team of translators and editors behind it and THIS is what we got. 

One thing that a majority of people still might disagree with me on, a topic I might go into in a later article is the voice work.  Not only was the localization bad but the performance was also atrocious.  I guess it's something we've come to expect with western anime voice actors but while in Persona 4 it was just a bit cheesy and campy in P5 it really ruined some things for me.  For example, in the English version of Persona 5, Ryuji doesn't sound like Ryuji in this game.  It sounds like a guy who played P4 and then tried to do a Kanji Mk2 rather than actually stay true to the personality of the character.  But Japanese voices were an option from the get go with P5 so I guess that's why no one gives a shit.

A good script and a good delivery of that script are important parts of story heavy games like this.  People shouldn't just settle for bullshit just because it's sort of expected of the genre.  ESPECIALLY from a company like ATLUS which we have seen do absolutely incredible jobs of localization with a lot of their other games.  Demand better quality for your hard earned money, goddamnit.