MrKillultra wrote:
If there is going to be an email campaign or any campaign whatsoever. It should be over hackneyed translation efforts like blade and soul's or the fact that it is a general trend for skinship mini-games to be removed/heavily altered from japanese RPG's in favor of nothing replacing it (i.e Mugen Souls, criminal girls:invite only, etc.). I sincerely doubt there's going to anything useful coming from a campaign based on fire emblem only as opposed to a campaign against the general trend.
If we're going to pay real money for a game, we expect the best that can be offered. If we settle for less then it means the industry can start charging us for games that have basically nothing in them. It is very important that we make sure industry leader's don't forget to pay attention to who they're letting alter and localize their games.
Good point, we should protest about bad localizations in general.
Look, Fire Emblem Fates is the straw that broke the cammel's back to me. But I saw it before, Xenoblades censored outfits, the removal of the alternate outfits in Fatal Frame. All those cases are a symptom of a bigger disease.
Now, you might wonder why I take this so personal. Well, imagine you are a surgeon, and you hear in the news that a completelly fit Japanese girl was disfigured by the means of plastic surgery to make her look "More American", and not only that, some of the surgeons in the hospital know very little about anatomy and hane no license. Don't you think it is fucked up already? Well, it gets worse, The hospital director ordered the surgeons to sew her mouth shut and cut one of her arms for the sake of "intersectionality" because it was ableist for her to be a normal Japanese girl.
When people reacted at a girl who would envy Deadpool's face, because her face is now vaguelly human in an attempt to make her "Fit for all cultures", the hospital director said on Twatter that it was not about health but about intersectionality.
Well, I am a surgeon, one who wants to have children.
This analogy means that I am a translator who wants to make a video game of his own. And seeing this localization horrors is disgusting to me. Not only that, people are saying I am accusing people of being SJWs with no basis, but one of the Treehouse employees using a Twitter handle called @alisonrapp said that intersectionality was the importat thing on video games. She IS an SJW. One who is injecting her views on a works SHE DID NOT CREATE, and is not the only ethical violation here.
This localization was unethical and unprofessional, and I am not just a weeaboo saying so because a mini game was cut, or a purist saying so because I consider games should not be localized. No, I AM A TRANSLATOR, I am a professional in one of the essential parts of localization,
I was taught by my mentors in the art of translation that translations and localizations must be accurate and faithful to the source material as the language barriers allow, specially literary translations and entretainment localizations. Adapting slang is translation, adapting the possition of the writing to fit Western languages in stead of Japanese is localization, explaining or adapting pop culture refferences is translation and localization, altering a poem in order to keep the metter and rythm is translation (Poems are one of translator's biggest challenges), cutting entire conversations, cutting content, changing names, deleting scenes, editing character backgrounds, changing character ages or clothing, recoloring a character's clothing, hair, skin, et cetera, removing game features, altering symbols. Those things are neither translation nor localizations, those are cuts, that is censorship, that is wrong, that is the work of a poorly trained and unprofessional localization team. I ma not just a guy crying censorship out of my ass, I am a professional on the field who learned what not to do.
For les than that Hayao Miyazaki sent a katana with a letter saying "No cuts" to a Wester film studio which intended to make minor modifications to Princess Mononoke.
Let me gve you two examples. When A Clockwork Orange was released in the US, the last chapter was removed because in it Alex decides to reform by himself after maduring, the original author intended to make that symbolic, but the retarded NY editors decided it did not match with the trends in US, eventually the most cultured readers found out and preferred the editions that respected the author's work, not to mention the author was not pleased with the changes.
The other example is the Okami series, a series which was a true localization challenge because it is basically an adaptation of all that is Japanese culture and mythology in a single game. However the localization team was respectful and they decided to stay as loyal to the source material as possible. The result, a masterpiece. And in order to explain the cultural context they included explanations of the myths that inspired the game on the manual.
Other example that I just remembered while writing this is Way of the Samurai. A game which is set in feudal and post feudal Japan and respects most if not all the source material. Heck, there is even a sex mini game in Way of the Samurai 4 which has a lot of cultural symbols, for example a turtle which needs explanation.