Culture Apparently ‘Unicorn Overlord’ Already Has Issues With Its Localization - For some reason, Japanese games are particularly affected by overly invasive localizers, trying to make their creative mark where it should not exist.

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'Unicorn Overlord' doesn't exactly have a very accurate localization. Atlus, Vanillaware

In yet another case of Japanese games receiving bizarrely edited localizations, it seems that Unicorn Overlord is the latest of these to be affected.

With the release of Unicorn Overloard pretty imminent, fans are eager to play the full version of Vanillaware’s latest and greatest gaming epic.

As I already covered the excellent demo, it seems that some fans are understandably upset with the game’s highly edited localization.

The full breakdown of this situation is worth a read, but the following Twitter/X thread (shown below) also goes into a lot of helpful detail.

Unicorn Overlord had a free demo released. After playing it, I can say quite confidently that the localisation is abhorrent. Here begins a thread of numerous examples.

Put simply, it seems that the localization changes a lot of the intent from the various characters and consequently the game’s story. This is a real shame but by no means the first instance of this happening in gaming.

For some reason, Japanese games are particularly affected by overly invasive localizers, trying to make their creative mark where it should not exist.

Localization is a complex and difficult process at the best of times, having people misunderstand their role and try to inject their own creative take on a translation far exceeds their remit and negatively impacts the games they are work on.

In that, localization is an important but entirely separate discipline from game development, and if localizers want to make games so badly then they should just apply for actual game development jobs instead.

In the meantime, it seems that arguably one of Vanillaware’s best games is already plagued with interference from people who should have been just translating the game properly.

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What fascinates me personally is how things have stayed the same, yet have changed because the fans have changed.

See, a localization company named Working Designs did various pop culture translation edits to the games they handled. They all got retranslated, after much hemming and hawing by Japanese script purists.

However, I would not expect this kind of thing to get the same treatment because now game translation is tied up in leftist politics. Can't even use the word tranny anymore, even if the Japanese equivalent was right there.
 
Yup. While they thankfully didn't go totally off the rails, with political and ideological bullshit, they rewrote a shitload of stuff to sound like it was in a historic play or something. A lot of verbose nonsense. Changed the meanings of some things and even some character characterizations as well. They also "cleaned up" most female dialogue. Basically erasing any text/dialogue that even hints that a female character might feel or be unsure, not confident or needing help. So the more basic infallible "stronk womyn" treatment.

It's a mess overall sadly.
 
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Night Crawler said:
Haven't you seen all the Sony exclusives on Steam lately? Console exclusivity is dead. Well not for Nintendo. The chances of you ever seeing a Mario or Zelda game on Steam is nonexistent. But for Sony its done. They are times exclusives at best.
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You were saying?

I want all of these games on pc, especially Vanillaware's back catalog. Exclusivity is for console war pissbabies who can only guilt their parents into buying one console and then screeching about it on the internet.
 
Night Crawler said:
Haven't you seen all the Sony exclusives on Steam lately? Console exclusivity is dead. Well not for Nintendo. The chances of you ever seeing a Mario or Zelda game on Steam is nonexistent. But for Sony its done. They are times exclusives at best.
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I think it would be better for me to get a newer laptop than a PS4 or 5. Nintendo seems to be the only console brand worth buying due to franchise exclusives.

Is this thing with Unicorn Overlord similar to what happened with Working Designs? At the time it was the only way you were playing those games in English so you had to deal with the Courtney Love jokes plus totally unnecessary gameplay changes.

I really enjoyed Magic Knight RayEarth for Saturn. But it was loaded with dirty jokes. It seemed everything I examined had some toilet humor attached to it. I don't remember the manga being like that. And the fan translation of the SNES game is pretty straightforward. I don't hate WD. I just think they went overboard. Most of the games I never even noticed had problems until I read about what changes were made.

I understand changing things that do not translate well. Some jokes and sayings just don't work outside of their native language. But turning everything upside-down because woke or you think you are the next great writer is just not acceptable to me. I'm really iffy about Vanillaware because Odin Sphere is one of the worst games I've ever played. It only cost me $4 so I guess it doesn't matter.
pikachudidnothingwrong said:
Yup. While they thankfully didn't go totally off the rails, with political and ideological bullshit, they rewrote a shitload of stuff to sound like it was in a historic play or something. A lot of verbose nonsense. Changed the meanings of some things and even some character characterizations as well. They also "cleaned up" most female dialogue. Basically erasing any text/dialogue that even hints that a female character might feel or be unsure, not confident or needing help. So the more basic infallible "stronk womyn" treatment.

It's a mess overall sadly.
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It's extremely sexist to do that to female characters. It's not what the original writer intended and it makes the characters seem less human because everyone needs to be Superwoman. As a woman I find it pathetically pandering. I assume they think I'm a retard and that's what is actually offensive.
 
Dysnomia said:
Nintendo seems to be the only console brand worth buying due to franchise exclusives.
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They're also the ones that keep experimenting with controls. No one offers controls like a Switch or a Wii in that way, which is why they can have first party exclusives. A PS5 is a PC with a PS OS, which makes it not as good as a $1K gaming PC given it costs about half of one. Sony should have pushed the limits of the PS4 first before upgrading.
 
Big moth tiddies said:
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You were saying?

I want all of these games on pc, especially Vanillaware's back catalog. Exclusivity is for console war pissbabies who can only guilt their parents into buying one console and then screeching about it on the internet.
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It will eventually be ported to the PC. Give it a few years.
 
AI and digital distribution will fix this. It means that they can offer unlimited different stories on their digital storefront and everyone can buy the version they want.
You could have the "true" edition which would be completely true to the original Japanese story both in tone and language.
The you could have the "leftie" version which would be full of men bad, patriarchism evil, nazi's everywhere, and Trump of course. And finally you could have the gender-special tranny version where everyone is LGBT and the story is all about troons fighting against the evil terfs.

This would be easy to do. Would this make people happy? That everyone can get the version they want?

No, the troons would be mad because the "true" edition would be 99% of all sales and only 12 trannies on the internet would buy the "trannie" version. The solution to end this racism and trannyphobia is a twitter campaign to ban the "true" version and force everyone to buy the "trannie" version.
Remeber, having representation and their own version is not enough. They need the normal version to not exist.
 
I've looked into it. While they definitely got a bit... creative... with the changes, they're relatively minor and benign. They clearly wanted it to sound and feel like Tactics Ogre and I think they succeeded.

It has nothing on some of the bad localizations I've seen. Especially the kings of butchered localization, Bravely Second and Fire Emblem: Fates.

Bravely Default was really successful and well received. But Bravely Second pretty much killed the franchise because the localization literally cut huge swathes out of the game.

Any sub quest that was deemed "Problematic" was cut, including all gameplay (Areas, items, characters) with it. This meant in addition to hours of lost gameplay, tons of plot, character development, and lore were just gone as well.


And I don't know how to even start with the character butchering that Treehouse gave Fates. It gave us such highlights as "RAWR is Dragon for 'I love you'!", "*SWISH SWISH* Look at my tail! Soooo fluffy!", and "..."

The "..." is probably the most egregious. In the original, there was a conversation between two assassins, debating the morality and guilt of killing someone just because you're ordered to. It was pretty deep and gave a lot of depth to their characters.

Treehouse thought it was "Too intense" and instead made both of the ninjas just stare at each other for entire conversations with "..." replacing all the dialogue. They turned a character-defining conversation into a bad anime-trope joke.
 
I just want translations that reflect the original writing of the author is that so much to ask? Its literally less work than adding shit and changing stuff
I want my japanese games to feel like they were made by a japanese company not some california faggot
 
Night Crawler said:
Those old 90's JRPG's were full of translation errors. I still never noticed.
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That's because most of those errors were spelling or grammar, and if you have a strong enough brain, it'll fix the errors/gaps to where you don't really notice them; at best the programmer mistyped and the script was never checked, at worst the translator was Japanese and forgot some part of English and they just rolled with it. And I'm not saying it didn't happen back then, it's just more noticeable now; but now they're actively removing shit from games and completely rewriting characters and telling you it's better. Case in point, in Final Fantasy 8, in North America, we were led to believe that Zell loves Balamb Garden Hot Dogs, the problem being, in the original script, it wasn't hot dogs, it was bread. That sounds boring the North Americans, but over in Japan, they have all sorts of flavored breads and what-not. To make it more familiar or whatever for us burgers, they changed it to hot dogs.

I refuse this line of thinking, because even if you're going to input cultural things into your game, the fact is, you're making up an entirely fictional world; the audience doesn't need 100% familiarity with your settings, especially right from the start. I mean hell, FF8 is about children (orphans and non-orphans) being sent to Mercenary School to learn how to wage war, and part of that training is letting embodiments of nature inhabit your brain (at the cost of your memories) and other shit. I'm not so up my ass I need to pull a GRR Martin and ask Tolkien what King Aragorn's Tax Policy is, the same way I don't need to be catered to and have bread turned into hot dogs. And frankly, having a bunch of annoying fucking N4 ALT JET rejects tell me I'm too fucking stupid to understand a proper translation; especially while they put their finger on the scale and destroy more than just the script.
 
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Kheapathic said:
That's because most of those errors were spelling or grammar, and if you have a strong enough brain, it'll fix the errors/gaps to where you don't really notice them; at best the programmer mistyped and the script was never checked, at worst the translator was Japanese and forgot some part of English and they just rolled with it. And I'm not saying it didn't happen back then, it's just more noticeable now; but now they're actively removing shit from games and completely rewriting characters and telling you it's better. Case in point, in Final Fantasy 8, in North America, we were led to believe that Zell loves Balamb Garden Hot Dogs, the problem being, in the original script, it wasn't hot dogs, it was bread. That sounds boring the North Americans, but over in Japan, they have all sorts of flavored breads and what-not. To make it more familiar or whatever for us burgers, they changed it to hot dogs.

I refuse this line of thinking, because even if you're going to input cultural things into your game, the fact is, you're making up an entirely fictional world; the audience doesn't need 100% familiarity with your settings, especially right from the start. I mean hell, FF8 is about children (orphans and non-orphans) being sent to Mercenary School to learn how to wage war, and part of that training is letting embodiments of nature inhabit your brain (at the cost of your memories) and other shit. I'm not so up my ass I need to pull a GRR Martin and ask Tolkien what King Aragorn's Tax Policy is, the same way I don't need to be catered to and have bread turned into hot dogs. And frankly, having a bunch of annoying fucking N4 ALT JET rejects tell me I'm too fucking stupid to understand a proper translation; especially while they put their finger on the scale and destroy more than just the script.
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"You spoony bard!"
 
Night Crawler said:
Haven't you seen all the Sony exclusives on Steam lately? Console exclusivity is dead. Well not for Nintendo. The chances of you ever seeing a Mario or Zelda game on Steam is nonexistent. But for Sony its done. They are times exclusives at best.
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As much as I've been a console guy most my life, I'll readily admit consoles are pretty much fucking dead at this point if you're not named Nintendo. Why pay $400-$500 for a thing that now has bloated day one patches, limited storage capacity, little to no exclusivity, are obsolete almost immediately, games on offer are worse experiences than PC, even when said games are tailor-made for console, and so on?

For a bit more, you can get a decent PC that can run most games, on top of the freedom offered by the multifunctionality of a PC and the ability to easily be upgraded, and there's little to no games you're missing out on if you also pick up a Switch. Let's not even get into how God damn easy it is to emulate Switch games with a decent computer.

The Switch's biggest selling point (and a pretty valid one) besides exclusives is its "console-to-handheld" functionality, and it doesn't require a streaming connection and a separate fucking device to work. The only other selling point of say, the PS5, is PSVR2, but again, you can do it better with a PC and you're not as limited by so much proprietary bullshit. Why the Xbox even exists at this point when you can get pretty much the entire library on PC for a pittance is beyond me. Console gaming is dying of incurable cancer and is on life support till the day Nintendo decides to pull the plug.
 
Nick Gars said:
Why the Xbox even exists at this point when you can get pretty much the entire library on PC for a pittance is beyond me. Console gaming is dying of incurable cancer and is on life support till the day Nintendo decides to pull the plug.
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Pretty sure it has something to do with the suits chasing the glory days of the 360 and trying to dominate (if not destroy) the market. The 360 days were a fluke based on the rise of Call of Duty, and the FGC did their part as SF4 and MvC3 ran better on the 360; but outside of those, just about everything on the 360 was on the PS3. At least that's what I would say, but Microsoft tried to beat Sony in their home court and started making insane fucking deals to get North American exclusivity rights; which is why despite PS being a JRPG haven, the PS3 never got a North American release of Tales of Vesperia, and a number of other bullet hell shooters and other niche Japanese games as well as Guilty Gear Overture; Microsoft tried to beat the competition by buying them out and failed.

They practically sunk the XB1 before it was even on sale with their restrictive as hell "The Console MUST call home every 24 hours or we lock you out!" shit, on top of "the disc you bought will be bound to the console, so no borrowing/resale/etc." I remember it being so bad Sony had their two guys go on stage and have a "Here is how you share games on the Playstation" presentation, which was Kaz Hirai handing the other dude a game and saying "Here you go."

Aside from a retarded naming scheme, I don't have much to say about their current day Xbox aside from going by what was available, even during Corona, the Playstation was more sought after. The two things Microsoft did right was their Game Pass thing and putting new games on it, and tying their Microsoft Account to the Xbox account, so whatever you have digitally on Xbox is also on Windows; really fucking shocked they made that good of a move.

Outside of that, with their purchase of Activision Blizzard; they're sitting on a shit ton of companies and IPs they refuse to use. They're gonna outdo EA at their own game and fucking sink the gaming landscape... and... I kinda want them to. Shit got too big and popular too fast, it needs to go back. But they'll keep going, because the suits want their second yacht and refuse to listen about how to turn videogames into money.

The only good Microsoft ever did was give us funny stories about kids getting banned for hacking MW2 lobbies and showing their dick on camera in games that supported it. And it's funny because the story started out with the kid crying to their parent, the parent contacts Microsoft, and then they'll send video evidence of "This is your child exposing himself in UNO." This ban will stay in effect.
 
Kheapathic said:
I refuse this line of thinking, because even if you're going to input cultural things into your game, the fact is, you're making up an entirely fictional world; the audience doesn't need 100% familiarity with your settings, especially right from the start. I mean hell, FF8 is about children (orphans and non-orphans) being sent to Mercenary School to learn how to wage war, and part of that training is letting embodiments of nature inhabit your brain (at the cost of your memories) and other shit. I'm not so up my ass I need to pull a GRR Martin and ask Tolkien what King Aragorn's Tax Policy is, the same way I don't need to be catered to and have bread turned into hot dogs. And frankly, having a bunch of annoying fucking N4 ALT JET rejects tell me I'm too fucking stupid to understand a proper translation; especially while they put their finger on the scale and destroy more than just the script
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Sure, you say that now but imagine being a kid thinking it was some ethereal thing and then growing up to realize he's just talking about pastries. Or thinking the guy is a really weird autist. At least a hot dog autistic makes sense, but a bread autist won't unless you still gave a cultural translation and started having them mention some French shit.
 
Shadfan666xxx000 said:
Sure, you say that now but imagine being a kid thinking it was some ethereal thing and then growing up to realize he's just talking about pastries. Or thinking the guy is a really weird autist. At least a hot dog autistic makes sense, but a bread autist won't unless you still gave a cultural translation and started having them mention some French shit.
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I'm willing to have things be ethereal or not make sense, that's one aspect of fiction I enjoy. I live in the real world, I'm very familiar with it, I have no problem accepting a world where something as non-descript as "bread" can create autism... just look at Null and his cheese rants.

I should also say, what I failed to put in what you quoted, is those N4 ALTs love to scream about colonialism and how America isn't the only culture; while they white-wash other cultural creations. They're a priest, rewriting the Bible to be more in line with their way of thinking, and telling the dirty fucking peasant should be grateful for even that. Even if it's "cringe Japan culture," I'll take that over anything these failed social study majors can craft.
 
Kheapathic said:
I'm willing to have things be ethereal or not make sense, that's one aspect of fiction I enjoy. I live in the real world, I'm very familiar with it, I have no problem accepting a world where something as non-descript as "bread" can create autism... just look at Null and his cheese rants.

I should also say, what I failed to put in what you quoted, is those N4 ALTs love to scream about colonialism and how America isn't the only culture; while they white-wash other cultural creations. They're a priest, rewriting the Bible to be more in line with their way of thinking, and telling the dirty fucking peasant should be grateful for even that. Even if it's "cringe Japan culture," I'll take that over anything these failed social study majors can craft.
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That's well and good to some degree but it doesnt take into account why the Japanese writers put in a reference to their own snack foods. They didn't want it to be ethereal but instead wanted you to associate it with a common and cheap food item. The authorial intent is actually lost in the plain translation you think would help because the translation by itself falls deaf in context.
 
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