Oh, the localizations can be a rant in and of themselves. The long story short is that Enix USA made a shitty tie in game for some saturday morning cartoon in the west without telling Enix JP, so they went DFE on the US branch. They reopened just in time for Enix JP to buy Squaresoft JP to keep Microsoft from doing a hostile takeover, and the recreated Enix USA (Dragon Warrior 7 being their biggest release IIRC) was shut down so Squaresoft USA could take over. But Squaresoft USA is like modern Marvel/DC -- you're not there because you love the industry, you're there because you want the prestige of working for an industry leader. And asking a bunch of people already busy skullfucking Final Fantasy into the ground to work on a mostly unknown franchise in the west was just asking for trouble.
Dragon Quest 9 was the first one I think, before DQ4/5/6. This was where the Squaresoft USA guys basically decided that no one in the west knew about this silly little niche JRPG they were being forced to localize by the JP branch, so they just wiped out all the references to the original games -- DQ9 being a spiritual remake of DQ3 -- and went with "le based tumblr rewrites" to show off how awesome writers they are. So you had stupid shit like the Buddhist inspired Dharma Shrine, which has been in almost all the games since DQ3, being renamed the Catholic inspired "Alltrades Abbey." Why? Because they wanted to rename the villain in DQ9 as "Jack of Alltrades" and his evil boss form after he's outed as being a monster, "Master of Nu'un." A tortured reference to an idiom/saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none," from the 15th century.
The localization of 9 was full of this kind of shit, in the monsters, in the spells, in the locations, in the characters, in the script. If they could rewrite something as le-funnay-laugh-damnit alliteration pun shit, they did. And they've kept ALL of these shitty localization changes since then, because if they ever stop using them that would be them admitting they did something wrong, and fuck you.
You could tell they had no idea how to actually market and localize and make a series a success on it's own based on the marketing for DQ9. They got some... pro skater? Or some D list 20 year old movie star? Someone to pretend to be playing the game in ads. It was cringe as fuck. But without the Cultural Inertia of Final Fantasy buffeting them, they just don't know how to do their jobs.
DQ4 DS was special too. I think it came out after DQ9 in the West, and they decided to give people accents.
This wasn't in the original script, like, at all, but fuck you, they're the artistes' and need this for their portfolio. This would be racist as fuck nowadays, but this was pre-2014, so it was ok to do. So you had the first towns being Irish or Scottish based, only they're not voiced (I suspect they were trying to push to include voice acting but it didn't happen), so how do you get the accents to come across?
Really really poorly, as it turns out. Scottish, Russian, German... they gave all the random regions of the world various accents that were just the most god awful fucking things. "Tsarevna is kidnaped!? How terrible this news!" "His Majesty is aboot tae make an announcement tae youse all. Simmer doon an' listen noo."
Not as bad as the last boss of ... one of them. He speaks in Russian. Not, you know, Russian text. No, Cyrillic script being used in ASCII art. So you have to look at the entire block of text and try and figure out what English letters they're trying to make out of the Cyrillic ones. I genuinely thought my copy of the rom was fucked with when I saw it.
This got better in 5 and 6, as defined as "you could at least read it without a translation guide pulled up on Gamefaqs," but it never got
good. And they've kept this shit for every localization since then. Because if they ever stop, that would be them admitting they did something wrong, and fuck you.
... Did I mention how DQ4 DS had the party chat feature removed in the West, because localizing things is hard, guys, and surely no one will notice 75% of the game's script being removed? Yeah.
DQ3 2DHD's localization is way better than the DS ones, but they still maintain shit like the accents (toned WAY down because accents are racist now) and "Patty's Party Planning Place" (actual name: Luida’s Bar,
which is an iconic enough reference that Square Enix opened an actual real life DQ themed bar named Luida's Bar) because to stop would be them admitting they're wrong, and fuck you.
