Dragon Quest

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and yet just about everything else is changed and screwed up and he didn't have any issues?
If he had issues, he would simply get someone else to do the games. Square-Enix doesn't own Dragon Quest, Armor Project (a company chaired exclusively by Horii and his family) does and they have a near complete veto on everything that happens in the franchise including localization decisions.

I actually found the Polygon interview from years ago where Horii states that he works directly with the localization teams for deciding things like terminology, names, and even accents and dialects:
Polygon: For the localization, were you very involved in that process, or did you primarily leave that up to the regional teams?

Yuji Horii: We were pretty involved with that process. When any of the terminology, like new character names, are presented and proposed, that’s something I like to review with the localization and the development teams.

Hokuto Okamoto: In localizing the game from Japanese to other languages, oftentimes we receive questions with regards to things like the setting or characters, things we hadn’t necessarily thought of for the Japanese game. We discuss those aspects and provide a response to the localization team as well.

Takeshi Uchikawa: We also take the opportunity to make any necessary adjustments or tweaks to the game if anything feels a bit off or awkward.

Yuji Horii: And also, as you know, the Western version adds voice-overs, so we worked with the localization team to determine what dialects and what accents we’d give to different characters.
 
If he had issues, he would simply get someone else to do the games. Square-Enix doesn't own Dragon Quest, Armor Project (a company chaired exclusively by Horii and his family) does and they have a near complete veto on everything that happens in the franchise including localization decisions.

I actually found the Polygon interview from years ago where Horii states that he works directly with the localization teams for deciding things like terminology, names, and even accents and dialects:
Well, that sounds a lot more reasonable than the other guy's story. I guess if he's fine with the theater kid taking a dump on each game, then whatever. I'll just stop playing them
 
Well, that sounds a lot more reasonable than the other guy's story. I guess if he's fine with the theater kid taking a dump on each game, then whatever. I'll just stop playing them
I mean, that's kind of the big issue with Japanese games these days. The rot isn't just in one place - it's a combination of theater kid localizers, domestic Japanese culture war stuff, old Japanese guys selling out, bloated corpo dev teams racing to the bottom, etc all synergizing to enshittify and sanitize everything.

The golden age of the 2000s feels so far away now.
 
I'd like some citations for any of this. I find it hard to believe he'd just come out and say "yeah I don't give a fuck go wild"
Yeah I have only seen the interview with Horii complaining about stupid standards in America, it was earlier in the thread. Most Japanese devs are rather tight lipped about alot of things involved in developing a game. So there isn't much evidence one way or the other, but what little evidence outside promo hype is that interview of him saying he his pigeon holed into DEI shit.
 
I firmly believe that DQVIII would have still been a big success even without the localization. It released on the (former) most popular system ever, it was made by the same people who created the incredibly popular FFX and FF7, and it had a great story and characters.

Unfortunately, this combination of factors just so happened to take place at the same time it got giga localized, so they decided it was the localization that made it more successful than its predecessors.
 
I firmly believe that DQVIII would have still been a big success even without the localization. It released on the (former) most popular system ever, it was made by the same people who created the incredibly popular FFX and FF7, and it had a great story and characters.

Unfortunately, this combination of factors just so happened to take place at the same time it got giga localized, so they decided it was the localization that made it more successful than its predecessors.
It also had a lot of momentum due to coming out during the peak of Dragon Ball's popularity in the US (like right at the tail end of Toonami airing the Buu storyline iirc). I knew people who grabbed it just because of the Akira Toriyama art.

Also Square-Enix put a bunch of things specifically into the international release of DQ8 - voice acting, full orchestral score, and a bunch of QoL stuff to make it feel more like other, modern RPGs on the system. All that stuff was absent from the original JP release.

And yet the localization is the most enduring influence they took away from that release.

The more I read into the Japanese game industry, the more I feel like it operates on cargo cult logic.
 
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DQ localization is never going to change as long as Yuji Horii is alive. People like to bitch about dangerhairs, but it was Richard Honeywood and Horii himself who worked together to set the standard on how to localize the games. Horii did this because he wants to sell to the absolute widest audience. He wasn't content with Dragon Quest remaining a niche franchise for nerds who read translation notes outside of Japan. He wanted the normgroid Nintendie audience. He wanted Dragon Quest to be a global property on par with Zelda or Kirby or Donkey Kong.

Don't forget - Horii isn't some put-upon old man. He's the CEO of Armor Project, which is the sole arbiter of what goes into Dragon Quest. Even Square-Enix has to go along with what he says, and every interview indicates that he's only gotten more hands-on in recent years when it comes to how his games are marketed abroad.

This is why I find the discourse in the west to be so... odd. So many people talk around the issue as if Horii is just a puppet being pulled around by evil Americans/Euros/Jews/women. It was those evil Americans who made him censor outfits, not a cost-benefit analysis rooted in the fact that getting a B from an increasingly conservative CERO instead of an A would probably cut sales by 20% which directly eats into his bottom line as a rights holder. The goofy names and accents are American wokalizers besmirching a proud Japanese institution, and not Horii insisting that the slop be tweaked in each market to be maximally digestible.

tl;dr it's easy to hate localizers, but do you have the courage to hate Yuji Horii?
He doesn't know English. Like really, worse than Miyamoto who sometimes can stammer through a sentence or two. How do you expect him to understand how fucked it is?
 
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Man, rose colored glasses are rough. I recently played Dragon Warrior 3 to the end for the first time. I had a friend who had it back in the day and I had this memory of going to the monster battle arena thing and having fun gambling on the fights. Lost so much money. Holy shit.
 
Just
Man, rose colored glasses are rough. I recently played Dragon Warrior 3 to the end for the first time. I had a friend who had it back in the day and I had this memory of going to the monster battle arena thing and having fun gambling on the fights. Lost so much money. Holy shit.
use save states lmao
 
Horii reviews and gets a final say on every single change done in the localized script and wields enough influence to cut off a project entirely.
What's that? A Localizer makes an appeal to a Japanese authority to legitimize his localization?

... Many such cases.

My favorite was Vic Ireland of Working Designs infamy explaining on his forum that him fucking with Class of Heroes 2 so it was almost unbeatable was fine because "the Japanese devs trust me to make these kinds of decisions for the Western market." (CoH is a dungeon crawler like SMT or EO, and it has a powerful spell if you master magic that buffs the shit out of you. He decided that was too powerful and forced the devs to make a patch to make bosses immune to the spell in the Western versions. All the bosses past the midpoint of the game assume you'll have this buff (and part of the mechanics is them removing the buff and you having to recast it before you die). So instead, you have to grind for dozens if not hundreds of hours to overlevel each and every boss.)


Meanwhile, here's Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama's Shonen Jump editor for his entire career's interview at TGS 2024, when they went off on Wokeshit and admitted they were being forced to change DQ3 to remove pronouns and fuck with Toriyama's art by Square Enix. They specifically blame it on the American side of Square Enix forcing the Japanese side to comply with "global regulations."

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Square Enix JP apparently sent lawyers after every JP outlet that covered that stream, and even had their official TGS stream removed from the internet. I've seen it reposted to X and Rumble but can't find it offhand right now.


But in all seriousness, back in November they did a huge purge of the Global Standards guys and the US branch including the pink haired lunatic in "charge" of the FF14 localization, the head of localization, and the JP Global Standards team. They all made the same type of brags. "We have a direct line to the JP CEO." "He listens to us not you chuds." "My entire Japanese team is filled with foreigners, isn't that progressive?" etc etc. Guess them fucking up the FF14 cash cow was the last straw, heh.
 
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Meanwhile, here's Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama's Shonen Jump editor for his entire career's interview at TGS 2024, when they went off on Wokeshit and admitted they were being forced to change DQ3 to remove pronouns and fuck with Toriyama's art by Square Enix. They specifically blame it on the American side of Square Enix forcing the Japanese side to comply with "global regulations."

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Yes, this is one of my points - Yuji Horii will call out American Squeenix to score points in domestic interviews despite personally having TOTAL CONTROL over Dragon Quest. If he wanted to, he could easily stop this troonery and bad localization with a single word. He doesn't work for SE and SE doesn't control the Dragon Quest IP.

He chooses not to because he likes money more than the integrity of his franchise.

That's kinda my frustration. He doesn't give enough of a fuck anymore to stand up to this stuff which means things are never going to get better.
 
Yes, this is one of my points - Yuji Horii will call out American Squeenix to score points in domestic interviews despite personally having TOTAL CONTROL over Dragon Quest. If he wanted to, he could easily stop this troonery and bad localization with a single word. He doesn't work for SE and SE doesn't control the Dragon Quest IP.

He chooses not to because he likes money more than the integrity of his franchise.

That's kinda my frustration. He doesn't give enough of a fuck anymore to stand up to this stuff which means things are never going to get better.
How did Null put it? "This all could have stopped if someone in the chain had just had the guts to tell these people no."

I also like this copypasta version from twitter:

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But I don't know. I honestly think the wokies that took over Localization do a pretty good job of lying to the Japanese side of things, they seem to be pretty vulnerable to Sweet Baby Inc style manipulation. But that November purge gives me hope. The downside being that they managed to subvert all 3 of the platform publishers in Japan before the swingback -- Sony was subverted when they moved Playstation HQ to woke Californiastan, Microsoft was subverted years ago, and Nintendo recently capitulated.

Until we see those platform publishers purge this shit the wokies will always have a lever they can manipulate things with. (e.g., even if Square Enix fires their global standards team, the wokies at Nintendo will just send Square Enix a night letter if they aren't obeying them anyway.)
 
Yes, this is one of my points - Yuji Horii will call out American Squeenix to score points in domestic interviews despite personally having TOTAL CONTROL over Dragon Quest. If he wanted to, he could easily stop this troonery and bad localization with a single word. He doesn't work for SE and SE doesn't control the Dragon Quest IP.

He chooses not to because he likes money more than the integrity of his franchise.

That's kinda my frustration. He doesn't give enough of a fuck anymore to stand up to this stuff which means things are never going to get better.
You're wrong that Armor Project has total control over the IP. They can't do anything without Square Enix's approval. It's a similar situation with Pokemon where nominally Game Freak & Creatures Inc & Nintendo & The Pokemon Company all have some say but we don't seem to know where the line is between Armor & SE, probably they've just never said it publically. Of course there's also Bird Studio (Toriyama) that owns owns the iconic character and monster designs and Sugiyama Kobo that owns the most important music.

BTW I can't help but think the Square / Enix merger was the end of days for both parties, everything since (except Dragon Quest Builders 2 of all things) has been a total turd unworthy of existing on god's green earth.
 
BTW I can't help but think the Square / Enix merger was the end of days for both parties, everything since (except Dragon Quest Builders 2 of all things) has been a total turd unworthy of existing on god's green earth.
Enix was just a publisher, whereas Square was an entire development and publishing house. Even at the time, there were concerns from the Enix side because Square outnumbered them by a factor of 10 in terms of headcount. The end result seems to have been the Square-ification of Enix properties rather than an actual balanced merger.

I can't remember if it was in this thread or the JRPG general, but I pointed out how the revamped vocation system in DQ7R is basically just an FF-style job system.
 
Enix was just a publisher, whereas Square was an entire development and publishing house. Even at the time, there were concerns from the Enix side because Square outnumbered them by a factor of 10 in terms of headcount. The end result seems to have been the Square-ification of Enix properties rather than an actual balanced merger.

I can't remember if it was in this thread or the JRPG general, but I pointed out how the revamped vocation system in DQ7R is basically just an FF-style job system.
But Enix was way bigger than Square, wasn't it? Enix published a shitload of stuff -- books, novels, manga, games... And they had their own development stuff going on too. It's why Enix basically bought Square during the "merger," and the Enix side owned more shares in the resulting company.

DQ7R2's vocation system isn't that much different from the original DQ7 one, is it? The big change is you no longer permanently learn stuff, which was already in DQ7R (3DS).
 
But Enix was way bigger than Square, wasn't it? Enix published a shitload of stuff -- books, novels, manga, games... And they had their own development stuff going on too. It's why Enix basically bought Square during the "merger," and the Enix side owned more shares in the resulting company.
After the merger, about 80% of Square-Enix's employees were former Square employees.

DQ7R2's vocation system isn't that much different from the original DQ7 one, is it? The big change is you no longer permanently learn stuff, which was already in DQ7R (3DS).
In the 3DS version, you permanently kept stuff from your beginner vocations that you learned. Only tier 2 and 3 vocations had abilities locked.

In the new remake, you only have access to the stuff you have equipped but can equip two vocations at a time.
 
After the merger, about 80% of Square-Enix's employees were former Square employees.
That's horrific and explains so much.

I personally am just waiting for them to fuck up Dragon Quest. They really really really want to. They want it try and do to it what they did with Final Fantasy.

I absolutely think DQ12 is going to be shit. They've mentioned wanting to do Grimdark and they keep almost but not quite saying it'll be an ARPG like FF13-3/15/16/7R. They seem to have convinced themselves of the stupid bullshit the halo generation was telling themselves -- "We only did Turn based because consoles couldn't handle ARPG, we only didn't voice every single line because it took too much storage space" etc etc.
 
I have finished DQ7R and while there's definitely problems with the way it turned out, I still think it continues to have one of my favorite bro characters of all time:
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I was watching Sackchief's video on DQ7R, and after finishing, I'm baffled that Square thought it would be a good idea to have a person that DIDN'T MAKE IT PAST THE FIRST DUNGEON IN THE ORIGINAL GAME THE MAIN PRODUCER OF THE REMAKE.:stress:

There needs to be some sort of background check or test for people who want to develop games and especially remakes of games where they need to show proof that they beaten a mainline game from that franchise if they want to work on it.

And this is coming off the the remakes of DQ1 2 and 3 which had a fuckton of effort put into those games too, so what the fuck happened?
 
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