Apparently there has been an outcry on social media about the English localization of this game. The claim is, that the translators felt the need to make the game less sexist and more inclusive than the original Japanese version which of course I found very alarming given what is going on in the gaming industry as a whole as of late. However, when I checked examples given on Twitter and other sources I found this claim quite far fetched. With one possible exception where the characters are joking about the presumed gender of a defeated golem, everything seems very unpolitical. So is this just a storm in a teacup or am I missing something? To those who played the game: what is your impression?

Note: please stay on topic. I'm not interested in a debate on principles I'm just looking for factual information on a specific game to make an informed purchasing decision.

From what I have observed in the Steam forums what has riled people up isn't so much wokeness (although plenty seem to have jumped onto this angle), it's rather that the English translation has deviated from the Japanese in certain areas to the point that it has effectively inserted entriely new meanings to the dialogue/changes to character personalities. This seems to have been backed up by the fact that the Chinese translation has stayed faithful to the Japanese source material.

I would also be interested because I find such an approach to be unprofessional and disrespectful, especially when moderate forms of humor are inserted.

You can find a lot on Twitter, but a confirmation would be good.

Usually this kind of stuff is overblown (FE:Fates)... but I looked at the youtube video the guy posted in the reviews and, while the person in the video is definitely an agitator... he also has receipts with a screenshot of the word 'chud' being used in the localization. Two seconds in google can tell you that word does not really belong in any game trying to immerse you, let alone a jrpg lol. Reminds me of when that one anime was 'localized' to randomly lecture on gamergate in the dub.

I thought JP companies were savvy enough with the west to overcome the pitfalls of the past, but apparently not.

Thanks for pointing this out. As a non native speaker some connotations are not immediately obvious to me. Urban Dictionary lists a lot of possible meanings for this word, so I figured it was just some common insult. Still on its own I would consider this as an unfitting translation rather than an agenda-driven one. And while this isn't great obviously I'm used to far worse translations in video games.

This localization mini-edit mod solve the worst and make it playable:

steamcommunity.com/app/1658280/discussions/0/4357871582654759273/

From my 8 hours of playtime on the beta, I saw nothing even remotely woke in the translation. The general outcry on steam forums and social media is one of the worst cases of collective insanity I've seen in a while.

BUT... that doesn't mean the localisation is good. It's true there are issues with the translation: typos, grammatical errors, inaccurate skill descriptions, etc.
The writing in general did not seem very good to me, but I can't tell whether the main culprit is the localisation team or the original Japanese writers (a possibility that no one seems to even want to consider).
Having only played the demo, I can't tell you for sure whether it has a real negative impact on important emotional scenes which, if true, could really be bad for the game as a whole.

To give you one specific example of why I'm talking about "collective insanity", there's no joke about "assuming the gender of a golem", it's a blatant lie.
What happens in this scene is that you defeat a rock golem and one of your party members says "Yeah, we beat him!"
Then another party member immediately adds "Are you sure it's a him?"
But we're talking about a ROCK GOLEM, it has nothing to do with "gender", it's just a way for the second character to highlight the fact that what they just beat was not human, it was just a MONSTER. There's no implied gender confusion, the confusion is between human and non-human, nothing more.
I mean, these types of jokes must be as old as the English language itself, you really have to be pathologically obsessed with woke rhetoric to even assume there's anything woke in that silly and harmless joke.
Most if not all of the examples of so-called "woke translation" I have seen so far are just as dishonest.
The problem is, while such insane overreaction is blowing meaningless things out of proportion, it seems no one is talking about the REAL problems of Eiyuden (regarding the localisation but also other aspects of the game). Real constructive criticism is being completely buried under endless piles of insanity-fueled rants.

PS : To be perfectly clear, I hate radical woke ideology. I'm not saying that people who are complaining about the so-called woke translation are just far-right extremists, nazi incels or whatever, and we shouldn't even listen to them in the first place... I'm just saying there is nothing woke in the script of this game (at least there wasn't during the 8 hours I played it).

Yeah, I mentioned it as a possible exception because one could perceive it as woke although it could just be meant as a harmless joke. And this was really the only example I found remotely conspicuous. All in all, I'm totally with you: While I'm opposed to woke ideology we shouldn't prejudice a game based on vague accusations. Thanks for your input!

I've been playing this for a handful of hours and I came back to see the reception of the game, and frankly I'm surprised by the negativity here. I don't understand it. It's been very fun so far, and the dialogue is just very standard JRPG stuff to me. It's a fun RPG and moves along at a nice pace. The former Suikoden team seems to have done a great job here making a spiritual successor to that series. Maybe my "woke" detector sensitivity isn't turned up high enough? Give me a break.

People are definitely more sensitive to this stuff than they were in the past. The stronger the push, the stronger the push-back, I guess. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

This really makes the difference between the useage of the words 'translation' and 'localisation' apparent. The english writers have taken (in my view a very large amount of) liberties to attempt to make the dialogue 'appealing' to english 'consumers', rather than treating the translation of the source material and tone as a priority. Which, when a game is purely cynically sales-driven like your average AAA game with paper-thin characterisation to begin with, is at least understandable.

In this case, though, it is genuinely grating to slog through character dialogue which is clearly 180 degrees off the original (clear even listening to the japanese VA). The vernacular is frequently niche enough (for certain characters) that unless you're a reddit or twitter user from specific regions in north america, the localisation is about as foreign and unrelatable as any regional japanese dialect.

I'd even hesitate to call the writing 'woke', Reading between the lines, yes at least one of these people is probably everything that the outrage content-mill types are accusing the localisation of being, but the examples of woke lines aren't that bad- they're just symptomatic of the bigger issues with the job that's been done. I don't htink that the localisation is technically incompetent, either.

i'm just struck by the hubris and disrespect of the english writers taking the liberty of loading the story with self-inserts and unbearably annoying characters that I want to eject from my party as soon as i'm able, despite them being totally fine in the source material.