ATTN: Blue text'ers
The 10% discount doesn't seem to exist as it's stating its original price of $49

Welp. Looks like I'll be waiting for a bargain bin discount after a modded fan translation is made before I even consider touching this.

Good job 505. Cretins.

I disagree. "Localization" should not even be a thing. Games should be translated - but never 'localized' - as closely to word-for-word as possible, and at the very least, when it is not possible to do word-for-word translation of every single line, then those lines should be translated idea-for-idea as closely as humanly possible.

"Localization" is just an excuse for translators to run wild by bastardizing the original text and inserting their own personal idealogies into the scripts.

Thanks for the posters in this thread who have pointed out that this Hundred Heroes games is apparently another victim of "localization."

That's already a mighty steep asking price for a game like this with obsolete graphics and janky animations.

I do give the devs respect for including Galaxy Achievements, though.

Good to see someone's finally putting the heretofore-obscure idea of the "chosen savior" into an RPG. Maybe this niche trope will finally start seeing more mainstream use soon!

You're wrong. A lot. But I'm not sure you have ever have you been more wrong (well, except that one time...). You are way off. There's a whole lot more to localization than just translation, and that's good and important. Yes, it's hard. Yes, sometimes it's messed up and doesn't come through as well as it should. Sometimes localization teams go too far. But good localization should be the norm.

Mere translation is insufficient.

Without localization:
* Jokes fail. Puns disappear.
* Cultural references vanish.
* Many layers of meaning go away.
* Nuances and context are lost.
* Even numbers/scale/etc can can be missed.

And more.

Yakuza's "Like a Dragon", was actually improved by a Twitter post. It was pointed out that by replacing the "More" command with something like "Ect.", the control instructions would spell SEGA. That observation officially became part of the localization.

Considering the Yakuza pedigree, that is TLC at its finest.

Another fine example! I really doubt Thomas Olde Heuvelt's novel "Hex" would have been nearly as successful in the US if it had been merely translated instead of fully localized. It's masterpiece example demonstrating the difference. When I had some friends read the Night Watch (Sergei L.) novels with me, I had to explain a lot of Russian cultural things to them that I was familiar with (as having studied Russian culture and language) because it was merely translated and not localized. Things that otherwise they'd have totally missed or glossed over.

We're fortunate that a lot more of the text in games is more stand-alone and thus even slightly easier to work around.

And those things are mostly fine. Nobody has a problem with changing units or numbers or finding a suitable English equivalent for a Japanese pun so that it can be understood. Still, the option of a near literal translation would be nice to have as an option, alongside localization. Then people could maybe look up things they don't understand and learn of a different culture, if they were interested. Not to mention a game has actually done that before:
https://nichegamer.com/river-city-girls-zero-offers-literal-or-new-translation-options/

But we are talking about completely changing character personalities, randomly inserting current day political stuff into places or simply just changing things to conform to the "western sensibilities and culture norms" (see the screenshot I linked in my previous post for an example).

An excerpt from an older paper about "Responsible" localization, quoting directly the guy who was doing the localization of Eiyuden:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3g21n3q7

(page190)
"Dealing with sexism, homophobia, and gender stereotypes by cutting, altering, or strengthening the characters, their words, or their representations are quite normal for game localization between Japan and the United States. In an interview discussing other work, Gray informed me that: "

Gender issues... in terms of how women are viewed... portrayed as ultimately being secondary to the man and the male hero... and where women will play along to that role. They won't be laughed at or made fun of... everyone is on the same page here. In Japanese [these characters] come across as endearing, whereas in the West they come across as very sexist. And these are things that tend to universally get cut [when localizing from Japan to the United States]... because certainly the writer's intention was not to offend anybody and that would be offensive. And so the idea is that this isn't really what's important in this scene. I mean, if it is important then it will be left in, but if it's not important then let's just find another gag or joke or riff here. And [this cutting] happens fairly often. (Gray 2012)

Or another quote from a different guy from the same paper:

(page 295)
"Ricciardi, the localization project manager at 8-4 Ltd who facilitated the localizations of both Shadows of the Damned and Nier, is well aware of the importance of responding with the game industry. He notes:"

There's a lot of tropes, there's a lot of Japanese stereotypical characterizations that just don't work in the West. Or that don't even make any sense necessarily. You know, the [stereotype of] females acting scared and helpless... the kind of over-sexualized [character]. A lot of it is related to females, I guess, but you know, there's just a lot of Japanese stereotypes that don't really fit in English and, yeah, changing those or improving them are usually, I would agree, that's something that we tend to do, and I think that's a good thing. I think that's something you have to do. Making characters, making the women maybe a little strong or independent, or less whiny. (Ricciardi 2013)

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The fact that shit like this is considered normal is what's wrong. The notion that the western audience has to be "protected" like children from the apparently inherently harmful Japanese culture is what's wrong. That we can't even risk being exposed to Japanese tropes and whatnot. As long as people like these are in charge of "localization", I'll take a literal word by word translation over that any day of the week.

Localizations are needed, I heard recently of a case where the japanese translation of a korean gacha tried to be more faithfull and the script was *so* dry the JP community begged them to go back lol

Now, what you shouldn't do is literally make stuff up, like that... joke? about assuming a golem's gender

Adding some bolds... And they're right.

Plus, nothing I saw in Swedrami's link has any character one way or another... One silly joke changed for another. But the localization implies that "open sesame" has a silly or humorous connotation in Japan whereas it doesn't here.

And, of course, a ton of the push back is from the typical "anti-woke" crowd who tend to hate literally everything, so it's even harder to take complaints seriously or expect a reasonable discussion.

Great release! ^_^

I PREFER to be treated as Japanese when it comes to my gaming tastes instead of a Gaijin and they could NOT have spat in my face/disrespected me more.

On an unrelated note I am THRILLED that I pledged for this game and PUSHED for them to offer this game on GOG only for GOG to force me to WAIT for the official release today since early access was BLOCKED except for those who used Galaxy. As a supporter of GOG I would like an apology from you by using what was early access for BACKERS as an opportunity to try FORCING us to download Galaxy!

edit: I will be playing this game in Japanese needless to say.

I was planning to pick this up on launch. The localization being this bad means I'm gonna wait for a steep discount if I pick this up at all.

Wow. Imagine the horror of being forced to experience another culture's idiosyncrasies through exposure to that culture's literature. If only those books had been properly localized, then you wouldn't have had to face the unreasonable burden of helping your friends to understand Russian culture and language (that you had studied). They could have remained blissfully ignorant in their Amerocentric boxes.

Don't misunderstand -- I thoroughly agree with you. Proper localization is extremely important when marketing a game globally. I need all of those jokes, cultural references, layers of meaning, nuances and context to cater to MY experience and sensibilities. I don't want to see any of that foreign funny talk.

If anything, I say localization doesn't go far enough! Why are they eating fish and rice? With sticks? No, they should be eating cheeseburgers and fries. With a knife and fork like I do, so I don't misinterpret what's going on. And what kind of names are Seign and Nowa? Even my browser's spell check can tell that's wrong. They should be named Sam and Nathan. No red line under there!

Rub-a-dub-dub! Don't give in to the chuds!

A rare case where we agree on something