I get where you're coming from, but massively overgeneralizing and making hyperbolic remarks really only benefits the shitty localizers. It makes it super easy for actual defenders to cherrypick and, if you start dunking on people for things that were out of their control, it mostly makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about, which makes it easy for anyone - especially the uninvested people who
haven't yet picked a side - to assume that your whole argument has zero validity. This kind of reaction is
exactly what companies want to see, because it makes it super easy to deflect all legitimate criticism.
Even then, the concept of "playing the games the way they actually are" is not as easy to pin down as it sounds. The quote that comes to mind is Cioran's: "It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland." The point is that
everything about a reader (in the case of games, the player) informs
how they interpret the text (in this case, the game): even if you speak a language fluently, you may not have a complete understanding of the culture, and this is especially true if you don't have a lot of shared cultural bases (e.g. America and Japan), so you may not interpret the text in the way the author intended. This is a big enough problem for writers
even when only writing for their own culture and language, let alone writing text for a game that is planned to see a worldwide release. (There's even big cultural divides between, for example, America and the not-so-United Kingdom, which are both English-speaking WASP-descended cultures.)
Please, by all means, shit on the localizers when they do dumb shit - removing all the dialogue regarding physical appearance, for example, or changing Rosado's dialogue to be uhhhhhhhhhhh Twitter posts. I spend about 80% of my time on stream REEing about how wrong translations are. But
please restrain yourselves to places where the localization actually, maliciously interfered with or censored the text - the
actual issue at hand - and not blindly criticizing everything.
Every mistake made in a criticism devalues the criticism, even if the rest of the criticism is wholly legitimate. I am also sick of seeing shit translations and even more sick of seeing shit fan translations that do
this same bullshit, but if you go full
ad hominem and reach the hyperbolic extent of "oh well they should just stop releasing games outside of Japan and everyone should learn Japanese if they want to play them", it only makes you look like an unreasonable zealot -
which makes the other side, who are actually the fuckups, look much better by comparison.
This appeal from authority - "We're OBVIOUSLY doing the right thing because we're THE PROFESSIONALS and THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ATTACKING US are frothing at the mouths and RABID" - is a classic tactic of governments and corporations. Every time you come out swinging and making broad, sweeping statements that contain inaccuracies - even if
the vast majority of the statement is correct - they win a little bit more.
We actually saw this recently with the Obi-Wan series, where the racist tweets mixed in with genuine criticism of the series was the best thing that could have happened to the series' social network presence - it gave them free reign to simply say "Oh well you're just racist, that's why you're being critical".
You cannot beat corporations with emotion. The only way to fight them is to gather cold, hard evidence and present it calmly and rationally, because you have a
huge uphill struggle against their corporate megaphones, even (maybe especially) in the age of social media. You must
demonstrate, without exposing yourself to refutation, their failure in totality. Every time you throw in an insult, a slur, a hyperbolic remark, or just
get something wrong makes it easier and easier for them to turn you into a strawman. To an extent, it doesn't even have to be done actively: as soon as you make a mistake, even uninvested passersby who are watching the show start thinking "Wait, they were wrong about X. They could also be wrong about Y", even Y is unequivocally true.
Absolutely shit on them for being stupid, but make sure you have all your facts right and you keep it classy. Anything else only helps the people who should be out of a job right now after releasing this fucking shitshow of a 'localization'.
EDIT: Forgot about this but Ar Nosurge got a T ESRB rating for some reason. I say "for some reason" because 1. it's absolutely not a game for kids or even really teenagers and 2. the ESRB was
exceptionally easy on it. I have no explanation for this. It wasn't like it came out in a period of the ESRB being light on games or anything like that, and
its rating summary talks about the nuditity in detail. Interestingly, the summary forgoes any mention that the characters are underage (the closest it gets is remarking on the protagonist being a "young man"), but as that has been an increasingly noisily-talked-about-on-Twitter topic lately (the "noooo you drew an underage character and posted it on twitter" crowd, you know the ones), my conjecture would be that corporations are being increasingly sensitive about social media now.
I could probably do my fucking thesis on the ESRB being insanely arbitrary and essentially "accepted" censorship.