It's just baffling to me how they allow this. Imagine if you were writing a story and some foreigner from halfway across the world comes in and has free reign to alter it because he claims it's not acceptable in his country. Why don't they fight this or quit on the spot if they are forced to concede by a higher up?
The best way to describe this according to a Japanese person i speak to on rare occasions(Japanese work ethic is crazy), It's that the West is now the biggest consumer of Japanese Video Game content so therefore the West controls it, and the Otaku's are no longer able to control it themselves because they can not compete with the West on Video Game purchases, if the sells were really bad, where it tanks their stock, i can bet you heads would roll at these big time companies and they can get their guys in there to reverse everything within a few years of being there. This is why AAA Japanese Studio's listen to American's over here, and why they keep listening to do things to precensor stuff or to allow alterations of things because all they really care about is the Global Mass Market, more money, more sales, everything has to be explosive and infinite growth the Blue Ocean strategy, not the Global Niche like us here, Japanese Otaku and organic growth, Red Ocean Strategy.
In essence Money matters, and Greedy Japanese execs in Japanese companies, they only care about the mass market and the West, Otaku are powerless to stop it because they can not outbuy the West currently nor can they make them suffer if they wanted to by not purchasing or adding pressure, and even the responses of Japanese AAA companies for telling them what they are doing is a bad move is "you dont buy enough for us to care about your demands the West does", so they are listening to our middle branches. The best example i can think of where change can happen was with Square Enix with and Kiryu managed to get in when Matsuda made the NFT announcements and tanked Square Enix's stock so badly a reorganization was needed and his seat was taken. Which is sadly what it might take for this to go away, is to tank their stock, tank their company and make the sells of games go down so bad that the Otaku over there can knock out the executives in Japan and replace them with their own people and not businessmen through a reorganization effort, along with Directors and Developers internally in the company doing the same thing because let's be honest, i do not think Harada of Bandai Namco is a huge fan of Tekken 8 having MTX, i do not think Atlus likes how everything is Personafied lately, but they do not have much choice unless pressure applied to the parent company and the money is not there when the leader makes a bad decision.
Also Takashi Kiryu is our guy, he is also having to deal with the holdover decisions of Matsuda unfortunately with all the censorship due to him being president of Square Enix less than a year in. This is why even though Kiryu did get rid of the Ethics Department 1 month ago, he did announce AI Translations with an aggressive focus 2 months ago.
It's not going to happen right now as that takes time for the Ethics Department to shut down, and for the AI Translation office to open will be in the next year or so. It will be in the next slate of games to release before judging him and Square Enix as a whole. There is also interviews with Nomura and hints of him waiting it out with Verum Rex so that it can not be censored when his trilogy of Versus happens. This might be why we had Reynitis instead of Verum Rex and Versus announcements this year, even though he said after Rebirth he would announce Kingdom Hearts IV and also Verum Rex. Nomura also mentioned in an interview in 2019 groaning about the Global Standards, and Tabata/Nomura in 2014/2015 in interviews speaking how they had to change things for a Global Audience with FFXV and things they used to be able to do they had to change sadly. So i think Nomura pushed for this as well to get rid of Matsuda as soon as possible on top of it.
About the localization issues, there was someone by the name of Eusis Landale that you can find on the GameFAQs forum that did some tweets and some other posts on there essentially highlighting a ton of issues with the MSF localization. Shame this isn't a straight thread, because that would make it easier to actually archive. Trust me, these tweets are up, I tried adding markdown to my Obsidian notes regarding this, and that also is flipping out, has something to do with the embeds.
There were also some problems with the second game's localization (Mainly Tsuu (a female who cross-dresses as a male and wants to be nyngo-hime's prince) referring to her and Jack as "brothers" in the localization, when it originally said "sibling", and Tsuu being named as "Otsuu" in the localization). I gotta dig up some more info about specifics that I saw on the GameFAQs forum for these games. I also recall hearing something about the localizers on that project being extremely defensive for some reason, but I'll have to try and dig up a source on that one.
I am going to have to say that there's obvious spoilers, but I figured I'd document the tweets here:
We need to make a thread on this. It's worth looking into, maybe it should be in the Video Games thread? Mods thread? I am willing to help contribute and make it happen. Because this is some deep cut stuff and not just dialog changes. Maybe we can get a retranslation thread going and try to have some QOL mods to make the game good again.
