Yeah, it's strange that we seem to get overloaded with some Japanese works, but then there are these glaring gaps that often leave out badly needed context. My favorite is the "villainess" genre popular in manga and anime, which are ALL riffs on the Angelique dating sim series. Western viewers wouldn't know that, though, because the series has never been translated at all.
I think things are coming to a head, though. There was ENORMOUS backlash over how that last direct had some beyond-tired western "dating sim", while Japan got Tokimeki. Nobody wants the lame parodies anymore, they want the real thing, and it's becoming increasingly bizarre that is isn't happening.
I also think that we've hit a bit of a crossroads. The trend in localization now is to practically rewrite works in ways that would make Vic Ireland blush, but it just doesn't seem like that's sustainable. Even aside from the endless online wrangling over it, that's going to be such a long and slow process that it likely isn't economically viable for smaller works like a Falcom SRPG. They already have massive delays as it is, ruining any momentum they already have.
(Also, the heavy changes are going to be alienating to exactly the audience that would be interested in the first place. The blunt fact is that if they wanted a western-written game, they would simply buy one, there's millions to choose from. Heavy Japanese cultural influences are usually seen as a feature, not a bug, and I think localizers often miss that.)
That's going to inevitably cause decision-makers to consider machine translation, but that has the opposite problem: it doesn't understand where localization actually IS necessary, leading to a garbled mess. It requires heavy editing, but then you're just back to the same problem.
I feel like the solution is to take a light hand, and to lean more towards the meat-and-potatoes translation instead of a flashy localization. Faster, cheaper, and the actual audience for these works would almost certainly prefer it. But I fear that it'll just end up being ChatGPT, leaving nobody satisfied at all.
Yeah, it's strange that we seem to get overloaded with some Japanese works, but then there are these glaring gaps that often leave out badly needed context. My favorite is the "villainess" genre popular in manga and anime, which are ALL riffs on the Angelique dating sim series. Western viewers wouldn't know that, though, because the series has never been translated at all.
I think things are coming to a head, though. There was ENORMOUS backlash over how that last direct had some beyond-tired western "dating sim", while Japan got Tokimeki. Nobody wants the lame parodies anymore, they want the real thing, and it's becoming increasingly bizarre that is isn't happening.
I also think that we've hit a bit of a crossroads. The trend in localization now is to practically rewrite works in ways that would make Vic Ireland blush, but it just doesn't seem like that's sustainable. Even aside from the endless online wrangling over it, that's going to be such a long and slow process that it likely isn't economically viable for smaller works like a Falcom SRPG. They already have massive delays as it is, ruining any momentum they already have.
(Also, the heavy changes are going to be alienating to exactly the audience that would be interested in the first place. The blunt fact is that if they wanted a western-written game, they would simply buy one, there's millions to choose from. Heavy Japanese cultural influences are usually seen as a feature, not a bug, and I think localizers often miss that.)
That's going to inevitably cause decision-makers to consider machine translation, but that has the opposite problem: it doesn't understand where localization actually IS necessary, leading to a garbled mess. It requires heavy editing, but then you're just back to the same problem.
I feel like the solution is to take a light hand, and to lean more towards the meat-and-potatoes translation instead of a flashy localization. Faster, cheaper, and the actual audience for these works would almost certainly prefer it. But I fear that it'll just end up being ChatGPT, leaving nobody satisfied at all.