As a writer for a gaming publication, I play games and write reviews all year long. As my favorite genre, I play a lot of visual novels. Some are good, some are great, some are pretty mediocre. As time goes on being a gay guy, my perception of anything considered offensive gets keener and keener, but the developers over there are either completely ignoring the community or doing a pretty lousy job at it. Here enters Our World is Ended.
I've been playing it for almost a month and waited before finishing the game and getting comments from the parties involved before sharing these scenes. It's a visual novel resembling Steins;Gate in a few ways, with a weirder and more "pervert" group, one of them being a shotacon and the leader being admittedly pervert (don't get me started on the harassment going throughout the entire game involving all girls from the group), except that all it has going for it is being pretty. There's no substance and after 30 hours and a few endings, I'm pretty much done with the game... But these scenes still bother me.
Scene #1: One of the girls tells the group a story about when she used to sing and play songs in front of a train station. Her sister says that she did that because there was a person she liked that crossed that station everyday, and that's why this particular girl would go there everyday. The crew asks what kind of man that person was, her sister tells them that it wasn't exactly a man and the crew replies asking if the first girl like, y'know, girls. Much to my surprised, she just answered: "Nope, my sister is perfectly normal". Not only does the protagonist and the group panic over the fact that one of the girls might be gay, but also her sister shuts that thought by saying that nope, she's perfectly normal.
Scene #2: Three guys from the crew are at a hot spring. The protagonist is checking the leader's body out, as he's more fit than it looked. Then the leader automatically goes into "if another guy is checking my body, he's gay" and follows with "hey, I know I'm a pervert, but I'm not that pervert", outright saying that being gay is a perversion.
These are two scenes I found from the game after finishing three endings. There are other endings and there might be more scenes, but I won't be doing them all anytime soon. I know that there's this ongoing issue with japanese games, being developed for the japanese audience, doing this kind of stuff, where it might or might not be an issue in Japan. Still, with a new company entering the ring every year, there has been several japanese games being localized that otherwise wouldn't a few years ago and there has to be responsibility in both picking which titles to localize and the localization itself.
I've gotten in touch with the person responsible for translating the game and it was clarified that those scenes are literal translations from the japanese version, meaning that what you read is what was meant in the japanese release. He was in charge of translating the game and that's what he did. There was supposed to be an editor that followed that work and edited the script for cohesion, correcting typos and to make it more readable than a direct and cold translation.
I also got in touch with the publisher that told me, after asking if there's the possibility of a patch coming or something in that fashion, that they were see what could be done ASAP.
In a way, everyone has its share of responsibility. A game is not released without passing through the hands of several parties involved, but still, it happened. It's scenes like this, which it's still somewhat common in japanese media, that should be properly localized in a way that, if the original material comes across as offensive, should be edited in order to adjust to another audience. It's a responsibility and a duty for these companies. Am I the only one that's sick of seeing this kind of behavior not only in the original material, but also not being filtered on localization?
I've been playing it for almost a month and waited before finishing the game and getting comments from the parties involved before sharing these scenes. It's a visual novel resembling Steins;Gate in a few ways, with a weirder and more "pervert" group, one of them being a shotacon and the leader being admittedly pervert (don't get me started on the harassment going throughout the entire game involving all girls from the group), except that all it has going for it is being pretty. There's no substance and after 30 hours and a few endings, I'm pretty much done with the game... But these scenes still bother me.
Scene #1: One of the girls tells the group a story about when she used to sing and play songs in front of a train station. Her sister says that she did that because there was a person she liked that crossed that station everyday, and that's why this particular girl would go there everyday. The crew asks what kind of man that person was, her sister tells them that it wasn't exactly a man and the crew replies asking if the first girl like, y'know, girls. Much to my surprised, she just answered: "Nope, my sister is perfectly normal". Not only does the protagonist and the group panic over the fact that one of the girls might be gay, but also her sister shuts that thought by saying that nope, she's perfectly normal.
Scene #2: Three guys from the crew are at a hot spring. The protagonist is checking the leader's body out, as he's more fit than it looked. Then the leader automatically goes into "if another guy is checking my body, he's gay" and follows with "hey, I know I'm a pervert, but I'm not that pervert", outright saying that being gay is a perversion.
These are two scenes I found from the game after finishing three endings. There are other endings and there might be more scenes, but I won't be doing them all anytime soon. I know that there's this ongoing issue with japanese games, being developed for the japanese audience, doing this kind of stuff, where it might or might not be an issue in Japan. Still, with a new company entering the ring every year, there has been several japanese games being localized that otherwise wouldn't a few years ago and there has to be responsibility in both picking which titles to localize and the localization itself.
I've gotten in touch with the person responsible for translating the game and it was clarified that those scenes are literal translations from the japanese version, meaning that what you read is what was meant in the japanese release. He was in charge of translating the game and that's what he did. There was supposed to be an editor that followed that work and edited the script for cohesion, correcting typos and to make it more readable than a direct and cold translation.
I also got in touch with the publisher that told me, after asking if there's the possibility of a patch coming or something in that fashion, that they were see what could be done ASAP.
In a way, everyone has its share of responsibility. A game is not released without passing through the hands of several parties involved, but still, it happened. It's scenes like this, which it's still somewhat common in japanese media, that should be properly localized in a way that, if the original material comes across as offensive, should be edited in order to adjust to another audience. It's a responsibility and a duty for these companies. Am I the only one that's sick of seeing this kind of behavior not only in the original material, but also not being filtered on localization?
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