JoJoestar Sorry! I didn’t bother explaining because the idea that some Japanese players would complain about the “original version” felt far more interesting (from my perspective) than the trivial issues they had with the flavor text in question.
I would agree for instance that the different meaning of Ranni’s ending in the English version is a more understandable reason to complain, if anything.
It’s interesting to see this happen because some recent games are indeed far better in English. Notably Sega stuff on PS3/PS4: most Western fans have no idea how much the English version of Valkyria Chronicles salvages one of the dumbest scripts ever written (it’s pretty crazy when you have the original Japanese dialogues combined with the English subs). Yakuza 4〜0 are also pretty good at livening up the flavor text of sidequests. Yet I had never seen Japanese players notice and comment on these changes until now.
It will be interesting to watch if Japanese players notice this kind of discrepancy with FF16, given how the game seemingly tries to appeal to Western audiences, and how these players will react to the eventual discrepancies between the English and Japanese versions.
There is a growing debate in French speaking communities about recent Square Enix translations (more or less since bigger internal translation teams were built for FF14:ARR) due to how differently the French and English translation teams manage the recent games.
Typically for each Square Enix project, the English team takes way more liberties with the original script, whereas the French team is pretty faithful to the Japanese version. This leads to controversies because far more French-speaking players have at least a passing understanding of English, can compare the French translation to the English text and do not understand why the personalities of some key characters, or the tone of some specific scenes, are not “faithful” in French (even though typically the opposite is true!).
