Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
|
alt title(s): Censor Localizing 
Don't move or we'll shoot you with our invisible guns!
Ichigo: "Mew Mew Style, think I'll pass, English dub can kiss my—" Minto: "Ichigo!"
The act of editing or altering scripts during the translation process in order to render them allegedly more "accessible" to a new audience. Although edits are not (quite) always as devastating as many fans make them out to be, Macekre will frequently impose extensive Adaptation Decay and Bowdlerization on a story. At its worst, the entire original script will simply be discarded and a completely new script created almost out of whole cloth. Never Say Die is a staple, along with Lull Destruction. One of the biggest reasons the Subbing Versus Dubbing debate is still raging.
Pronounced similarly to "massacre", the term was coined by anime fans from the name of producer/writer Carl Macek, whose early "free adaptations" of anime frequently bear little or no resemblance to the original Japanese stories. His usual procedure was to dispose of the original script entirely, and write his own from scratch. Often he would combine two or more unrelated series simply in order to have enough episodes to fulfill a syndication deal. He is particularly reviled for the seemingly xenophobic ruthlessness with which he purged any hint of Japanese culture — what he euphemistically called "ethnic gestures" — from the series which he adapted.
Fans (with some justification) feel that this practice is disrespectful to the creators, as the series is being treated as a pure marketing product rather really "getting" the draw. The practice has fortunately dwindled since the eighties because of the utter hatred modern fans hold for it, as well as the greater accessibility to the original product (although consistency can flounder at times). The importing companies have hopefully realized that the quirks were what attracted many viewers in the first place. The increasing number of import companies born from fan groups (like ADV Films) may also have something to do with it. The practice has also largely faded, however, because ironically doing things like what Macek did — replacing whole scripts, writing entirely new musical scores, having to spend days editing and re-cutting a show — is actually more expensive than a straight dub, especially now that the original source music and the like can be stored digitally and easily layered back into an English track. With the margins of the Western anime market being fairly tight, it simply makes more sense to give the fans what they want, since it's cheaper.
Contrast Woolseyism (where the changes are seen as more organic and workable), Gag Dub (where nearly the entire dialogue is rewritten from the ground up, and the changes are for intentionally comic purposes, often making fun of the original), and Good Bad Translation.
See also Difficulty By Region.
Examples:
Film
- Quite a few of the Godzilla movies, particularly Godzilla, Godzilla Raids Again, and Godzilla 1985. But contrary to popular belief, King Kong won in the Japanese and American versions of Godzilla vs. King Kong. The 1954 original is surprisingly excellent in its unadulterated, non-dubbed form. Godzilla 2000 also received a not-so-nice dub release with added gags and alterations to make it appear to be cheesy and poorly done from Tri-Star, which makes sense since Toho made it largely because they were so disappointed with Tri-Star's own Godzilla.
- You might be surprised...many Godzilla fans consider Godzilla 2000 to be very slow-paced and dull in its original Japanese, and consider the American dub an improvement. Listen to the DVD commentary for it with the American dub creators.
- Also, it's quite possible that given only a decade or so had passed since World War II, at the time, alot of Americans wouldn't be able to sympathize so well with the Japanese.
- The American theatrical Digimon movie was created by blending three movies with unrelated storylines together into one story by rewriting dialog and adding narrative links. The modification was so extensive that the Screen Actors' Guild deemed that it "no longer constituted 'dubbing' as defined by the dubbing agreement" so their actors should be paid residuals.
Western Animation
- The Polish version of Futurama. Oh Lord. Professor Farnsworth is Fry's uncle in some episodes, most of the references are happily butchered, and the show is called Przygody Fry'a w kosmosie, that is Fry's Adventures in Space. Not only that, but the TV station that picked it up was fined for showing the episodes at the time when children could see it. It allegedly showed "an unreal world full of violence".
Live Action TV
- Arguably this happened with the transition from Super Sentai to Power Rangers. The first three seasons of the latter took three seasons of the former and butchered it into one "mega-arc", and the later incarnations seem to only be superficially similar to their originals, with the motives of the characters and some story elements being completely changed.
- Of course, Power Rangers was never intended and doesn't claim to be a dub/reenactment of its Super Sentai parent, despite borrowing suits and battle footage.
- It should also be noted that certain renditions of Power Rangers have stuck decidedly close to their source material, like Time Force stuck to Timeranger's original plot. Others have had varying levels of success, such as Carranger into Turbo and Megaranger into In Space. Carranger was a parody Sentai show, and Turbo suffered from many reasons on top of that footage (seriously the Rangers were baked into a pizza once). In Space, on the other hand, was a drastic variation upon the Sentai version. Megaranger never even left the Earth, instead literally surfing the web! Strangely enough, In Space was a smash hit.
- Mainly because Saban already did the "Rangers surfing the web" thing with VR Troopers.
- When the Ultraman series Ultra 7, was dubbed into English by Cinar for TBS, it received a bizarre Gag Dub that made it almost entirely incomprehensible. This version has since been almost entirely forgotten even by fans of the series.
- To capitalise on the success of Power Rangers, Saban licensed the dark and serious Kamen Rider Black RX and turned it into "Saban's Masked Rider": a gay old Aesop-tastic romp starring a superhero alien learning about Earth culture with his adoptive All-American Family. Later the editing got so shoddy that at times you could clearly see the original Japanese actors, or the fact that the footage they were splicing in was from a completely different series starring a completely different hero. The end result was so bad that Shotaro Ishinomori, the highly-respected godfather of the Kamen Rider series, refused to allow any more American adaptations of his creation ever again. When a new series was proposed nearly a decade later, the team behind it had to personally meet with the people behind Kamen Rider and answer questions on the legacy and meaning of the thirty-six year old franchise to make sure they wouldn't screw it up.
- Just for the record, Dex/Masked Rider's adopted Earth mother was Asian-American.
- This happened to Thunderbirds twice. First when it was run on FOX with redubbed voices, rock music, and cuts to remove content deemed inappropriate for children and also to cram the plots into half-hour episodes, rendering most of them incomprehensible. After that bombed, the rights holder released another half-hour version which further altered the original episodes to be taking place on planet "Thunder World," redubbed the dialog yet again to add more "post-modern" jokes, had the Tracy family taking orders from a pair of live-action teenagers who called Jeff Tracy "Mr. T", and referred to the teenagers as Hackers who lived aboard Thunderbird 5, now dubbed "Hack Command." This version so enraged original creator Gerry Anderson that it was quickly pulled from syndication and supposedly destroyed at his request.
- Probably one of the best examples of this trope being successful is the British version of The Magic Roundabout, in which Eric Thompson ignored the original French scripts and wrote new ones based solely on the visuals, leading to the cult series that is known and loved today.
- This happened to Star Trek when it was dubbed into German. In the episode "Amok Time," in which Spock must return to his home planet to mate or else die, all sexual references were cut and the plot changed so that he was suffering from "space fever," making his battle to the death with Kirk a mere hallucination.
Anime
- Macek's most infamous effort was the three-way hybridization that turned the unrelated series Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada into Robotech while throwing out almost all of latter two programs' original scripts. While massive changes to the stories of the three series make the adaptation unpopular with many anime fans, the show was a legitimate commercial success, and created a foothold for Japanese animation in the U.S., along with a minor pop-culture phenomenon of its own.
- Elijah Wood is currently writing the script for a live action movie version.
- It is worth mentioning that some people don't mind this change, at least for the first 36 episodes.
- Macek then took Mega Zone 23, edited in some Robotech footage, wrote his own script, and called the resulting mutant Robotech: The Movie.
- Macek also merged Captain Harlock and Queen Millennia to create the rarely-seen Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years.
- Macek rewrote the script for Windaria, which he retitled Once Upon A Time; he trimmed its 102-minute running time to 95 minutes, switched scenes around, gave all of the characters Western names, and provided narration which, most egregiously of all, replaced the original's Downer Ending with something more hopeful.
- Voltron was created from two unrelated Combining Mecha series, Go Lion and Dairugger XV. However, while the plot changes were considerable, the interference between the two combined stories was minimal, and each occurred almost in its own continuity.
- There's also a live action movie version of Voltron in the works.
- More notable was the censoring of the death of Sven, which was turned into merely being badly injured and being shipped to a hospital planet. This heavily clashes with the imagery of his death scene, where he's being cradled by Lance, and his sword falls over as he "passes out."
- Saban's VR Troopers was made from three different series: Metalder, Spielban, and Shaider Somehow, having three shows to draw on didn't stop it from recycling plots.
- The original, New World Pictures dub of Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind was Macekred so heavily that Hayao Miyazaki held off licensing his other films until someone approached him with a deal that stipulated no changes to the script or editing.
- The differences are more akin to the difference between a streamlined theatrical release and an extended director's cut. The ecological angle remained in place but was given less screen time and more hinted at than directly stated, the Giant Warrior and the destruction of the old world was woven into an analogue for nuclear war, and the original names were changed to more Tolkien-esque fantasy names, but beyond that the differences were minor.
- When Miramax picked up Princess Mononoke, one of Studio Ghibli's producers didn't forget the previous disaster and reportedly sent the Miramax execs a katana with a note saying "No cuts."
- An old video box for "Warriors of the Wind" features a prominently-placed heroic looking male figure, along with a bunch of other things with no bearing on the film. They didn't add any such character to the film itself, though, making the poster art just peculiar.
- Speaking of Miyazaki, the Streamline dub of The Castle of Cagliostro completely butchered the movie, changing the plot, inserting cheesy dialogue, and stuffing dialogue where it shouldn't have been. Later, it was redubbed much more faithfully.
- New World Pictures performed similar duties on several other anime pictures, including Galaxy Express 999 and Angels Egg, which suffered the indignity of having live-action footage added and being released as a post-apocalyptic thriller.
- Lots of changes were made to the DiC dub of Sailor Moon to make it more palatable for American audiences, including:
- The Sailor Senshi's names changed from Japanese to American (oddly enough, Sailor Saturn escaped this treatment, though she didn't get much screen time anyway),
- In the Latin American dub, the main heroine is "Serena Tsukino".
- Quirky Miniboss Squad member Zoisite being changed from a flamboyant homosexual male into a full-blown woman.
- Sailors Uranus and Neptune being portrayed as "cousins" instead of "more than just friends." Famously, this change didn't work.
- The entire ending of the first series being cut down into one episode so nobody would be shown dying, including the villains themselves.
- And the characters developed an inability to distinguish rice balls from donuts.
- This troper would like to note that it's nigh-on impossible to list everything here because the changes were so numerous and oftentimes completely unexplainable.
- It should be noted that what DiC did pales in comparison to what Toon Makers was planning to do if they got the rights. They were going to make their own American version with original animation and live-action segments. There exists footage of a promo being displayed by someone who worked on it.
- Pretty much every other show dubbed by 4Kids Entertainment show some of the signs, such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Tokyo Mew Mew. One Piece doesn't just show the signs of a Macekre, it's lying in a pool of its own digitally-erased blood.
- The entire premise of the second and third seasons of Yu-Gi-Oh, originally a personal quest of self-discovery for each major character, was completely replaced with the generic "villain plotting to take over the world" plot. The final season was also outrageously tampered with due to the particularly high body count that had to get sent to the Shadow Realm.
- With that said, Shaman King, a show with death, blood, possession and slapping, got away with what many consider to be one of 4kids' better dubs and kept a lot of the aforementioned in. In fact, the fact that the big bad, Hao beats the 7 shades of crap out of Yoh, then proceeds to rip Yoh's soul out of his body and eat it whole during the endgame arc was all shown in the dub had several busybody self-appointed independent TV watchdog groups slamming the show. Of course, by that point, bad scheduling had done all the damage to Shaman King's US reputation that was going to be done and 4Kids went on to "do" One Piece.
- It gets worse: Tokyo Mew Mew was initially touted by 4Kids as "Hollywood Mew Mew". Al Kahn is quoted in a press release for this as having said "By the time we localize the programs, kids don't even know they're from Japan any more."
- In this editor's opinion, "Hollywood Mew Mew" would have been a miles better name than what they eventually decided on. If only for all the battles that would have taken place around "Hollywood Tower".
- Ultimate Muscle and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003 got to mostly escape this, if this troper heard right.
- While I can't speak for Ultimate Muscle, TMNT 03, while lacking gratuitous violence, featured one Baxter Stockman receiving repeated offscreen mutilations as the show went on and he continued to fail Shredder. Agent Bishop attempted to open up Donatello with a buzzsaw and at one point was impaled on a meathook only barely offscreeen.
- Truly, the effects of 4Kids' dub of One Piece have to be seen to be believed. But utterly flensing the series, they managed to take the most popular shonen franchise in Japan and effectively bury it. Meanwhile, Viz learned from 4Kids' mistakes, produced Naruto with minimal edits, and discovered a license to print money.
- it prints money! (sorry)
- This troper recalls one point in the One Piece dub in which a rifle is digitally altered into a shovel. Several episodes later, when a group of children are actually wielding shovels and other gardening implements as weapons, they are in turn altered into bizarre neon blobs. They actually removed multiple episodes and even story arcs, some of which were filler, but plenty of which's removal caused significant Plot Holes that would just get worse as they went along. By the end that had turned 144 episodes into 104.
- Nelvana, a Canadian distribution studio, Macekred Card Captor Sakura and turned it into "Cardcaptors". In a rather clumsy attempt to widen the show's appeal beyond its original demographic, half the first season was cut out and the scripts were rewritten, turning supporting character Syaoran Li into a lead character alongside the original heroine. At the same time, a much more accurate subtitled version was released on tape and DVD under the original name; the DVD version of the original sold so much better that the dub version was discontinued.
- Incidentally, the Nelvana dub aired in other Anglophone countries with the episodes in the original order, and all 70 made it to ITV. Seems that the messing around with episode order was an afterthought. On the downside, in the UK at least, we got no sub discs.
- When aired in Australia, Sakura was the main character and her dead mother was referred to quite a few times — was this just a Canadian problem?
- The company that licensed the dub in Australia luckily had enough sense than to try to shove it into a shonen hole. They kept it as a show for girls, about a girl, and accordingly did better in Australia than anywhere else. We got the original opening and ending themes dubbed into English and Australia was the only place where all of the dubbed second series was screened.
- Vision Of Escaflowne was Macekred in a similar way by Fox. Most of the drama was removed or rendered incoherent, and the resulting mess was quickly canceled. The uncut version by Ocean Group was released on DVD in 2003, and the edited-for-TV version was mercifully forgotten by most.
- The uncut version was screened on the Anime Central channel in the UK in 2007.
- The German dub of the series was admittedly produced by translating the French dub, not the original Japanese. The result was... rather deviating in both meaning and feel from the original. However, this troper does not deny that he like the German OP more than the original and that it was this dub that changed his general perception of anime.
- Transformers goes both ways!
- When Beast Wars, a rather darkish series with somewhat outlandish comic relief moments at times, was dubbed into Japanese, it received a Gag Dub with no sense of self-restraint whatsoever. A lot of Japanese transformers fans were quite unhappy with this.
- Not to mention the fact that the female Airrazor was dubbed into being a younger male. This made things a bit awkward at Dubville when Airrazor became Tigatron's lover in season 2.
- By contrast American fans were quite pleased with 2001's Transformers: Robots in Disguise which rewrote the bland Transformers: Car Robots as a Gag Dub maybe-sequel to the original television series. Its endearingly-quirky characters were a surprise hit in America, while Car Robots had done so badly in Japan that it was pulled from television before airing its finale. The changes eventually cross-pollinated back to Japan; an official timeline from TakaraTomy now places Car Robots between seasons of the original cartoon, jamming it sideways in order to do so. In America it's simply considered one of many alternate universes.
- In Transformers: Cybertron, the supposed sequel to Transformers Armada and Transformers: Energon, the original Japanese version was written as an independent series. Unfortunately, Hasbro had already planned to market Cybertron as a continuation of the first two when Galaxy Force came out, and had to shoehorn in a few lines about the "Unicron Singularity" warping the very fabric of reality itself as an explanation for the canon dissonance, and even then had to put in 3 manufactured shots of the 2 previous series' characters during the series finale in a desperate attempt to make the whole thing work. I Am Not Making This Up.
- Ironically, Galaxy Force has since been rectonned into Micron Legend continuity in Japan.
- Digimon fluxes between having a perfectly acceptable level of editing to a downright ludicrous level of editing that often made for a non sequitur in the overall story with lines such as "Matt, you whimper more than my puppy!" from Tai, who had a cat but no puppy, and "I'm even starting to miss my baby brother!" from Mimi, who was an only child.
- The main standard edit is erase all kanji unless called for translation.
- This troper actually remembers a scene when the main characters are in China, and one of them argues that he doesn't know Chinese, only Japanese. This is a big thing, considering the at-the-time tendency to ignore the country of origin.
- This troper also notes that the dub erased every instance of the original Japanese songs and replacing them with a gimmick rap theme that repeated "DIGIMON DIGIMON DIGIMON" nonstop. Obviously, this made the epic battles and evolution sequences just bland scenes, without the power of the music to make the scene really immersive.
- How can anyone not like Run Around and Here We Go? Especially as battle theme/transformation scene songs.
- The Filipino dub of Digimon Adventure 02 is an interesting variation in that, while the Americanized terminologies and some names are used, the original unedited Japanese episodes are used and the Japanese script and episode titles are mostly adhered to, and most of the cast is referred to by their original names except, strangely, for Hikari and Miyako who are, respectively, referred to as Kari and Kyo. Arguably, this may be more of a case of Woolseyism. The Mexican dub is also like this, but uses all the US dub names.
- To prevent children from learning that perverts exist, the French translation of City Hunter turned Ryo Saeba into a fanatic vegetarian who liked to eat in vegetarian restaurants, rather than a pervert who liked to invite girls to love hotels.
- In Argentina, there is a non-anime cartoon series called "City Hunters" with that exact same premise, only with animation (supposedly) supplied by the great Milo Manara, and funded by Axe Deodorant (hence, the series claiming it being "powered by Axe"). Any relation?
- Megaman NT Warrior is more or less given the cold stare from the Megaman Battle Network fandom for being a total mess of changed names, edited scenes that realy didn't needed to be edited out and other things besides. It's considered a good thing by the fandom that Axess was the last in the Rockman.exe series to get translated. The truly annoying part is that the franchise already had English names and translations because the source material, the Battle Network series, had been available in America for years. Even many battle chips were censored that are key chips in the games that presumably the show is trying to help promote. Bizarrely, Sho Pro, the studio behind it, also handles the much better Naruto dub.
- Megaman Star Force is holding up a bit better, the only real change is taking two episodes and making a 30 minute episode out of it but that's forgiven given the show's format in Japan.
- Tekkaman Blade got a fairly standard Macekre-ish dubbing into Teknoman for release in English-speaking countries. Oddly enough, after a Full Run In Australia, the series was Macekred even more before being released in the US.
- No Samurai Pizza Cats? Creators of the series claimed that they had never received the original scripts for the series, and were therefore 'forced' to write the entire series anew from the ground up, changing the characters, dialog, and even the plot.
- Umm, that's because they really didn't receive the script for the series? Quoted from The Other Wiki When Saban bought the rights to the show, the translators were supplied with the tapes of the series in Japanese, but not with any transcripts. Furthermore, the show was apparently chock full of esoteric Japanese cultural and linguistic references. Things like that have no English equivalent, and how would a American ten year old understand it? It retained the characters personalities, as well as the many of the scenes. At one point in time the characters even broke the fourth wall and mentioned that "this is a Japanese cartoon". They also made no effort to remove any if references to completely remove any Japanese references as it was easy for the average viewer to understand. It stayed pretty faithful to the original series unlike many other dubs at the time retaining the original plot, and characters and is considered as more of a satire than a Macekre. Also the english dubs of Lupin the Third and Shin Chan, use the same formula.
- The whole concept of the Macekre is heavily subverted by not only Samurai Pizza Cats, but also Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs, both of which flopped in Japan in their original versions. Bizarrely, the Macekres of both series turned out to be extremely popular, airing in multiple countries around the world. Go figure.
- Science Ninja Team Gatchaman wins a lifetime acheivement award for this trope. There have been five separate English dubs of various parts of the franchise: Battle Of The Planets, G-Force: Guardians of Space, Eagle Riders, the Urban Vision dub of the Gatchaman OVA, and finally ADV Films' dub of the original series. The ADV dub is the only one of these that didn't have character names and plot points rewritten wholesale.
Video Games
- The original Persona was badly Macekred for US release, which causes a few minor plot holes between it and Persona 2 that weren't present in the original JP version. The biggest is that it's a much messier Ret Con that Nyarlathotep was manipulating things from the beginning, as his name was changed to Massacre for the US release.
- In Japan, Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere was a fast-paced flight arcade game with highly competent teammates, a deeply involving, character-driven, completely non-linear storyline, featuring five young pilots caught in the middle of a struggle between two megacorporations, a guerrilla faction hell-bent on digitalizing everybody's minds, and a secret peacekeeping force where some dark monkey business is going on deep inside; all of that interspersed with beautiful, sleek anime cutscenes. When the game was released in the West, the editors somehow thought Western gamers were a bunch of hotheads who just want mindless, fast-paced action and slaughter, and everything that made the Japanese version stand out from the rest was horribly destroyed. The truly intelligent teammates were removed, making all your missions solo. The original plot was replaced with a bland, highly generic story about a peacekeeping force who just jumps in and ruins enemy stuff every time something bad happens. The anime cutscenes were replaced with text slideshows that just threw an Infodump on what was going on. The entire "story tree" was replaced with a completely linear plot that just goes from point A to point B. Even Dision's quest for causing massive mayhem was Retconned with a computer AI that suddenly went haywire! For once, a case where They Changed It Now It Sucks was true.
- And there's also the Mobile Light Force Shoot Em Up games on PlayStation and PlayStation 2. The original Japanese scripts were tossed out completely and replaced with an English script that made no sense, and the original covers were supplanted in favor of a Charlie's Angels-style cover that had absolutely nothing to do with the game. And each game is part of a different series.
- After great anguish from fans, the company promised to bring over the second and third Shikigami no Shiro games unchanged. They did indeed do so, though the translations were still filled with Engrish.
- Then there's the first Ranma 1/2 game, which was edited into Street Combat, changing the premise and removing all Japanese elements and renaming and redrawing all the characters completely differently.
- Drakengard had almost all plot points pointing to incest removed, and everything related to pedophilia removed. Some other parts of the script were also gummed up and rendered incoherent, such as the scene leading in to the third ending.
- Several Puyo Puyo games got this treatment, being reworked into games starring Dr. Robotnik on the Genesis/Megadrive or Kirby on the SNES. These cases weren't quite as bad, as they still turned out to be good games in their own right.
- The Puyo Puyo franchise still lives on to this day under its original title, even after the demise of Compile, the company who created the series.
- A similar thing happened to the Panel de Pon series, released in Japan with cute shoujo-style characters. It was released in the US, with characters from Yoshi's Island, as Tetris Attack, even though the games don't have anything to do with Tetris.
- One especially infamous example was the original American localization of Metal Gear, which changed the villains from a group of rogue American military personnel holed up near South Africa to a pastiche of Moammar Gadhafi. The game was so successful that it spawned a non-canonical sequel, Snake's Revenge, which has you battling Arab terrorists.
- This was actually only in the manual, the people at Konam...I mean, Ultra kept thinking they were comedians so they just made a bunch of bad jokes in the manuals. Both games have Big Boss as the one behind the attack.
- The first game of the cult series Earnest Evans for the Sega Genesis took such a hit. The translators moved the year from 1925 to 1985, made Earnest Evans into Earnest Evans III, tore out the entire story, made Annet his mom instead of his girlfriend, and changed Al Capone into Brady Tressider. Of course, the game was reverse-ported from the Sega CD to the Genesis cartridge, so a lot had to go.
- As for the rest, El Viento remained largely intact, and Annet Futatabi was never released outside of Japan. In short, the first game also became the fourth game of the series. Ugh.
- The European localization of Contra: Hard Corps not only replaced all of the humanoid characters with robots, it also turned the plot of the game into a barely coherent mess, by replacing references to the enemy being a terrorist organization with some nonsense about "Alien Rebels", as well as downplaying the role of a character so he was no longer a traitor.
- For the American version of Streets Of Rage 3, the main characters were recolored for the purpose of having "gender-neutral" colors, female enemies have more clothing, and the story is completely rewritten, changing the plot from one revolving around nuclear weapons to one about robotic duplicates of city officials.
- There's a lot of Internet Backdraft related to Working Designs about whether or not their scripts fall under this or Woolseyism. They were notorious for slipping in an ungodly amount of pop culture references, as well as playing fast and loose with the dialogue in the games, which made keeping track of changes in the various Lunar ports difficult just because the player never knew whether a change was added for the new version or just added to the English version. On the other hand, this notoriety is also what made their games appealing. The Clinton joke in the original Lunar: Eternal Blue is legendary, to the point where many mourned its loss when the PS 1 version came out and they had updated it to something more relevant.
- While otherwise a decent game, the poor translation effort put forth in the Genesis version of Langrisser is said to have contributed to its low sales and the prevention of any other game in the series to be released outside Japan.
- In Um Jammer Lammy, a level taking place in Hell was relocated to a desert island for fear of offending religious types. The European versions got to stay in Hell, though.
- Aversion: When commercials for the American release of Final Fantasy X-2 began to circulate, some fans shit a brick and immediately started raging that what would obviously have been moving, wonderful, life-changing Japanese songs in the original had been Maceckred into "Britney Spears crap" for the American release. 5 minutes' worth of youtubing would reveal that the songs between the 2 versions were... exactly the same, except for the language they were sung in. Somehow, the complainers still found excuses to bitch about it.
- And it can be argued the English lyrics to "Real Emotion" fit the rhythm better.
- When the first Gameboy Gradius game was translated in America, the plot of the game was changed from a "Aliens are attacking us!"-style blurb to ridiculous crap about chasing down a criminal called "King Nemesis". While the Gradius series was never plot-heavy in the first place, the manual of this game has to be seen to be believed.
- In the SNES conversion of Gradius III, "bosses" became "Mayors", and several bosses got renamed:
Big Core mkIII QB2B, Crystal Core Monarch, Big Core mkII Ice Ice, Derringer Core Grim, among others. Worst of all, the Vic Viper gets renamed to the "M.A.X."
- What did you expect, this is early 90s Konami we're talking about.
- The German releases of Command & Conquer they changed everyone in the whole series into cyborgs, but Generals was by far the worst in this regard:
- Every face was cyborgified.
- All voice samples were modified to make them sound more like robots.
- The GLA suicide bomber was replaced by a bomb with wheels. Which inexplicably starts talking once you put it into a car. Oops.
- A few of Nippon Ichi's post-Disgaea localizations tend to fall into this — particularly the cringe-worthy "ghetto slang" and gratuitous swearing (hee hee, they said "ass!") in Makai Kingdom and Soul Nomad. This troper studied Japanese language and culture throughout childhood as well as college and is fairly certain that "My name is Gig" does not translate into anything resembling "I'm only the most hardcore asskicker who ever walked the earth." Oddly enough, much of Soul Nomad is translated a bit more traditionally — which makes the juvenile bits that much more jarring. Disgaea 2 even has a few annoying bits, particularly Tink. Mocking the French? How original.
|
|
