P. Zimerickus: oke, just bought the discounted Persona 3 portable/Persona 4 bundle (...)
(...) changed the spoken language to Japanese [i] why are the american subs so bad ??... okay okay... this is the bonus question (...)
foxgog: Hello P. Zimerickus!
Since the others already mentioned some plausible explanations to your technical question and I do not have personal experience with gaming on higher fps counts anyway, let me give you an answer to your bonus question.
Why are American subs in Japanese (roleplaying) games so bad?
Well, it is first a translation and a cultural issue between east and west, and secondly a marketing/commercial one.
Japanese game developers and writers usually make extensive use of culturally embedded expressions, idioms and references which barely make any sense in other (especially western) languages and their cultural context (such as American English).
It seems that they go even the extra mile in so called JRPGs with all their weird and goofy characters, stuff and so on.
A 'good' translation actually has to rewrite a lot of content in order to make it sensible and appealing to other audiences.
The problem is, if the translaters in their localization efforts stray off to far from the Japanese source material they receive a lot of flags from both sides, the Japanese producer (see for example Konami's / Kojima's History with the translator for the original Metal Gear Soild script which included many American military 'slang' or vocabulary and got kicked out for it although it played a part in its success in the west) and from fans with Japanese as second or third (or whatever but not native) language knowledge (just compare the comments of the vocal community members in almost every JRPG release thread here at GOG.COM).
So, should they stop adapting the script and content for western audiences by sticking to an almost literal (word by word) translation which only a minority of customers will be able to decipher? I do not know!
However there is as well a marketing/commercial issue at hand. With that I am neither talking about the financual cost of experienced translators nor the questionable use of low quality machine translations (also very well known in the west, see for instance Bethesda's 'efforts' with their translation of TES IV Oblivion into German).
No I am speaking of a common phenomen: one company lands a commercial hit with one of their games despite certain flaws in it (in this case with the localization / translation of both or either subtitles and/or dubbing into a non-japanese language) and other companies copying those errors, because they misinterpret what made the competitors game so successful in the first place.
Let's take a look at a specific example: Final Fantasy X (originally released in 2001 for the PS2)!
Does anyone here remember how awkward the localization of that one was?
Tidus and Yuna laughing together - timestamp [03:34:23]
(Or start a little bit earlier to appreciate some of the characters' in-depth conversation that lead to the laughing scene.)
Sure, Final Fantasy X was ground-breaking in many ways including the amount of actual voiced dialogs (thanks to the PS2's utilization of DVDs instead of CD-ROMs), complete realtime 3D environments, etc.
But it also cemented the trend of small corridor-like environments (levels) and over-reliance on fully voiced cut scenes (both prerendered and in-engine) to name just a few.
Maybe, it would be best to offer the option to the player for selecting either an interpreting localization or a more close to the source 'translation'. Although, it would increase the production cost and hence the prize of the game for a release outside of Japan, and if there is no succesful precedence case of a risk-taking Japanese developer / company it might cause even less Japanese games to be localized to western audiences...
Kind regards,
foxgog
You know what i found most intriguing i guess, is the lack of emotional appearance in the western translation the producers do seem to found most appropiate. I mean, hire our all time stars from Vox Machina and let them read those lines.... understand what i mean?
this little odd occurrence led to a string of events that ended with me refunding Persona and dropping all Japanese games for now.
Something with honor and wrongdoing in the past..... The Dutch in Indonesia, blablabla..... Even had it with my car.... during my time with Toyota i had a great dealer experience... but yea...... only Korea and the smaller nations seem to 'fit' in my oh so Dutch live atm