A Talk About Classic Suda51 Games' Translations

Well, this is a pretty weird first post, but I'll put my effort into making it a pleasant and somewhat informative one.

If you are here, you probably found it through my Twitter. I'm Frost51, an internet user, a Bachelor of Game Design, Law and Software Engineering student, YouTube content creator, podcaster, article writer, even a fucking t-shirt designer when I feel like it. I do a lot of things and this is my personal blog, mostly focused in notes on the Japanese niche gaming culture. 

The only pic of me that truly represents my soul.

I'm also ESL, so I'm very sorry if my English reads unnatural or weird. My first language is Portuguese. I also know some Spanish and some basic Japanese. A bit of German too but I stopped studying it years ago.

This post's idea came from experiencing a specific controversy I fell into after sharing and commenting on a friend's joke about this game called Flower Sun and Rain, directed by Suda51 and developed by the iconoclast studio Grasshopper Manufacture. I'll refer to the game as "FSR" sometimes,  for my hands' sake. The joke implied that this classic's English translation was a bad fanfic, and I expected people would understand that I'm just joking around ― just like my friend was too. I also made a joke about the DS port (the only one available in English), implying it's a "fangame". And yes, apparently some people took it seriously enough to raise issues on me and harass me anonymously, which surprised me a lot considering I said pretty different things before very consistently on my Japanese PS2 playthrough notes. Hell, I'm making an entire game directly inspired by Flower Sun and Rain.

Considering how social network interaction works nowadays and how people's personal biases do play a lot on how they perceive you, it was to be expected that some of my cynicism wouldn't be well perceived by a small, but very loud (and very cowardly considering the anonymity) portion of this community. Which is strange, because it's a known fact for years that Suda51's adventure games aren't that well translated. I mean, it's blatant: ranging from lore removal to implying wrong things, the community knows a huge array of issues. Just join any decent Suda51 Discord group and they'll point you out to some classic ones.

Yeah, as you can see, I'm a pretty big gatekeeper.

Lately, I've been interacting a lot with the western visual novel community, and interestingly enough: they are a lot pickier with translations. Choices like not localizing specific in-game terms or jokes that weren't really translated well are picked up and shared extensively. While I do believe that there is always room for improvement and debate, this is a direct result of the fact that visual novels sharing the same appeal of a book. Therefore, it also shares the same kinds of discussions we face while interacting with any literature community: the whole translation debate. What translation of a certain book should I pick? Is this translation good? Are this book's nuances even translatable to a given language?

It's certainly a bit excessive the way that some visual novel fans go through this subject, but I feel this pressure gets the translation companies into doing their homeworks. It gets them into striving for a better overall translation quality, even if their work conditions and pay aren't ideal at all and I do wish the industry could value their work, giving them proper time and resources to translate works such as Wonderful Everyday or Cyanotype Daydream with the care they deserve.

SCA-DI's Wonderful Everyday, even if acceptably translated to English, is known for a whole debacle on how the company rushed its usual QA period. That's quite unfortunate, considering how much the game tackles complex subjects like Philosophy and Theology.

The thing is: while the VN community still has some reasons to complain about translations, we're getting a lot worse when we're talking about conventional games. Especially text heavy franchises, and even more so if they're niche. While you have some really well regarded localizations like Phoenix Wright (even if I'm not that much of a fan of how much they adapt stuff, I gotta admit they're consistent) and Danganronpa, you also have franchises like Jake Hunter where one of the games is so badly translated that people disregard the English localization.

Even in popular games you do have some controversy. Where should I begin? Nintendo Treehouse's painful localization in Fire Emblem Fates, that was so bad that the fans had to patch it themselves? The classic Metal Gear Solid localization taking too much freedom, to the point Kojima got picky about how future game translations would be dealt with? Symphony of the Night and Zero Wing's translation becoming memes? Even modern games like Ys 8 had translation issues that required some later patches from its devs. If visual novels translation is already something that brings some controversy, it's outrageous that video game translations' quality bar is a lot lower.

Jake Hunter Detective Chronicles is a victim of a very bad translation, a testament to how even classic franchises can suffer in the hands of the translation industry's current standards.

And honestly: I'm not that big of a translation snob. I don't care much, especially because most games do communicate a lot with visuals, interaction and atmosphere, but I do think that games like Cing's classic Hotel Dusk: Room 215 do benefit from having a good translation. I don't think every game is unplayable simply because it has been badly translated, my experience with Castlevania's infamous Symphony of the Night PS1 translation was amazing regardless of how clearly weird it was, but I also think that some factors should be considered when measuring how much the quality of a translation would affect a game.

One of them was already tangentially discussed: reliance on text. If a game relies a lot on text, of course a screwed up text will destroy your experience. But even still, I do think there is another important factor that should be taken into account: how much does it lend elements from literary fiction, and what about the genre fiction elements too? I'll elaborate.

The Goal of Media

Unfortunately, I'll have to bring the literary vs genre fiction subject to the table.

If you are not familiar with the terms "genre fiction" and "literary fiction", I believe this text on Medium does a pretty amazing job at explaining these concepts. It's a considerably complicated subject and it sure is very subjective on its essence, but once you understand what it means, you'll get what any given person is trying to say when they bring it up the table. I'll bring a simple definition for anyone who doesn't want to navigate through hyperlinks though: genre fiction is a definition used for commercial, conventional and genre focused stories. Harry Potter? Genre fiction. Marvel movies? Genre fiction. You have somewhat of a "mold" of what an adventure movie should feel like, and you will use it. Well regarded genre fiction like the Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban has its merits usually given to things such as good plot-twists, quality on conventional elements such as visual effects, memorable characters or even commercial success.

The most conventional examples ― such as superhero movies ― are usually very industry tested and hardly bring any personal artistic choice or deep thematic exploration. The most blatant example of games like these are free to play shooters, such as PlayerUnknown's Battegrounds and Fortnite. While being very fun games (which I do personally appreciate playing), they have no artistic intent. They don't want you to reach any kind of enlightment. They want to sell you colorful skins, get into playing more and more hours and spend as much money and time as possible, to the point their entire progression system is based on getting you logging in daily. Shops? Let's make these skins temporarily available on the shop, so the player is pressured into buying more and more. They are not expression, they are marketing, seeing the player as merely a consumer ―  you won't probably get any new personal insight out of it. They are the games that makes this image of the medium being a huge waste of time widespread and this isn't necessarily something horrible: we all need some simple fun sometimes.

Uncharted is a pretty good example of genre fiction, maybe one of the most iconic ones of the last decade.

Meanwhile, literary fiction is usually connected to unconventional artistic choices. It's usually the kind of fiction that instead of making a cast of likeable and charismatic protagonists, might choose to take a deep dive into one character and make him very unlikeable, like Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver. It's that kind of art that doesn't have a mold, doesn't care about tropes and sometimes even breaks them on purpose to further emphasize its intents. A lot of the works that fit the literary fiction label are really abstract since they focus on themes instead of selling character designs and funny quotes. It's all about the creators' intent, be it some kind of experiment, a highly hermeneutics focused story, symbolism, metaphors, magical realism... It's those stories that actively want you to immerse you into someone else's rules and mindset. Movies like Citizen Kane or Mulholland Drive are pretty great choices for this category. It's when the focus of a given media is being art above being entertainement, expression takes the front seat.

We have a plenty of examples in gaming. Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding might be a very controversial game in some regards and I personally dislike some of its quirks, but it's undeniably a game that has strong literary fiction elements in it. It's trying to comment on our context and on reality, it has a strong artistic intent and it doesn't follow a lot of conventional gameplay or plot structures. Disco Elysium's heavy political focus could also give it this label, since it also disregards a lot of gameplay conventions to invite you to a bleak social reality. Actually, we could go on all day: from the bleak streets of Pathologic to the dark meta reality of Drakengard. And we didn't even talk about indies such as Beholder or Papers Please, because they're numerous and this list would get longer and longer.

Pathologic, a game where you spend most of your time walking, disregards standards to focus on a more contemplative and threatening experience.

This discussion is so subjective that some people might attribute great character writing to literary fiction instead of genre fiction. But it's clear that heavy psychological elements, such as the exploration of James Sunderland's deep fears in Silent Hill 2, is more related to literary fiction ideas, while the charismatic writing of Maya Fey in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney is deeply connected to genre fiction elements being well played out. We shouldn't also forget that this is not a very binary definition and should be treated more like a spectrum, since you can have both elements intertwined. Metal Gear Solid is a good example of something that fits more a literary fiction label but uses a lot genre fiction to get its quirks. It's still a cheesy espionage game, even if it does tackle serious subject matter. If you are familiar to Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of "cultural industry" ― which analyses how capitalism overtakes art to get profit ― it's easy to just say that usually genre fiction is very tied to finantial demands, while literary fiction is usually more focused on giving its public a specific, personal experience. This doesn't mean genre fiction is inherently bad, even if literature snobs do try to imply that a lot. It's just a different kind of experience and that's perfectly fine.

And the thing about these two categories is: genre fiction as a whole is a bit more predictable and easy to understand. It plays with tropes you already know: the protagonist is going to get the girl, the moon's appearance is foreshadowing some tragedy and a brutal antihero will either have a redemption arc or a sad ending. Now, literary fiction feels the same as sailing into an unknown sea: you should take any dialogue, visual cue or context very seriously, because there are no predictable indicators of where the story will head to. They are games where everything matters to get a full picture of their intent, and of course that having a precise text is important. No wonder Pathologic's latest remaster had the entire translation redone.

In an interview made for PLAYISM's The Silver Case marketing material, Suda51 mentions Godard's Nouvelle Vague as one of his main inspirations for The Silver Case.

Given all of what was previously mentioned in this text, we can finally get to one of the main points about Suda51's work ― even if No More Heroes 3 has a lot of genre fiction elements, his earlier work is undeniably a lot more tied to literary fiction. Unlike his current fixation on Miike, tokusatsu and superhero movies, young Suda51 was a pretty big fan of Godard, David Lynch and Sion Sono's work. Certainly a very pretentious dude, so he would write really interesting stories, full of surrealism, esoterism and metaphysics to embody metaphors and themes. It's no wonder that The Silver Case has a lot of references to the Minamata Disease Incident and to the advent of cybercrimes. The Kill the Past games are heavily political and they do embody some of Suda51's beliefs and views on society and the way it affects individuals as a whole.

So of course: getting a precise translation is important to a Suda51 game, since one of his older games' main selling points is exactly trying to understand what he means on a thematic level. What is Suda commenting on? What is he trying to convey with his unconventional storylines? They are not regular detective stories, but their chaos is not gratuitous either. And another element I want to elaborate further also further proves my point on Suda51 games' translation: Suda51 communicates a lot of concepts with just a few words, so they need to be translated as accurately as possible.

Less Words, More Meaning

Suda51, a very subtle writer, relies on nuance and implications to write his stories.

Suda51 games are defined by one liners, visual narrative and a lot of surrealism. Unlike directors such as Quentin Tarantino though, his use of one liners isn't merely stylistic and a lot of his games' main themes are conveyed by short sentences. In Flower Sun and Rain, the name of the hotel where you have to stay is Hotel Flower Sun and Rain, which initially is just a setup that doesn't seem to go anywhere. However, it actually has a purpose, which is very central and it's revealed in the final stretch of the experience: the entirety of the game can be nailed down to the meaning of these three words, thus turning the game into a metaphor.

I'm not going to elaborate any further for the sake of avoiding spoilers. Flower Sun and Rain is a masterpiece and its abstract and surrealistic workings should be experienced by anyone who loves game design or art, but this is a perfect example of Suda51's writing style. He will make one sentence matter a lot more than the text wall, that gave you enough exposition to understand his games' worlds beforehand. He will sometimes highlight important events through short sentences and visual feedback, and both of these resources are very connected during plot important scenes.

Which means, sometimes we're having to overanalyze specific sentences to fully grasp what the game means. Hell, when the most important sentence in The Silver Case ― which thematically concludes the story ― is a sentence like "Lend me 50.000 yen", it means that even casual conversations should be put into the equation when we're talking about what this game is about. I might just write a theme analysis on this title eventually, since it's so complex that it actually deserves a whole new article on it.

No wonder one of Grasshopper's main gimmicks is the use of stylized fonts and text. They are aware of how much their blend of aesthetics and writing are their main appeal, so they love playing around with these ideas in their games. Have you ever thought about Killer7's reloading animation, where it's written"reload" both in English and in Japanese's katakana? It's just genius how they reflect the game's takes on cultural differences by using a simple moving text on a stylish layout.

Killer7's text animation while you reload is one of Suda51's many textual tools to reflect the game's themes.

Killer7 is a great example of a game that requires a good translation. Relying on short, but very important cutscenes that focus on key events, this game uses small drops of storytelling to give the player enough context for their assassination missions. Sometimes this info is subverted by sudden plot-twists, which means you will be constantly paranoid on the veracity of any given fact the game reveals. This doesn't mean that the player should be constantly paranoid on if the game is trying to be mysterious or if it's just another hiccup from a sketchy translation though. Information should be precise in a story like this, since it's about building a very specific interpretative space instead of answering every question.

I'm not going to elaborate on Suda51's No More Heroes series because even if the first No More Heroes game does generally get the literary fiction treatment on its writing, this franchise has a more conventional and predictable structure, and so I don't think a translation will change much about the way the game feels to most spectators since they are essentially simple stories. You don't havea lot of interpretative freedom being managed or any kind of deep social commentary, even if I do love the first game's take on metalinguistics. I do also think the franchise strayed further from literary fiction after its first entry, except for Travis Strikes Again ― which is heavily reliant on the player's previous knowledge about Grassshopper Manufacture's history.

As just evidenced, his style relies a lot on a relationship between the aesthetics and the writing, which only works if the text is correctly translated. Suda's preference on constantly using nuance and implicit information makes a good translation not only important ― but actually necessary to get a satisfying experience out of his games. And if I'm being honest with you guys: that mostly didn't happen.

I'll go through some specific cases and talk a bit about them.

The Silver Case: Even a Good Translator Needs QA

Unlike a visual novel, The Silver Case relies 100% on its visuals instead of describing spaces and scenes.

The Silver Case's translation was done by a very capable man called James Mountain. He had enough context on how Japan's overall atmosphere and life was in the 90s, which is very important to convey this game's tone in English. Some people did complain about how many swear words the characters were throwing around, but I do feel that is not an issue at all. Not only the original script had some offensive words being thrown around here and there, but The Silver Case is heavily inspired by the nineties' neo-noir cinema. And I think he did the right choice regarding how sweary the game should be.

However, considering how long the script is, there are some mistakes here and there. A very famous one is the implication of the existence of multiple Silver Eyes during one of the final scenes.

While a wrong usage of plural nouns isn't a big deal, it is a big deal when we are talking about Silver Eyes.

If you are unaware of the plot, you might think I'm nitpicking. However, I'll guarantee you I can't go deep into what is a Silver Eye or its role in Suda51's games without really spoiling you on the story, so I'll just say that it's a very important plot device in The Silver Case, Flower Sun and Rain and The 25th Ward. Since fans are expected to discuss and think a lot on some of the unexplained mysteries in most of these games, adding one more unit of a countable plot important item (especially putting into account that there literally just one Silver Eye in the this game) is something that could create a lot of confusion. Especially when the franchise features more than one Silver Eye in the sequels, which could possibly lead to wrong associations. Imagine if the Dragon Ball translation decided to add one more Dragon Ball accidently? It's like this, but even worse.

Even if James Mountain's localization skills are really praiseworthy, it's really important to mention that plural nouns and pronouns were a huge issue to him when he was translating The Silver Case's script. I'm one of the editors for The Silver Case's fanmade Portuguese translation, and even if our translation is taken directly from English, the editing and overall reviewing uses the Japanese script as the standard. After a while, both the translators ― some of which also have Japanese knowledge ― and the editors noticed how a lot of the words were confusingly translated in the western release. This is very prevalent on plurals, where the English translation would be unsure if the correct wording for a certain scene was "24 Wards" or "24th Ward", thus wrongly implying in a couple of scenes that they were giving lore exposition for the entirety of Tokyo instead of just for the 24th Ward. This causes the politics of The Silver Case to get even harder to understand than it already was on the Japanese release.

It wouldn't make sense to divide the already divided 24 wards of Tokyo into five. What the fuck would that be? The 120 Wards? This is a mistranslation, "24 wards" was supposed to be the 24th Ward.

If you know Japanese and you know enough about the special wards structure, you can proofread it yourself. The sentence is pretty clear on this being a description of a special administrative region.

This is already the second plural mistake that could lead to confusion. The western player is probably not even very familarized with Tokyo's special wards and how this political structure works, so they will be confused at this initial loredump the game throws at you. And the thing is: while it's pretty clear to anyone who has played The Silver Case the reason why such mistakes are a big deal, it pains me to tell you that a lot of these are constant and could affect both shorter dialogues and longer ones. I don't know how much it does affect the entire game because our translation project haven't gone through the whole thing, but this is not a very good sign.

We also have the 己 discussion, which James Mountain did document on his devlog ― which I highly recommend you to read, especially 2 and 3. While I'm not going deep on this subject since the linked text does explain it perfectly, this is a discussion that is worth noting because it has to do with how the Japanese language is structured. Most of the times, you don't need to use pronouns as long as a pronoun is implicit in context and most conversations omit a lot of them as a consequence, unlike conversations in the English language. While in English you would say something structured like this:

John: "Do you like pizza?"
Peter: "Yes, I like pizza."

In Japanese, you could structure it to something similar to this:

John: Like pizza?
Peter: Like.

And people would still understand it easily because the context would give enough hints to what they mean. People enjoy Suda games in the West for their dreamy dialogues, but playing through some scenes of The Silver Case in Japanese actually showed me that some these dialogues were a lot clearer in Japanese, it's just that the translator wrote it a bit more vague than it should be, giving this non sequitur feeling a bit more strength than it should have.

While I think The Silver Case's translation is a totally okay way to play it, I feel it did need some QA. Maybe this was caused by the fact this game runs on the Unity Engine and also by how much it also relies a lot on visual context to tell its story. The translator and the editors would need to constantly be checking scenes on Unity to make sure they're contextually accurate given the fact the visual information is quite important. Unlike conventional visual novels, The Silver Case doesn't use prose to describe situations, relying on direct visual representations of the places and the situations.This means relying a lot only in the script itself will result in a very clunky translation.

The Silver Case doesn't use any kind of long descriptive prose unlike most visual novels, it's a very visual game, very akin to a movie.

I use Unity myself to make my own game and I gotta tell you: I don't really believe they would give the translator more than a Japanese build with some debugging tools. I also don't believe they would lend the project files and teach the guy on how to use the engine just for a translation. This would be unpractical, time expensive and risky in terms of leaking the source code.

This means they would have to rewatch entire scenes of a 40 hour game to proofread it, while following a highly complex and somewhat hard to piece out story and paying attention to how the scenes correlate to the text. This is like proofreading a 40 hour movie instead of a 40 hour novel. While I do believe there are multiple pipeline ideas that could make this process a lot easier (getting a Grasshopper dev to write the scenes like a movie script before passing it to the translator would probably be a nice idea), I think it's a hard job and it makes sense that this could cause issues on understanding context, which would in turn make dialogues a lot harder to connect. Of course these last comments I have are based on some assumptions, but I do think they're fair enough considering both how the dialogue feels in the English version and how it could use some proofreading.

I hope this doesn't sound gatekeepy or highly disrespectful to James Mountain's work. If anything, characters like Tetsugoro Kusabi and Tokio Morishima are testaments to his incredible localization skills and I do think he nailed how a hardboiled Suda51 story should feel, and the existence of a very loyal western fandom proves it. These games are well liked, increasingly popular and they're still discussed for their incredible themes. Be it how Tokio Morishima's depressive mundanity affects him, or be it on how the social context of the 24th Ward becomes a nest for criminal intent. As previously stated, I just think more should be invested on this game's QA and it's a shame that such mistakes can affect someone's views on the story and especially hinder the understanding of Suda51's continuous narrative.

Flower Sun and Rain: Even a Good Translator Needs Context

Flower Sun and Rain's first chapter already starts off changing "Tetsugoro" to "Bob". And even if at first glance this is fine, it's probably the defining example of Flower Sun and Rain's translation issues.

Flower Sun and Rain is a very mysterious game, one which has no fear of leaving a couple of its elements unexplained. While The Silver Case ended with an purposely unsolved mystery ― which was solved on its Remaster's extra chapters ― this is the first game Suda51 heavily experimented with using info to create "interpretative holes": unexplained elements you can use to think and find your own meaning on this narrative's themes and concepts. Still, if Suda wanted you to just think of anything, he wouldn't focus on specific themes and information. If anything, the correct translation of any given information is even more important since he will leave some of the missing pieces for you to find by yourself, and you can't find them if the clues are incorrect.

And, if anything, we should analyze this image above. Our protagonist, Sumio Mondo, affirms that "Working with a Catherine is always better than working with a Bob." However, as pointed out by other people years ago, this is the result of bad localization. The original name that Sumio used to his remark wasn't "Bob", it was "Tetsugoro". This is a reference to a very important character in The Silver Case, and this implies a lot of what Flower Sun and Rain is to the first time player. Not only that, but it implies that Sumio Mondo might remember some of The Silver Case's events for some reason.

While Flower Sun and Rain has a plot on its own, it references The Silver Case constantly, to the point its ending is incomprehensible to the player if they didn't play The Silver Case before.

I wonder why something like that happened, because this translation was handled by a pretty big team considering what is written on Flower Sun and Rain: Murder and Mystery in Paradise's English credits. Maybe this was the actual issue since a lot of the staff was unfamiliar to The Silver Case's lore? Maybe they couldn't proofread the continuity aspecs properly? We will never know. But something that is pretty clear when looking into Flower Sun and Rain's localization is that there was little to no regard to continuity since The Silver Case wasn't localized in the west back then.

While I could point out some bits of wonky translation in this game, I actually do think they went really well with the jokes, especially some of which are connected to Japanese as a language. One of the most clever adaptations was on the game's first chapter, where they would joke about Edo Macalister's name. While at first I thought of it as a mistake, thinking about it: it was a way to adapt a specific kanji (the complicated Japanese letters, to put it simply) joke to English while just making Ed Macallister (his original name)'s spelling a bit weirder to make sense.

I believe this job was handled by a competent team in terms of localization, but I also feel this was pretty much a translation destined to have issues simply from the fact they had no way to keep the information consistent and available to the player ― it requires knowledge on another game that wasn't even localized. I also do think they might have not played The Silver Case considering the Bob/Tetsugoro issue.

This issue requires no elaboration. This game is a sequel and it uses previous established lore and characters. If this was ignored, it's already enough to create issues.

Killer7: Even a Good Translator Struggles With Ruby Text

Any translator would struggle with Killer7 considering how this game was written.

Have you ever heard of furigana or ruby text? These little notes above the complicated scribbles you see above? They are used in media ― especially manga ― to tell the reader how that kanji (the Japanese complex characters people use as tatoos) should be read. This is really useful if you are writing something for a younger audience.

Yeah, I see your face, I know what you're thinking: "Why would Suda51 use a linguistic resource usually associated with helping someone to read kanji in a very adult oriented work such as Killer7?" Well, sometimes you can see furigana in complicated words that aren't really used in your everyday life, so here is the quick answer. Still, the weird thing is that Suda chooses to use furigana in every text Killer7 has, even easy kanji has some annotations above it.

Initially, I thought it was just a stylistic decision, since yeah... it looks cool as heck. While wondering about that at the same time I was testing Killer7 in Japanese though, I noticed that some of the furigana was completely different from what those kanji could be read as. Oh no, they're at it again: furigana wordplays.

Imagine if I I was writing a game about gods and demons, And I mentioned someone as the "Great General". What if I wanted to add some sort of godly vibe to this word, implying that this same person is some kind of god? In English, you could use adjectives such as "Great Transcendent General" or something. In Japanese ― while you can use adjectives too ― a possible option is using furigana to add a note that doesn't really represent the correct reading of a kanji, but actually adds another meaning to it. I could something similar to what the image below shows. 

A dumb model of how a furigana wordplay could feel if we had something similar on the English language.

The thing is: this concept doesn't really exist in the English language, so adding small annotations could feel a bit artificial. Translating Killer7 required to choose one of the meanings which were conveyed on each wordplay ― thus removing one of the intended meanings. Of course, there are more ways to translate this and keep both of the meanings, but some of the nuance could be lost. To be honest: in this image, the official translation just scrapped one of the meanings, even if adapting this wouldn't be the hardest thing on earth.

 In the example image, I show 大将, which means "general" or "boss". However, instead of using the correct furigana, Suda51 decided to write "Harman" in the annotation. This means the fact that Harman is the leader of the Smith Syndicate was explicit since one of the first dialogues of Angel (the prologue chapter), something that would clarify the story a bit more at the beginning. They simply don't mention Harman in this dialogue in the English release, which means you would probably struggle with connecting the dots of who Harman is until Angel's ending.

Remember what I said about how important the small clues are to figuring out a vague and mysterious storyline? Killer7 is probably one of the most difficult to understand Suda51 games and figuring out the plot requires a lot of effort. Clues are spread from chapter to chapter, some of which interact in very interesting ways, connecting this episodic narrative into a network of connected events. I had some other findings on Angel but I digress, I think the point was made. If there were more wordplays like this in the entire game, I wonder how many clues were hidden by linguistic differences.

Inherently Different

While experts struggle for years to translate James Joyce's masterpiece into other languages, they will forever be different experiences, even if this isn't a bad thing.

In literature, you have books such as James Joyce's Ulysses. While certainly being a masterpiece, it has some notoriety in the Brazilian literature community because of the different translations it has, and also because it's a book a lot of people would recommend you to read in its original language. Especially because it's so tied to its language's structure that it's hard to convey the same experience in other languages. The translator is a co-author in any localization for sure, but this means some of this work's structure will have to be reinvented pretty strongly; and even if it's a good translation, it doesn't mean it will be the same experience.

While I feel that Suda51 games are nowhere near as tied to the Japanese language as Ulysses is to the English language, I do feel that ― like any media ― you should try to experience the original script if possible. Languages are more than just codes, they are a registry of given culture, their philosophies and beliefs. Reducing language into a mere medium is not only wrong, but it's a very uninformed take. Japanese's honorific usage or the fact that formal Brazilian Portuguese is very different from the everyday Portuguese are reflexes of these societies' characteristics; be it Japan's highly structural organizations or Brazil's economic and educational inequality. A lot of specific words, even when correctly translated, do not have the same feeling when it comes from one language to another. And I would still persist in this opinion even if these games had the care they ultimately deserved during their localization process ―  at least if you are really trying to dig in the full depth that these games have to offer.

While this is truth, I don't mean to say you cannot appreciate these games in English! Tokio Morishima's depression will forever be relatable in any language.

Now, even if you are okay with reading a translation (I mostly don't mind much myself), it's not a hard to conclude that these games did deserve a bit better and that the community should consider some making some patches to fix such issues. I'm currently playing Flower Sun and Rain PS2 and I'm planning to make a patch focused on lore issues by myself, but of course this will take a while since I'm new to Japanese, even if I'm constantly trying to improve my skills. I hope other people also consider attempting this, and I'm very open to hear any kind of complaint or feedback from you all.

Translations are beautiful. While they are undeniable co-authoring and they sure bring a somewhat different experience to the table, localization bring accessibility. I wouldn't have played these games as someone whose primary language is Portuguese if they didn't release this to English. Hell, I'm a lot more priviledged than the average Brazilian just by the fact that I learned English ― a language which Brazilians typically struggle to learn because of the pronounciation differences. Of course, I don't think that playing a Japanese game in English is for certain a bad thing, but I do think we should also have standards and avoid gulping any subpar translated work just because it's the only way you can experience a game for now. Even if Grasshopper, h.a.n.d. or ACTIVE GAMING MEDIA are smaller companies, they are still companies, and defending a lacking service just for the sake of brand loyalty isn't excusable.

Postscript

You might have noticed I didn't talk about The 25th Ward. Well, I never played it in Japanese to judge the way it was localized, but I still do wonder about its process. Stuff like mentioning the F.S.O. political faction from the previous games as "Frontier" ― which is totally fine since they did mention that the "F" letter comes from the word "frontier"― troubles me a bit since this wasn't really that common in The Silver Case's English localization. I also feel the non sequitur feeling was even stronger and I'm not sure if this was done on purpose or if it was a result of the way it was localized. If anyone feels compelled enough to give it a shot, I would love to hear your impressions.

After this huge textual trip, I feel deeply compelled to address one of the most stupid statements I received during the harassment campaign. Now that you have all the context and my beliefs in hand, peep this one:

Well... Uhh... I'll translate to you guys.

"And what is the problem of a person playing the English version and then searching for the references online, etc? Of course you'll disagree on that to keep gatekeeping, which would be ironic, since you played a lot of games using guides lol (nice experience)"

I answered with:

"Yeah man, because playing these incredible PS1 puzzles when Grasshopper even added a skip option to them in the remaster is very important. Get help."

The thing is: when these games' core experience is heavily focused on hermeneutics, psychological elements, character exploration and atmosphere... What the fuck are you talking about when you are asking if someone has completed puzzle #5 blind? This wasn't even 5% of the total game time and even the original game had a guide included on its box to help you solve the first puzzles, which are some of the hardest ones.

If Grasshopper Manufacture themselves thought a skip button should be added since the code puzzles can get obnoxious, who are you to question their decision and why? Who the hell even plays The Silver Case expecting challenging and fun puzzles? More than 95% of the game is just reading, for God's sake! I wonder how much the person who asked this even understood about this game's themes if these are their priorities.

I'm not even against guides, especially because old games did have a lot of game design issues that could hinder you from progressing and a lot of them were designed with the fact that guides existed in mind, especially in the past. Actually, to the unhappiness of the purist crowd, it's very common to read guides in the visual novels niche for instance, because some of these titles have an enforced reading order ― like Dies Irae Amantes Amentes or Tsukihime. Reading these games just by picking random routes could give you a really weird experience, and even in some games that do not have that, people might just want to avoid bad endings and focus on the main plot (which is the core experience of a VN, no wonder most of them barely have a lot of choices).

A shoutout to all heroes who finished Tsukihime without using a guide. I hope you enjoyed the 34 bad endings.

So, let's make this very conclusion very direct. I'm not a gatekeeper when I joke on the fact that FSR's translation is infamous for its inconsistencies. I'm not a gatekeeper when I'm tweeting some curious findings I have while playing FSR in Japanese. I'm also not gatekeeping for stating the fact that playing something on its original script is the most accurate experience. However, when you affirm that a given player's experience is inherently worse because they relied on a guide during the playthrough, the gatekeeper is you. And considering how much this game relies on text interpretation and how little it relies on gameplay segments, a very bad gatekeeper at that.