Recently Capcom held a GDC panel discussing Monster Hunter that included the following slide:
This led to the usual jeering at other localization efforts, namely Nintendo of America’s Treehouse and Fire Emblem, and the cheering of Capcom and 8-4’s 100% accurate and meme-free work on Monster Hunter. The only thing that would make this incredibly awkward is if somebody found a list of all the weird memes and pointless references 8-4 made in their translations, exposing the people citing this GDC panel as mindless, unlearned morons so stupid they can’t Google.
8-4’s rampant memery in Monster Hunter games starting with Monster Hunter Tri seems to know no bounds, spanning movie references that are not, in any way, relevant to the story of Monster Hunter, to mentions of anime that make no sense and also are not relevant, and even a straight up MEME, I Can Haz Cheeseburger, old by the time it was uttered in Monster Hunter Tri’s initial 2010 release, and positively ancient by the time 2013 rolled around with Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate.
So Capcom is full of shit if they think they are in any moral position to lecture any localization effort, especially ones they contract from 8-4. And anybody trying to use this slide as some kind of ammo for a failed boycott/”awareness” hashtag aimed at NOA’s Treehouse and Fire Emblem: Fates, be forewarned that 8-4, Capcom’s and your supposed champion, was in charge of localizing Fire Emblem: Awakening. And that was so chuck full of memes and references it has a large page describing them as well. Certainly Treehouse should have followed 8-4’s example and referenced Larry The Cable Guy and “My Body is Ready,” or a belabored joke about the movie The Princess Bride, right?
It’s tough to blame 8-4 for this, because they just do what they’ve always done as far as translation, and have found themselves placed on a pedestal for doing translations “right,” even though their translations are full of all of the qualities that are “wrong” by the very people lionizing them.
When one gets so angry on the internet it makes him stupid, it’s hard to take any sort of “movement” he’s trying to promote seriously, especially if he practices such blind unthinking adherence to tweets and gifs (and memes, ironically enough) that it turns him into a brainless know-nothing, easily tricked into defending what he’s supposed to be railing against.
Pietriots 
Capcom is just riding the current wave of Nintendo hate. They’re pandering to these people knowing full well that they’re eventually going to turn on them too in hopes of mitigating the backlash when it does happen instead of standing in solidarity with Nintendo and telling these morons to take a hike like they should be.
There’s this anime series called Ghost Stories that completely tanked in Japan. Eventually someone decided to localize it into English. Instead of sticking with the dramatic Japanese scripts they pretty much completely rewrote the stories, let the voice actors ad lib most of their lines, flooded it with meme and pop culture references, and it’s one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. The English dub apparently even made it’s way back into Asian countries.
Point is, sometimes the source material isn’t good and needs to be altered. I don’t know if I would have liked the original Japanese version of Ghost Stories but the English dub is simply amazing either way.
And this from someone who prefers subs to dubs!
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Three words… Samurai Pizza Cats
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I’m working on a new super long tome of an editorial in which I mention both of those things. Stay tuned!
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Capcom is just riding on the current wave of Nintendo hate.
I wouldn’t call this Nintendo hate, it’s just the presenter being a cheeky little shit.
Someone tweet this article to Capcom Unity, I really want to see them defending this!
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Oh, I wasn’t saying that they were hating, but they’re most certainly using the recent hatred to their advantage instead of standing up to it. The fact that they mentioned avoiding memes, when Nintendo has been the one being attacked for using them recently, shows that they know exactly what they’re doing.
They’re not directly spreading this stupid but they’re definitely trying to hide behind it and using it to deflect from their own issues.
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I kind of imagined Meme Country to be one of those insufferable videos newly 4chan exposed teenagers post to Youtube and not just a few references here and there. Otherwise yeah you’re totally right that anyone who thinks this is ammunition against their imagined enemies culturally appropriating their jokes is an idiot.
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So a quick glance peek at Twitter revealed that people are still enraged over Fates’ localization and that a certain you-know-who female employee not being fired, and no public response from Nintendo about this whole thing made me laugh. Oh boy, those threats of buying a PS4 over a NX will certainly make Nintendo quake in their boots.
Ha.
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I thought they did fire that girl. Truthfully I don’t get the gamergate thing. Something about people not wanting to censor pervy Japan stuff? I’m as anti-SJW as they come, but this doesn’t make sense to me. Anyone with common sense wouldn’t be caught dead playing some of that weird stuff with another living human being in the room. I’m all for having attractive female characters, but you gotta draw a line somewhere (pre-teens in their underwear is a good starting point). I live in America, how is this even an issue? What’s the take over in Australia?
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Our culture is pretty similar to America, moreso every day. I don’t see anybody here campaigning or boycotting though, I think that’s the main difference. Nobody I’ve talked to understands or cares about this controversy. The Nintendo userbase in general is very small compared to Xbox / Playstation, even moreso than the rest of the world right now. I personally find “Japanese” content amusing, but naked young girls definitely aren’t a cool thing. I think it’s exclusively Japan where this stuff would be seen as normal, but even then I don’t know enough about their culture.
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Well, those same pissant babies whining about localizations have also bashed 8-4 for their work on games like Azure Striker Gunvolt, Xenoblade X and the aformented Fire Emblem Awakening for absolutely bullshit reasons like removing dialogue, changing characterizations and scenes, etc. when they probably had to do so by the publishers or because they were given permission to do so. They’re just doing what they and the publishers feel would make better sense for Western audiences and/or weren’t given much time or good documentation to properly refine their translation.
http://www.1uptranslations.com/en/localization-blog/2016/3/confessions-of-a-game-translator-12-actual-reasons-why-some-game-translations-suck This article’s a really good look at how actual crappy translations are made the way they are (for some reasons I pointed out above).
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It’s funny….because Yokai Watch, a video game where even after those bastards at the evil treehouse butchered the shit out it, is still heavily Japanese and has alot of Japanese culture still in the localized version.
When the game was annouced for NA alot of people (namely pokemon fans) started bashing the game and created a hate campaign around it. This makes me wonder where were these cursaders of japanese culture when THAT shit was happening? I didn’t see these torrentaltearjerkers screaming about how Japanese culture should be respected when that shit was going down.
However, there wasn’t any crap like Fumichan (Katie in the NA version) wearing sexually provocative clothing in the Japan version that was changed in the NA version, so I guess I can see why they didn’t give a shit.
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