This part of the video was sponsored by LastPass! When we started Stop Skeletons From Fighting, we had to keep our passwords easy for everyone to remember, and that's not great for security. And if you're anything like the Hot Dog Gamer, you struggle with object permanence and remembering long passwords. LastPass not only makes it easy so you don't have to remember passwords or usernames, they make your passwords safe! No more writing passwords down, no more remembering, no more resetting, no more Hot Dog Getting Locked Out Of Your Account! It even works on mobile, and on apps and on websites, and it even lets you write secure messages with top-secret info! With unlimited password storage and free cross-device sync, you can put your passwords on autopilot with LastPass! Click the link below to find out more! Thanks again, LastPass, for sponsoring this part of the video. A winner is you! Conglaturation. I am Error. English localization was a delicious mess in the early days of console gaming. It's How the West was Worse. But one company in particular stands out: Capcom. Their games and their localization errors are prolific, spanning decades. For our last video on our How the West was Worse series, we focused on the ways Konami changed games when bringing them into western markets, but for this episode, we're mostly going to leave gameplay behind and focus on the changes Capcom made to the meaning of their games. I'm Derek, this is Stop Skeletons from Fighting, and welcome to How the West was Worse: Capcom Edition. This episode is gonna focus on localization, which is different from just translation. Localization is the process of making a game make sense on a cultural level for wherever you wanna sell it. Translation is a part of that process: All localizations have been translated, though not all translations have been localized. Localization also sometimes gets misconstrued as censorship, which... is a whole can of worms. We think the censorship debate can get overblown, or isn't discussed in a nuanced enough way, we even think "censorship" is too strong of a word for it, but we'll address these on a case-by-case basis. Localization was WILD in the 80's and 90's, mostly due to a lack of time, money, communication and manpower given to localizers, and almost no-one was worse at communicating with each other than Capcom Japan and Capcom USA. We mostly stopped seeing screw-ups on the level of "This story is happy end" after the 2000's. Global markets have become bigger money makers than Capcom's home market of Japan. It's more important than ever to get it right. Before we dive in, a disclaimer: We are not experts. I actually have a bachelor's degree in Japanese that I have literally never used. Haruda-sensei, if you're watching... sorry. We got a lot of the information in this video from the heroes at The Cutting Room Floor, and Clyde Mandelin's fantastic Legends of Localization series. We have two of his books, and links to all this stuff is in the description below. And now, let's get to it! We have to start with one of my favorite video game series of all time, Mega Man! He's also a good one to start with, because of course, Mega Man is Rockman in Japan. Mega Man's western localization in the early days was kind of a mess, and we've got these terrible boxes to prove it. Side note: We all laugh at North America's hilarious box art, but forget that Mega Man 1's PAL box art was shockingly good! That second one though, yeesh, what happened? But the boxes aside, was the name "Mega Man" a bad choice for Capcom that made the series worse for the West? Famously, Mega Man's original Japanese name is Rockman because the game is supposed to be rock 'n' roll. But I've always though that that was kinda weird. Yes, he has a sister named Roll, but the games' aesthetic and gameplay has literally nothing to do with rock 'n' roll, or music at all, even if the series does have some of the greatest video game music of all time. Also, he doesn't pick up boulders! Can he jam out on the guitar? "Rock" says nothing of his function as a robot for an English-speaker. Mega Man is honestly a pretty decent name, because it captures the idea that Mega Man is the ultimate robot who can have all the powers, which was an idea that made perfect sense to me as a kid! It's worth noting that Capcom didn't change almost any other major name on a level like this. Mega Man's is the most major, though there are others, like the mystifying change of Forte to Bass. And it's "Bays", not "Baas", Mega Man 8! MEGA MAN: "Hey Baas!"
BASS: "Shut up!" We're gonna focus on two major characters that highlight a classic Japanese translation problem: [alarm sirens]
The L/R Catastrophe! Okay, I'm being a little dramatic, but switched up L's and R's are some of the most common mistakes when bringing a Japanese game to the West. And hopefully I don't embarrass Haruda-sensei too much by trying to explain it, but here we go. So the Japanese language doesn't really have a soft R sound, it's hard like an L. I've always thought of it as the Japanese language doesn't have an R or an L sound, but really an R AND an L sound smashed together. But ra-re-ri-ro-ru is translated into English writing, or Romaji, as an R, which is why a lot of people say there isn't an L in the Japanese language, even though that's not necessarily true when you're listening to the language. Which is why Mega Man's creator Dr. Light is... well, Dr. Light over here, versus Dr. Right, or Raito, in Japan. It honestly went back-and-forth for the first few games: At the end of Mega Man 3, he's Dr. Right, but in the Mega Man 1 instruction book, he's also Dr. "W" Wright, and consequently, he's also Dr. Wright in Captain N. ♫ "One of these things is not like the others" ♫ Eventually though, he would settle into Dr. Light, which is more than we can say about our other favorite L/R mix-up: Clash Man, or Crash Man, from Mega Man 2. We went crazy trying to figure out his official name! In Rockman 2 for the Famicom, he is Clash Man, but in the NES Mega Man 2, he is Crash Man. But in the Mega Man 2 instruction book, he is both Crash Man AND Clash Man! Also, shout-out to Fish Man. When Mega Man 2 came to the Game Boy, he was Clash Man again, but in the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, he is Crash Man. He's also Crash Man in the Power Battles arcade game, and his power is Crash Bomb, even in the Japanese port for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Personally, I like Crash Man better, because the idea of clashing is more of an abstract concept, and he's a robot that throws bombs, not contrarian opinions! But on Spotify, he's Clash Man again, so honestly, who knows. On the topic of naming problems, we gotta talk about Mega Man X5. In the Mega Man X series, the robot Mavericks are all named after animals... kinda. Boomer Kuwanger always threw me for a loop, but it's wordplay on the Japanese word for "stag beetle" that never got properly localized. Anyway, the localization company that worked on Mega Man X5 decided to completely throw tradition out the window, and name the Mavericks after Guns N' Roses references. So like, Volt Kraken is named Squid Adler, because it's kinda like Steven Adler, get it? There's also a hilarious translation error involving Squid Adler: There's a part where X apologizes for Octopardo, which makes no sense until you realize the localizers didn't realize that X was talking about Launch Octopus from Mega Man X1. Whoops! This decision was actually made by Alyson Court, who did the voice for Claire in Resident Evil, as well as a bunch of other stuff for Capcom! It was done as a tribute to her then-husband, and hilariously, someone at Capcom must have realized it too late, because these Guns N' Roses names didn't make it into the manual. These references would also appear in the X Collection for the PS2 and Gamecube, but were finally released in the Legacy Collection, released in 2018. There are other problems that I'm tempted to file under the West being better: There's probably tons of issues in the various Mega Man spinoff series, but I wanna highlight Mega Man Battle Network 4, for giving us classics like: "What a polite young man she was!" and the admirably inappropriate "I'll jack into your squirrel if that's what it takes!" These are bad, but also amazing. Mega Man 7's ending makes our hero WAY more bloodthirsty than in Rockman 7, and then there's one that's quite personal for me: Mega Man 8. Mega Man 8 was the first time I heard Mega Man talk, outside of the Captain N cartoons, and I absolutely hated it! MEGA MAN: "I understand, Dr. Light. I'm on it!" DEREK: Augh, why does he sound like a little boy?! I hated Mega Man's voice so much that I wasn't able to appreciate the real stunner here: Dr. Light's voicework. DR. LIGHT: "You must recova all de enegy imedely, W- Mega Man!" "We may a- be able to locade an other energy emishun from de wadar room." "When we find dat medeoh, we'll find Doctoh Waawee." DEREK: How did this make it into the final game?! Did they not have time for a second take, was- or was this the best take they had?! Also, being a light RPG with lots of dialogue, Mega Man Legends had some significant localization done to it, but I wanna shout out the decision to take out the animal abuse: In Rockman Dash, you could hurt all animals instead of just the jerk dogs. The Hot Dog Gamer thanks you for it. And then there's Grace's and mine's personal favorite line from any Mega Man game ever, the ultimate culmination of localization decisions made years earlier: "And we named this baby Mega Man." It's brilliant. It's brilliant! Our next series for How the West was Worse is another favorite: Resident Evil. We talked about some of this in our Re:Certified Classic video on Resident Evil 1, but this series has plenty of localization... let's just call them "quirks". "JILL-JILL-JILL JILL SANDWICH" First off, the name. "Resident Evil" is the result of a naming contest held within Capcom USA, because the Japanese name, "Biohazard", would be too difficult to trademark in the US. This was a great name for the first game, which took place in a house, but it lost most meaning when the series became a monstrously successful, globetrotting hit. While all localization decisions come down to how much money you think you can make in a certain market, this is especially true for gameplay decisions made for Resident Evil: It was pretty common for Japanese game difficulty to be altered for the international market, and this was basically because of one factor, one not present in Japan: Rentals! Vanilla Resident Evil 1 had the auto-aim purposefully taken out so that it would make the game harder and take longer to finish, meaning more rentals. And we got this little fact wrong in our Re:Certified Classic video, so I wanna take a second to correct it: Resident Evil 2 also had a easier Japanese version, though you CAN turn on the auto-aim in the US version, it's just not automatically on, like it is in the Japanese version. These sorts of difficulty differences would continue for many titles throughout the series. Resident Evil trafficked in video game violence during a time in the US where that was more controversial. The first game in particular had its fair share of censorship, and here's some highlights: The opening cinematic had a few things changed, like Chris' smoking - drugs are bad, kids - and poor JosEeEeph's... JILL: "JosEeEeph!" DEREK: ... gory demise. For the Director's Cut version of Resident Evil 1, Capcom promised to release the uncensored version, but... accidentally shipped it censored! Another version, the Dual Shock release, had the infamous Mamoru Samuragouchi soundtrack, and... well, that's not censorship or localization, that's... just really how everyone got it worse. [♫ RE Dual Shock Version Mansion Basement theme ♫] There's a ton of examples of violence in the series being censored, but in later years, the censorship got flipped and Japan got the censored versions, while most of the rest of the world was able to revel in the extra gore! For the Resident Evil 2 Remake, a couple of particularly gory scenes were toned down. This one in particular feels ironic, because to me it feels like an homage to the first zombie reveal in the first game, which was, of course, missing a key scene. This switch into censorship for the series started because of the Japanese adoption of its ratings board, CERO, in 2002. This actually resulted in Biohazard 4 having some violence toned down, but that's not the main content difference I wanna focus on. In Biohazard 4, the Japanese version, when you play as Ashley in chapter 3-4, you have the original fixed camera angles instead of the over-the-shoulder camera! There's a lot of talk of how censorship in the Japanese version makes the western versions better, but for my money, this is the real thing I wish we had over here. Since the Ashley section's all about taking your weapons away from you, it really feels like a throwback to the series' survival horror roots, and really adds to the tension of that moment! It's a small thing overall, but I think this would have made Resident Evil 4 just that much better! But of course, that real cheese here is that translation. Well... not so much the translation, but the localization. Resident Evil is infamous for its terrible/wonderful voice acting, but we think a lot of the problems with its script are due to a too-literal translation, meaning Resident Evil didn't suffer from a bad translation, but a bad localization. For the early Resident Evil games, the script was first written in Japanese, and then translated/localized into English. That English script is what the voice actors spoke, but for the Japanese version of the game, the Japanese subtitles are mostly the original Japanese script, and don't follow the English voices. This makes it easy to look at localization issues, for example, and we wanna thank Residenteevee over on GameFAQs for pointing this out, the infamous "Master of Unlocking" is an almost-literal translation of the phrase Barry says in Japanese. But no-one speaking English in the American Midwest would talk like that, which is why the line became this in the remake: BARRY: "It's a lockpick. You'd make better use of it." DEREK: ... which is not as fun, but it is a better localization of the line. Resident Evil 4 comes up a lot in this "localization vs. straight translation" debate. There's always been a bit of controversy around the tonal shift that Resident Evil 4 represented for the series, not the least of which comes from Leon's character. Though the signs that Resident Evil was going to become a cheesy action series were already there earlier than Resident Evil 4. Hell yeah! Claire can outrun a helicopter and shatter the laws of physics by falling faster than both her gun and gravity! Mah gurl! Anyway, while the idea that Resident Evil ever had a consistent tone is kinda hilarious, there are some valid complaints that Leon had a personality shift between Resident Evil 2 and 4. His cocky, smarmy action-guy attitude was not present in the Japanese subtitles for Biohazard 4. The best example of this is my favorite line in video game history: LEON: "Where's everyone going? Bingo?" DEREK: [chuckles] Makes me laugh every time. But in the Japanese script, this line is instead simply "Dō natteru...?" which, thanks to Haruda-sensei, I know is a very standard "What's happening? / What's going on?" No jokes, just a simple statement of confusion: "Dō natteru...?" So this makes the bingo line a poor literal translation. There's sadly no mention of bingo in the Japanese script, however, I think it's an amazing localization, because it gives RE4 a cheesy action movie feel that I think is fitting for how over-the-top and bananas that game is! For our next game, we're actually gonna tag-team this one. Be right back. Hey! It's Grace, and I'm gonna step in to talk about our next series, because I was obsessed with it in my gamer youth: Breath of Fire. Now, there are a couple of localization issues across the series, I mean, Breath of Fire I had a character's race changed, which... yikes. Breath of Fire IV also had some sexy things taken out, but like, honestly, that didn't really make the games worse, or like, THAT much worse. The big fish to fry here is actually Breath of Fire II. Where to start... Breath of Fire II on the Game Boy Advance is one of the first JRPGs I ever played. I absolutely love it. However, I am still embarrassed that 12-year-old me didn't notice the awful translation - not just localization, translation - that was present in the SNES version and was only partially fixed for any of its other versions. It's actually kind of amazing that it got released as-is, even in the mid-90's. The translation is so bad that it's pretty hard to show off on video. It's full of grammar mistakes like punctuation errors and misspellings, genuine mistakes like gender mixups, bad localization, and just some... weird choices. The best examples I found are actually in the various minigames, which are available to you very early on. The fishing minigame in the SNES version features issues like the L/R Catastrophe! Uh... this was fixed in the GBA version, but words are still abbreviated in really weird ways throughout the game, likely because English is a longer language than Japanese, and they shorten words instead of finding a better substitution. Hunting isn't much better: "Roast is found" sure is an interesting way to describe the boaricide I just committed. There's spacing and grammar issues throughout these menus, and then they also don't localize Japanese words like "unagi", which means "eel" in English. Now, I don't have a problem with this decision to keep it as "unagi" in general, but because this game is supposed to have a western old-timey English setting, it just feels off! The localization for this game is completely all over the place. I love this game, and I played through it as a kid without really noticing it somehow, but once you DO notice it, it's like... whoa. If you really wanna see a thorough breakdown, I highly recommend Clyde Mandelin's breakdown on it, link in the description below. I also gotta note that the plot itself is pretty special, if only because Capcom was able to get an anti-religious plot with references to saints and churches through Nintendo of America's strict censors. Though perhaps Nintendo wasn't being so heavy-handed on that stuff by 1995. It's me again! Hey! And now we're gonna switch it up with another series that was important to me as a kid: Bionic Commando. We're gonna level with you: Bionic Commando is pretty different from its Japanese version, and How the West was Worse is still a new concept for us, but I'm gonna go ahead and rule that Bionic Commando is actually a How the West was Better, and here's why: Bionic Commando, or really, Top Secret had a Hitler problem. Let's start way back. 1985: Capcom releases Commando into arcades. Now, some of you might be saying "Hey, Uncle Derek," "Commando actually has nothing to do with Bionic Commando," and you're right! Two years later in 1987, Capcom released Top Secret into arcades, but you might know it as Bionic Commando. In yet another example of changing a name to avoid copyright issues, Capcom USA renamed Top Secret to Bionic Commando. Despite the fact the game has almost no in-game story to speak of, it was marketed as a sequel to Commando, and they decided to claim the main character was Super Joe for some reason. It seems like Capcom's Japan and USA offices weren't communicating much, because Commando did get a sequel a few years after that: Mercs. Now, all this is weird, but everything's fine at this point. I- it's fine. Until they decided to port Top Secret to the Famicom. "Port" actually isn't even really that fair to say, it's basically a completely different game from the arcade original. The only real holdover is that it's an action-platformer where you don't jump. But they also slapped on the subtitle "The Resurrection of Hitler", and threw in some alternate history Hitler stuff that, at the end of the day, is not necessary? North America got the better version through the transitive mathematical property of "Less Hitler = Better". Bionic Commando for the NES renamed Hitler as "Master-D", but his likeness is still there, and they renamed the Nazis as "The Badds", which I appreciate for the honesty. But even though the Nazi stuff was largely censored, that doesn't mean the game as a whole was. By some miracle, this game shipped in North America with a radically gory end to Master-D, featured a GD cuss, and there's still an interrogation scene, but he just calls you a little boy and you can't shoot him. Overall, the localization is still pretty bad: There's misspellings and the computers still talk in Japanese onomatopoeia, however, it features one of the great video game lines, "Get the heck out of here, you nerd!" It's still hilarious that they took the effort to remove the Nazi stuff, but still misspell "Albatross"? Or is it the German spelling? Or is that a misspelling, I'm saying... I'm calling- I'm calling it- No, that's a misspelling. No. When the Game Boy version came out in 1992, the series became Bionic Commando in all regions, officially dropping Top Secret. I always felt the Game Boy version had a more futuristic Mega Man vibe to it, less grounded in real-world World War 2 stuff. From here, Bionic Commando games sometimes would briefly mention Albatros or Master-D, but would never again go full Hitler. Remember kids: Even Hitler killed Hitler. And now we're gonna take it home with a game that has maybe the craziest localization of any Capcom game, not because of what got changed, but when it happened! Everything else we've talked about happened in the 80's and 90's, but this stunner came out in 2005. Devil Kings is the unfortunate localization for the first Sengoku Basara game. The Sengoku Basara series - basically Samurai Heroes in English, by the way - is kinda like if Dynasty Warriors was set in Japan. It's a historical hack-and-slash game where everything's over-the-top crazy, fun, anime as hell. It's kind of a loving send-up to Japanese history, and according to Capcom, even caused a spike in tourism in Japan. At the very least, it's popular enough for Capcom to brag about putting Sengoku Basara characters in a Japanese "Rock the Vote" campaign. So there's that. I guess a modern equivalent would be something like this. Now, this is VERY different from the game we got. Basically, series producers thought that Capcom fans wanted more Devil May Cry instead of a fantasy samurai game, which... Okay, it was 2005 so, fair. I mean, I fell for it, that's why I bought it. So they slapped on a new name and a familiar font and called it good, right? Didn't change anything else? HA! Nope! Devil Kings is no longer set in Japan during the Sengoku period, it now takes place... sometime, in a weird Pangaea-like country or continent? And because of this, tons of things got changed, like soldiers' models were changed to look more western, kinda? ... these guys are suddenly ancient Egyptian for some reason? Also they changed the backgrounds, basically to make the game look less Japanese and more western. Oh, and they even got more name changes: Oda Nobunaga is now the titular Devil King, and actual series mascots Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura are now Azure Dragon and Scorpio! Beyond aesthetics, there were also numerous changes to the gameplay itself: They cut four playable characters and made huge changes to the combat. We won't get into mechanical specifics, but you can understand why Sengoku fans consider this to be the worst version of the game. It's important to note that Devil Kings came out during Capcom's Keiji Inafune-led big western push, which we did a whole video about, though Inafune didn't appear to have any hands on this game in particular. Devil Kings was released to mixed reviews, and Sengoku Basara didn't get another western release until 2009's Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, which notably didn't have the same treatment as Devil Kings. However, this brings us to the actual Devil May Cry, not the shoehorned Devil May Cry. While the series has had its questionable moments, - the awkward second game, the difficulty changes between regions in the third game, this: DANTE: "I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with LIIIIGHT!!" DEREK: ... one game marked a new era of localization issues for Capcom. Well, "localization" might be a stretch of the definition, but stick with me here, because it's time to talk about DmC: Devil May Cry, the Devil May Cry reboot. Again, we talked about a lot of the factors surrounding this in our Inafune Explained video, but the period from about 2005 to 2013 had a lot of growing pains for Capcom. Increasingly, to make a successful game for consoles meant appealing to a more western sensibility than a Japanese one, so the process of localization was fundamentally changed: No longer would they take a finished Japanese game and drastically change it, like Sengoku Basara, instead they would already be as western as possible from the jump, a turn towards globalization instead of just localization. Initially this meant titles like Dead Rising, Lost Planet and the little-remembered Shadow of Rome... AGRIPPA: "Are you satisfied?!" DEREK: ... were developed in-house by Capcom, but then they decided to take it a bit further, and have games developed by external western studios, like 2009's Bionic Commando reboot. 2008; Devil May Cry 4 left Capcom feeling that that series was a little tired, so they gave the series to British studio Ninja Theory. But it's not like Capcom gave Devil May Cry to Ninja Theory and we magically got this... DONTE: "Not in a million years." DEREK: Capcom, and specifically Keiji Inafune, who was a senior corporate officer at the time, and series director Hideaki Itsuno initially pushed concepts from Ninja Theory farther and farther away from a game that would be recognizable to Devil May Cry fans. They felt that Dante as a character reflected gothic Japanese street cool circa early 2000's, and they wanted Ninja Theory to merge late-2000's European street cool with a grounded western movie aesthetic. Which is how we got Bieber Hair Dante. Capcom asked for this. Understandably, fans of the series were upset at the 2010 Tokyo Game Show reveal of this sudden stylistic reboot, which, at a core level, betrays the original Japanese-style flashy appeal of Devil May Cry. Side note: Inafune peaced out from Capcom literally a month later. I'm not entirely sure that DmC: Devil May Cry is a bad game... - it's a bad name, that's for sure - ... but it was a complete globalization misstep for Capcom, selling way under its projected sales of two million in its first fiscal year. That, combined with Resident Evil 6 drastically underselling, led Capcom to blame their troubles on a "decline in quality due to excessive outsourcing", and to shift their franchises back in-house. In recent years, they've found a way to strike a globalization balance: Monster Hunter: World did the impossible by becoming Capcom's single best-selling game in company history, and the new Devil May Cry 5 looks to have taken Dante back to his roots. Literally. Alright, and that's it... ? No, I'm sure you noticed the conspicuous absence of a couple of franchises, and that's because Final Fight and Street Fighter are so massive, we decided they need their own video, so stay tuned for when How the West was Worse covers Final Fight and Street Fighter. Thanks so much for watching, we'll see ya next time, SMASH the like button, and SMASH the subscriber button, and then smash... GRACE: The bell!
DEREK: ... the bell, uh... and smash the fists and high-fives of all of the people that help support this video on Patreon, all of them are awesome, and you can see your name here too if you go ahead and help the channel, you can also see videos early and help with voting, be a part of our Discord, join the Stop Skeletons family, or just hey, keep watching, keep likin', keep subscribing, stay tuned.
