While I had fond memories of the 2000's stories, lately their dialogue have felt stilted and less natural sounding to me now at days. It's this the fault of Shiro Maekawa (and etc.) or the localization staff at the time?
It is absolutely the fault of the localization. Sega had notoriously bad localization back then. There's one I think about a lot, and it's at the end of Sonic Adventure 2. You clear the Cannon's Core tag team level, Shadow faces off against the Biolizard, and it's setting up for the final boss.
The Biolizard rears back, roars, and vanishes in a flash of light. Shadow, shocked, suddenly blurts out, "Is that what Chaos Control is?!"
In Japanese, Shadow's line is "ć«ćŖć¹ć³ć³ććć¼ć«ć!" (KaosukontorÅru ka!)
Or, in other words, he's just exclaiming "Chaos Control!" as like, a realization. The line is probably a little more like "That was Chaos Control!" He's surprised that the Biolizard can do that. That line was officially localized instead to read more like Shadow doesn't know what Chaos Control is.
There's a mod you might be interested in that came out in the last couple years. It implements Windii's retranslation of Sonic Adventure 2. You can set the game to use the Japanese voices and get subtitles using her script. You can download it here.
And I'm basically going to spend the rest of my life apologizing about this, but I do still think Windii's translation is a little stiff. It took a lot of work, she did very good, but I will always be a picky bitch about "natural" sounding dialog, and I think her script is a little too wordy. She's aiming for 1:1 parity with the Japanese script, which is noble, but I personally think some of the lines can be rewritten to sound a little more casual, and often that makes them less wordy, too. Not as accurate, sure, but more readable, I think.
And I have an entire copy of Windii's Sonic Adventure 2 retranslation where I've basically copy-edited every single line to sound more casual like I want. She posted those scripts publicly years ago, encouraged edits, so I made my own copies to edit. And I'm terrified of doing anything with them because I don't want to make her more upset with me than she already is for whatever reason she's mad at me. (Last I heard she just thinks I'm "a loser" and won't elaborate)
But, I would still recommend the mod. A lot of people like it. I'm just a picky bitch about this kind of writing localization.
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
