#support comparisons

[agoddamn]

Rosado to Louis in English: I thought you were mainly interested in watching people socialize, though. Is it the same thing to watch me with no one else around?

Rosado to Louie in Japanese: But I thought you liked watching cute girls. I'm a man, you know. You're okay with that?

Treehouse/10

[agoddamn]

Just out of curiosity, let’s go through some of these personal skills and how they were localized. Cut because it got long...

不思議な魅力 / Supportive This does actually describe what the ability does, but it’s dry, which is an especially unfortunate choice for the main character. I’d go with Mysterious Charisma or something along those lines. Mystic Charm? Hell, if character length is a problem even just Charismatic has a more special feeling to it than Supportive, which is a quality you look for in a bra moreso than a main character.

ダーティファイト  / Highwayman This is literally just “Dirty Fight[ing]” in katakana, so it’s not like it was confusing. I have no idea why they changed it, given that dirty fighting cleverly both describes the ability itself (it only activates when the enemy can’t attack back) and Ashura’s struggle as a character (he hates himself for being an honorless thug) so...what was gained from changing it to Highwayman, which is just a synonym for his base class?

農地の主 / Forager Descriptive, which is good! My only complaint is that the original title, Farmland Master, implies a lot of competence on her part that Forager doesn’t capture. Nature Master? Living off the Land, if we get creative?

おっちょこちょい / Mischievous Completely different term. The Japanese is Scatterbrain. The deeply confusing thing is that this completely changes the nature of her ability, instead implying that she strips people on purpose. I don’t get...why they did this...

お転婆 / Fearsome Blow Completely different term! The Japanese is Tomboy. I guess we’re not allowed to say she’s a tomboy in America. The Japanese word for tomboy supposedly comes from the Dutch ontembaar, which means spirited/indomitable/untameable. Which actually says a lot about the Japanese perception of the term “tomboy”--it’s not “boyish girl” in the sense that we imagine boyish girls, IE short-haired and pink-hating and sports-loving, but “boyish” in the sense of not being quiet and submissive. Personality over appearance. Anyway, in light of that I can understand not using the literal word tomboy in English but Fearsome Blow is just dry. Doesn’t reflect on her personality at all. Even Ferocious Blow would be better.

爆炎使い / Pyrotechnics What always confused me here is that pyrotechnics almost always refers to decorative explosions. You use pyrotechnics to describe tricks or flashy shows, not actual bombs designed to kill people, which is what Saizou is doing. It’s like saying a flamethrower and a flashlight are interchangeable because they both involve light that you point places. I don’t think 爆炎使い is an existing term; the only results on Google for it are Saizou and a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Literally, it’s something like Explosive Flame Messenger/Carrier. Probably a double meaning on Saizou carrying explosive bombs and being an explosive bomb. Hilariously, FEH completely gave up trying to translate this term (which is also his character title in that game) and just rendered it as Angry Ninja. I’d just translate it as Incendiary, trying to keep the double meaning intact.

小さな声援 / Quiet Strength This one is accurate to Sakura’s personality--which is good--but doesn’t describe the effect and misses out on the fact that all three (!) Hoshido princesses have linked personal skills. Aqua’s is Healing Voice, Hinoka’s is Rallying Cry (localization was actually dead on here), and Sakura’s is Little Cheer/Soft Cheer. They’re all voice-related. Localization lost this theme by changing Aqua’s to Healing Descant (a type of melody) and Sakura’s to Quiet Strength. At the very least, Sakura and Hinoka have reciprocal effects so the names really ought to match. They actually did this excellently with the Nohr sisters (Lily’s Poise/Rose’s Thorn) so it’s a shame the Hoshido sisters lost out.

ぼんやり / Optimist Another totally different term. The Japanese is Absent-minded/Airhead. Like, did they feel bad about calling Setsuna dumb? But still left all her supports about how dumb she is? Even more confusingly, Kisaragi’s personal skill is named almost identically. Nobody would do that on purpose. I admit that this one is tricky to name--neither Airhead nor Optimist suggest getting extra-effective healing, but at least Airhead describes her personality. She’s more implacable than optimistic. I’d try to get creative with this one and go with something like Help From My Friends if space allowed, or just fall back to Airhead/Head in the Clouds if airhead sounds too mean.

悪あがき / Triple Threat Once more, different term. The Japanese is something like wasted effort/struggling in vain. I think the implication is that you’re wasting your energy trying to melee Hinata? This is definitely a weird one. Honestly dunno that I’d have a better suggestion; Triple Threat at least gets across that it procs against three weapon types. Last Stand, perhaps.

軍略伝授 / Perspicacious This is another one of those where the game suddenly whips out obscure vocabulary for no apparent reason. When’s the last time you heard someone use perspicacious outside of an English test? The Japanese is Strategy Instructor (or something like “offering strategic advice”), which is why it buffs other units’ hit rate. I can kinda see the connection to being perceptive, but perspicacious, for all its syllables, fails to describe that Yukimura is instructing other people. Strategize would have done the job perfectly well.

勝利への執念 / In Extremis The Japanese is something like “victory through persistence”. This is a case where I actually like how it communicates the ability--it activates under extreme circumstances, when she’s on the edge--but I question the terminology. Latin is a pretty specific choice in language. What about the soft butch French rebel artist says “yeah, Latin is the right choice here”? 

風の血 / Wind Disciple Another case of losing the theme. Fuuga, Flora, and Rinka, as the scions of their elemental tribes, all have abilities that go [element] Blood, implying they’re the distant descendants of their founding dragons. They got it with Rinka and Flora, but for some reason fucked up Fuuga.

美しき王 / Peacebringer Japanese is Beautiful King, hahaha. I actually like that the English gets the meaning of the ability--and his role in the story--across, but the Japanese implication that Izana is so beautiful that everyone around him forgets how to fight is really goddamn funny.

怪力 / Puissance The one I’ve been complaining about the most! Why French? Why this word? The Japanese is a pretty simple “super strength”. I totally understand the urge to jazz it up, but this just seems like the worst way to do it. It’s not an easily recognizable term and the diction doesn’t match her character at all, localized OR original. I like the idea of rendering it as Atlas to emphasize her role as Elise’s pillar plus a sly reference to the Charles Atlas strongman stuff, but you could go a million different ways here. Just...not puissance.

奇襲任務 / Opportunist Man, I’m so used to Ambush Duty that I had to look up who Opportunist was actually attached to...which I think says a lot about its success as a character descriptor. Opportunist technically jives with the ‘surprise attack’ part of the Japanese, but not remotely Belka’s personality. The ‘duty’ bit is important here because that’s Belka’s role, she does what she’s told. She’s mechanical. Camilla even likens her to a broken doll. Opportunist generally implies more agency, someone actively taking chances. 

青の踊り / Fancy Footwork Azure Dance. I guess Indigo Dance would flow better with Awakening’s localization. I like the dance nod but it’s a shame to miss out on the color wink.

冷血 / Pragmatic Cold-blooded. In this case I understand why it was changed--”cold-blooded” is too close to Flora’s “Ice Blood” (though that didn’t stop them giving Setsuna and Kisaragi literally the same ability?)--and the meaning is mostly intact (pragmatic can just mean simple and efficient, but cold-blooded means cruel). Leon has a couple of other ice-themed symbols in the game, though--his personal weapon, Leon’s Icy Blade, and general references to being cold and heartless. It’s also an ironic contrast to his tome, a tree of life. Cold-blooded fit really well with all that and Pragmatic doesn’t.

ひろい食い / Goody Basket sdfkfghdf the Japanese for this one is like...indiscriminate appetite/open-minded eater/someone who eats stuff they picked up on the floor. Which is why she’s regaining HP, Velour’s just eating random shit she finds. Goody Basket doesn’t remotely capture how funny this is. I’d have called it Five-Second Rule.

乙女心の躍動 / Bibliophile Bibliophile does hint at the effect, but...just looking at a list I honestly thought this was Eponine’s. She’s the one explicitly described as the story-lover. The Japanese is something like Liveliness of a Maiden’s Heart--so it’s Ophelia’s own earnest, girly version of Odin’s Aching Blood. It’s admittedly hard not to have Something Blood on a female character sound kind of lewd or a euphemism for masturbation. What about Pounding Heart?

臆病 / Guarded Bravery Just the opposite meaning here, the Japanese is Timid. Were they afraid of making him look bad?

だまし討ち / Fierce Counter Foul Play! The one that started all this. To copy-paste, the implication is that either male enemies underestimate Foleo’s ferocity because of his feminine appearance or that Foleo is the type of guy who has no compunctions about kicking another guy in the balls (he IS his father’s son), take your pick. Fierce Counter is dry and doesn’t indicate the proc (male enemies) at all.

[agoddamn]

trinesrus replied to your post “alright what’s the Greatest Hits of cut from fates elfie’s personality...”

I mean...while the localization doesn't specifically mention dead kids, it didn't specifically exclude them, either (as far as I remember). I'd naturally assumed dead kids were on the table based on history, so it's always a trip for me encountering other localization fans who DON'T realize there used to be more siblings.

Pardon the late response, but this is such a fascinating topic to me. The localization did specifically remove all reference to dead children. Where the original text specified that the children of the concubines killed one another, the localization walks that back to “the suitors fought their own family members” (which, what does that even mean??). 

So someone coming to Fates with no previous online knowledge, just the game itself, is very unlikely to assume that Marx executed siblings. Nyx/Marx, the support that spells out Marx’s despair most explicitly, loses its ambiguity to say that Xander regrets killing enemies during war where Marx said he regrets killing enemies in fighting (implication: half-sibs are a potential regret under ‘fighting’, but not ‘war’. Savvy readers might note that it doesn’t even make sense for Marx to feel bad about enemies killed in war because the Faceless have been used against Hoshido for his entire adult life but uhh Treehouse doesn’t care about making sense so fuck you).

tl;dr the localization doesn’t specifically deny dead children but it also deletes all specific mention of them, instead inviting the assumption that the concubines killed their own parents or siblings for...some reason. Localization-only fans are often confused.

[agoddamn]

I was digging through the IK end for other reasons and one little thing stuck out to me, one of those small changes that's part of a tapestry that makes a very different picture.

Avatar: Hahaha, I was so nervous. It was hard to hide that I was shaking so much.

Azura: Nervous? You jest.

Her response in Japanese: また嘘ばっかり。

Aqua: Only another lie.

(or "I see you're still lying", or "you're lying again", or whatever other mutation you want to build from the same kanji)

It's the same intent--she doesn't believe him--but Aqua in Japanese has this sense of almost...serene rudeness, a lot of the time. She tells jokes with a completely straight face. She teases, but she's not bubbly about it (not until the final chapter of Hoshido, that is).

Changing her mild tease of "you're lying" to "you're joking" is a tiny change on its own, but it's part of a larger pattern of how Aqua was tweaked and made generally...nicer, for lack of a better word. Softened. Azura's voice is happier. Her words don't shut you out. She doesn't hide her feelings. She's not so blunt as to tease a close friend with "oh, what a liar".

[agoddamn]

The Dumpster Fire of Niles

As we all know I’m That Cunt who insists on Japanese names for FE14 characters because I feel the localization character rewrites are too significant to call many characters the same, but our current Warriors datamine shows something interesting: English Niles supports, but no original Japanese Zero supports. This is likely because the devs tried to scrub DLC data from the release file and didn’t completely succeed.

Anyway, Niles is continuing his character devolution as a Xerox-of-a-Xerox.

His Sakura support, is, hilariously, almost a copy-paste of Zero’s original Japanese Elise support where he tries to set her up for failure for his own enjoyment--which the English Fates localization whitewashed to Niles being a a kind spirit who’s good with kids and wanted to give Elise a pep talk.

But Niles here is definitely trying to neg Sakura into fucking him.

Sakura: It's so sweet of you to worry about me. But I shouldn't be distracting you with my tears. Niles: (Ha! If only she knew how much I liked the distraction...) (This plan really backfired, didn't it?) That's right. I just think you need to toughen up a bit. Then next time you cry, it'll make it all the more satisfying. Sakura: You're right! Wait...what do you mean by satisfying? Niles: Oh, you'll find out eventually. Sakura: O-OK...I-I'll look forward to it. See you later! Niles: Hmm... She sure keeps me on my toes. Let's see where this little relationship takes us, shall we? Maybe one day she'll come crying right into my arms...

It’s particularly awful character deterioration because it’s managed to completely lose the motivation of the bullying: Zero wants to see Elise fail because how dare this princess live a blessed life when he grew up in hell? But Niles wants to see Sakura fail so she can come crying into his arms.

But hey--it’s a type of consistent, right? NoA has already replaced Zero’s schadenfreude with a desire to fuck young girls in Niles/Mozu (if you’re new to Fates, yes, him offering sex there is indeed a complete localization original).

It’s now a canon, established, consistent through multiple games character trait that localized Niles enjoys fucking young girls.

[agoddamn]

I can’t believe it took me this long to realize the major dialog explaining the Awakening reincarnations was cut. I could be wrong but I don’t see that info in the Rhajat recruitment or localized supports aside from the briefest reference to “following you all my life and beyond” in her paralogue. Other than that, you need her to die in Classic Mode to imply the Awakening connection.

[agoddamn]

So I never realized that localized Xander is ten times more dickish than Marx in the Garon confrontation.

Marx:

…I understand. This whole time,

you have led us in this war. So…

I believe you. In your words. But,

if what you say turns out to be a

lie… It will be concluded that you

betrayed us, and the entire army

will turn against you, as an

enemy. I just want you to be

prepared.

Xander:

So be it, Kamui.▾ You have led us this far. The least we can do is follow you just a little farther.▾ I am choosing to trust you, Brother.▾ However, you know what will happen if this all turns out to be an elaborate ruse.▾ If you mean to trap us, your siblings who have loved you all these years...▾ You will be punished, just like any other traitor.▾ I will not allow anyone, even you, to bring harm to my family or the kingdom of Nohr.▾ If you can accept those terms, as I trust you will, let us proceed.▾

“The army will turn against you and I cannot save you from that” versus “I kinda bet you’re still secretly trying to murder your loving family and I’ll kill you for it”.

[agoddamn]