multi language in games

in an atlus forum there is a debate on if japanese to english games should have japanese audio… last time i checked, about 60%-90% of the forum said "no, because you can’t understand it anyway. so why bother" (also to them japanese in america is a very small percentage). but yet on the other hand a thought came to me recently that with games that have multi-languages most of the times, the selectable language is french and spanish. i don’t know about all of you but i hardly know anyone who speaks those languages.
infact i know more people who speak japanese and/or filipino.

so i’m thinking if a games going to have multi-language it should be one of those two.

your thoughts on this?

I’d rather have both.

The new Sakura Wars game, from Atlus, is fun…but the DUB is total crap!
That’s why I’m happy to out the PS2 version, which has both.

where do you live that you dont know someone who speaks spanish?

I’d say if a game is dubbed in Japanese and ported for English, then both dubs need to be selectable. It’s an insult to let the originals dubs be tossed by the wayside only to be replaced with cheaply acted new ones (I’m lookin’ at you Arc Rise Fantasia). I love hearing the original Japanese, it helps to learn word association of the language.

I also agree with tanis on the new Sakura Wars, although I feel the Japanese dub isn’t that good but it’s over 9,000x better than the English dub. I am slightly confused though as to why they didn’t include both dubs on the same disc. And even in the English translation of the Japanese dub, there are many errors of different lines. The lines spoken in broken English are the ones that are most noticeably written wrong :p

If there is no dialogue in the game, I still prefer that all text be selectable in each language as well. Although I’ve not seen it done, I think there should different selects for Japanese. I would really like to be able to try to read the text in romaji to be able to learn it better.

I’d definitely rather have the option of both. Really, most of the time I’d be fine with them using the original language track and not dubbing it at all. A lot of these games get a pretty low budget for their localizations and the dubs are just not very high quality. I’d rather have the better acting job any day.

Not understanding it isn’t an issue when there’s text that says what they’re saying right underneath. I’ve played some games, like fighting games and RPGs, with small bits of untranslated Japanese stuff during battles, but they’re usually stuff like "yatta!" that I can understand anyway.

where do you live that you dont know someone who speaks spanish?

x10

hawaii. also i didn’t say i don’t know anyone who speaks spanish.. i said i HARDLY know anyone. although.. i think i only know… like five people personally who know it compared to over 100 people who know filipino.
although filipino is such a funny language that it would be a good laugh to here a game like final fantasy or something like that in filipino. and i don’t mean it as anything bad against the language, i’m just saying.

Do you expect the North American publisher of the games to waste money on production of a one version for Center America (Spanish), one for the USA (English), and one for Canada (English and French) just because you don’t understand or know people who speak those languages?

Nope, they do one version for all of those 3 "territories". And it’s fine like this.

Short sighted guy is short sighted.

Short sighted guy is short sighted.

are you calling me short sighted? i’m sure the thing about french and spanish languages weren’t the only thing in the topic.

i admit i didn’t think of canada and mexico, but that’s just because i’ve heard that some quite a few games don’t get released in some countries and i figured that they might be one of them.

although thinking about it i think the bigger point of the topic is how for some japanese to english games we get spanish and french but no japanese. i think i’ve seen one or two like that.

are you calling me short sighted?

Huh? I had to squint to read that. . . .

although thinking about it i think the bigger point of the topic is how for some japanese to english games we get spanish and french but no japanese. i think i’ve seen one or two like that.

Well, I think a Japanese language option is only going to be a draw in certain types of games. Sakura Wars is a niche title and most of the people willing to buy it will probably have an interest in the Japanese language track. The same goes for a lot of RPGs, especially the weirder stuff like Record of Agarest War. But there’s probably not that interest there for more mainstream titles like say, Bayonetta.

I’m sure developers keep their audience in mind when they decide what language tracks to include, and that’s probably why most of the weirder rpgs being released now are getting the Japanese language track.

Leaving behind the Japanese audio because there are few people who understand Japanese is no excuse.

Furthermore, many people enjoy the original voice acting.