Suspension of Disbelief(Why western fans dislike JRPG's)

[Scoobes]

ctk495 said:

Scoobes said:

You might be onto something with the definitive gender issue. Don't agree with the other two though.

The problem with dialogue is that the translations are generally done quite badly. Playing in Japanese with subtitles often works better than in English and does a far better job of conveying emotions and cultural nuances. When translated into English the dialogue is often translated too literally. That combined with the long dramatic pauses (which culturally don't occur so much in modern English) come off as over the top and cheesy.

I don't agree with the causality either. Plenty of Western developed characters have pointless clothing that simply appeal to Western audiences. The original Deus Ex had characters with over-sized coats and flashy sunglasses when the entire game was set at night. Female characters in both wRPGs and jRPGs have the most impractical (non-protective ) armour ever conceived.

There is either  cultural misunderstanding or poor localization. First, people might find the pauses annoying since they have expectations of how emotions should be conveyed-therefore, if the chararacters  don't act display emotions that way they want to they find it cringe worthy. Or like you suggest, the localizators do a poor job of capturing the essence of the game and instead do a cheap translation. Although I've  played Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XII and found the dialogue just fine. Is this problem mainly with indie JRPG's developers that lack the budget for a proper localization?

Could it be about customization(player freedom) trumping practicality? Maybe the staple characters have a more pratical wardrobe like the main male characters in most games having short hair and being buffed-Mass effect. This are pratically is inherited in context of the adventure- fighting aliens. In the case of the female characters, the developers might want to give the player agency- thereby it becomes the player's vision and not the developer's. The player breaks the rules and throws out the window the praticality aspect. In  "The World Ends with You" its Tetsuya's complete vision, therefore, he adds lots of belts and spiky hair and the player can only accept this as it is not customizable. In IGN a lot of people are constatly complaining about this. Finally, maybe Deus Ex is a exception to the western norm given that Square Enix now publishes the game maybe they found the work appealing because it have a similar aesthetic to their game.

I think its a mixture of both misunderstanding and localization. Dialogue that often sounds perfectly natural in its native language (including mannersims), often sound very odd in English. Part of this is to do with the localization as they often have a quick translation with little thought put to the English equivalent. The question of "How would this be said in an English way that incorporates the mannersisms of the character?" doesn't seem to come up often enough. 

You might be onto something with the customisation point. In a lot of wRPGs I give my main characters blue hair, violet eyes and weird facial tatoos so the player gets a higher degree of input. That said, I still think wRPG devs don't necessarily think of practicality when designing their characters. That may be part of their design process but it certainly isn't the only thing they think of. I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the Japanese character designs are simply there to cater to younger Japanese audiences (the core jRPG consumers). FFXII for instance had two younger characters added into the game so it would appeal more to the younger Japanese demographic, even though they had little relevance to the overall story.

As for Deus Ex, I was actually talking about the original that came out in 2000 when Eidos were still a publisher and Ion Storm were still a developer. I think the point still stands for Human Revolution though as it was in development for a long time before the SE takeover, and the art-style and character profiles were already well established.