Weird english

[Lukha]

While I am extremely critical of the English localization team's often extremely questionable decisions, I'm always surprised to hear people complain about the way the dialogue is written, since that's one of the few things I'll miss once I'm confident enough in my kanji knowledge to say good-bye to the English text for good. The medieval flavor is very tasty, and shouldn't pose a comprehension problem to the average literate English-speaker.

My issue with the game is how different the actual content can be between languages - and I don't especially care which version is the 'original', though I do question how much of the actual writing the English side of things is responsible for (I'd wager it's mainly sidequests like Hildebrand's, and some of the basic lore, while most of the main story comes from the Japanese devs; this just seems the most efficient method, and matches with both the general flavor I would expect from writing Koji had a hand in, and past mentions regarding things like the Hildebrand questlines taking extra time because of the need to contact the devs to have certain animations made). Whether the original writing comes from the JP team, the EN team or some kid they hired off FF.net, I'm mostly concerned with the fact that the actual content does not match between languages, which is an unacceptable failure in quality from a multiplayer game where every country (Except China and Korea) plays together on the same set of servers. If I want to discuss the story with an FC mate who plays in French, I shouldn't have to worry that we got two different versions of events, or a particular character's personality came across as wildly different in her version of the game, even though we just watched the same cutscene.

For instance, one scene that I rarely see mentioned; when you first go to see Matoya, in English she's pretty harsh to Alphinaud, and (obviously) pretends to mistake him for his sister, while the Japanese line was something like 'Ah, you're Louisoix's grandchild; the boy' - where the Japanese word for grandkid is not gendered, so she specifically added a word to the sentance to point out she knew he was the grand[SON. This has always bothered me, since it makes her come off as much more of a bitch than I think she was intended to. Unless, of course, the English was the 'original' here, in which case the Japanese version should have kept the same tone, and I could happily dislike Matoya for being a rude old broad.