Request: Limiting the number of blatant Game of Thrones references in future?

[Abriael]

Localization is not translation. Localization is taking text and making it fit and understandable for a western audience. Japanese and English operate as very different languages. English relies more on subtlety and things being inferred, whereas Japanese makes more sense to just spell everything out. If you do that in English, it becomes patronizing and almost condescending to the person reading the text. So honestly, it makes more sense for the English text to read as fairly different from the original Japanese text because of how they want to present the information to the playerbase.

I'm intimately aware of that all. It's always funny how people ready to defend poor localization always seem to assume that whoever they're discussing with doesn't know what localization entails.

The point is that there are plenty of cases in which relevant information is omitted or relationships between characters are misrepresented.

A very clear example is the fact that Estinien calls the warrior of light "aibou" in Japanese, meaning partner. There are several ways to localize this, but in English it's simply lost, and it's a big loss, as it shows how the cold and detached Estinien has been touched by the warrior of light and opened up to trust him/her.

This kind of conceptual loss is simply an example of bad localization. There are no two ways about it.