What is going on with Square Enix and the 14 team?

[Denji]

Some JP site commentary I've seen has been very blunt, but I'm guessing they're the less "polite" ones which the devs avoid.

as someone who has a decent grasp of japanese, people have this misconception that they're more polite. i assure you, they're not. google translate and other translators typically strip emotion from text and there's a lot of context and cultural stuff that just ends up getting left behind in translations done even by people.
it doesn't help that the japanese language itself is based around the idea of apologizing for inconveniencing people so people get this strange idea that this means they're always actually saying sorry when in actuality it's pretty difficult to write more than a sentence in japanese without something that resembles an apology to non-native speakers.

example: saying just "thank you" without apologizing for an inconvenience is so difficult in japanese that many just say サンキュー (sankyuu), aka 'thank you' in english.