Quote Originally Posted by Slatersev View Post
We have been told a million times the scripts for both English and Japanese are written alongside each other. Koji has actively come up with lore and written lore and dialogue for both versions. How much there even is an "original" is something they have gotten annoyed about many times because that's not how they have operated.
This is very wrong. Many years ago Koji said something about how they get asked to make things that can be used across all versions, citing the English team as having created the dragons' language and a large amount of player titles (they're in English in the Japanese version of the game, though not always the same). People kept repeating it without quoting it, playing some weird game of telephone until it became "they somehow write the game in English and Japanese simultaneously." They don't, it would be difficult to impossible to even do something like that.

That's not to say that the English team doesn't have much more input than any other localization team for pretty much any other game does - Koji does indeed write background or "lore" for a bunch of stuff, and he's worked out of the Japanese offices and been able to directly bounce ideas around with Yoshida and Ishikawa and the other writers, which is obviously way more involvement than just being the head of a localization team. But this doesn't somehow make the English version co-original, however you think that would work. The script is written in Japanese by native Japanese speakers, and it has an English localization team that has some input, that's it.