Quote Originally Posted by Lunaxia View Post
Look, I get being annoyed when they change the occasional piece of text in a story, but one thing you have to understand is that for English audiences, the Japanese text cut and dried more often than not would be very, very boring. Most of the nuance is found in their speaking style, and that is very difficult to convey to someone who doesn't have a deep familiarity with the language, and even then, it won't quite hit the way it would for a native speaker.
That's not for any one specific person to decide, and is also flat-out wrong. Plenty of subbed anime (and even dubbed content) is able to retain the nuance and charm of speaking in Japanese, but you're also overlooking the fact that the medium being used is a video game, so naturally, the Japanese textual content is going to work with the assets and thematic elements of the setting, style, engine, etc. to immerse the player.

Many of their favoured archetypes and preferred kinds of humour just flat out don't translate well to English, and can come across as juvenile, cliché or old-fashioned when enforced - see the majority of JRPGs - and others, like Haurchefant's original portrayal, just strike a bum note because we do not perceive certain behaviours in the same way. As Koji said, to deliver the same emotional experience to a foreign audience that the Japanese would have is just not possible without significant change, because our cultural mindsets and values are innately different, even if we share things in common on the surface.
Anime fans may be more accustomed to the Japanese style of storytelling and see no issue with this, but with all due respect, there is a reason most anime is not generally held in high-esteem in the West
With all due (dis)respect, those types of people who would have been offended or bothered by Haurchefant's portrayal in Japanese would be better off either just skipping it or just not bothering playing the game, or consuming any Japanese media for that matter.

What you're basically supporting is the cultural gentrification, correction, and displacement of Japanese media, the condensation and revision of 'problematic' elements because allowing the content to stand on its own merits in a foreign market would be seen as undesirable.
That becomes a sort of racism, wherein the content has to be 'corrected' because it would be seen as 'wrong', when objectively, there is nothing wrong with it, and the foreign market would be better off just having their insecurities ignored for the sake of retaining artistic and literary integrity, otherwise people wouldn't be so keen to identify and call out these egregious deviations and discrepancies which do have a negative effect on their ability to enjoy the game's content and story, especially when the changes are unnecessary or are less desirable than what was initially written.