Digimon Cyber Sleuth constantly misgenders you, and it's so annoying

[Delusibeta]

From my understanding, it's less a localisation issue and more a programming one: there's no way to change the pronouns in the script to reflect the character choice (in that version of the game). I would speculate that the female player character was a last minute decision, and that they didn't get round to editing the Japanese script to reflect that, which then tied the localisers' hands. Akiba Strip had a similar problem, except that all the female player characters were added post-release there.

 

[Deleted member 9746]

The localization is almost machine translated at times. Fun game.

 

[cj_iwakura]

 

[Hero of Legend]

Yeah I heard that Cyber Sleuth has a rough localization so that would be a "good" example. Hopefully this gets around so that Bandai Namco become aware and fix it for the Switch and PC versions. There's a few months so they have time.

 

[Aaronrules380]

From my understanding, it's less a localisation issue and more a programming one: there's no way to change the pronouns in the script to reflect the character choice (in that version of the game). I would speculate that the female player character was a last minute decision, and that they didn't get round to editing the Japanese script to reflect that, which then tied the localisers' hands. Akiba Strip had a similar problem, except that all the female player characters were added post-release there.

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This might make sense, especially if the Japanese one just defaulted to gender neutral pronouns for the protagonist which don't have non awkward sounding equivalents in English

 

[Wereroku]

As some others have said the translation in this game is pretty bad in places. Some of the Digimon interactions are just plain broken.

 

[Delusibeta]

This might make sense, especially if the Japanese one just defaulted to gender neutral pronouns for the protagonist which don't have non awkward sounding equivalents in English

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If haven't checked, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the Japanese language version was also all male pronouns all the time.

 

[PucePikmin]

I had to review the game -- lousy localization in general. Felt like something from the bad old PS2 days.

 

[FallenGrace]

The game has a really rough localization. That's pretty much all there is to it.

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I played as a female character and noticed being misgendered, it was annoying but as there were a ton of typos and other errors I assumed it was just a rushed localization.

 

[ASaiyan]

This game has a pretty low budget and it shows.

Hopefully they fix this for the re-release though. Dealing with a half-baked localization is bad enough without the added pain of unintentional misgendering.

 

[DevilMayGuy]

Yeah, pretty bad localization.

 

[Aaronrules380]

If haven't checked, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the Japanese language version was also all male pronouns all the time.

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Yeah, it's definitely possible, I just know Japan does have pronouns that are gender neutral for people that mean something along the lines of "that person" which is used a lot in manga when referring to unknown characters (and is the reason some professional translations use him or he when the character being referred to later turns out to be a woman)

 

[cj_iwakura]

The localization isn't god-awful like SAO, it has some clever attempts at localizing jokes and doesn't do bad at hitting the story beats, it was just clearly rushed and poorly edited.

Pronouns wouldn't save this, though. For stuff like the aforementioned 'perfect girl' project, you'd have to either adapt it completely or just change the subject, like 'or hey, we could even get you your perfect guy if you wanted'.

 

[Harry Potter Obama]

How was Hacker's Memory's localization? Was it still babelfish-level or what?

That kinda makes the most sense to me. It's clearly been overlooked.


Agree with all of this. The unintentional gay content is appeciated but the sloppiness of the misgendering is the sour part.



They / Them.

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Those can work sometimes, but they can sound incredibly unnatural in some situations and just don't work in others. Translating Japanese to English is a pain.

 

[Pandora012]

Yeah, it was incredibly noticeable while playing through the game that they never actually intended for anyone to play as the FeMC. The flirting, and the people who want to date you in the game always felt like it was aimed at a guy since it created a whole lot of gay and bisexual characters, which I kind of loved, but felt pretty unintentional. The fist fight between you and your male best friend to hash out a disagreement was another time that it just really felt like a "Yeah, they wanted me to be a guy for this scene" and that's a feeling I had consistently throughout the game and it's translation. It's a super fun game though, and if they just fixed the pronouns/misgendering the game would honestly have felt fine

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It's not that they didn't intend for anyone to play the FeMC. The issue was it was only created with the male character in mind. And they just did a palette swap. I'm thinking the the choice in sex was done after the game was written.

 

[Deleted member 679]

This is pretty bad, but I have to say that the game unintentionally turning into a yuri anime if you play as a woman is kind of cool and made me more interested in the game.

 

[cj_iwakura]

This is pretty bad, but I have to say that the game unintentionally turning into a yuri anime if you play as a woman is kind of cool and made me more interested in the game.

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It's so funny when it happens it boomerangs right past offensive.

 

[Harry Potter Obama]

The localization isn't god-awful like SAO, it has some clever attempts at localizing jokes and doesn't do bad at hitting the story beats, it was just clearly rushed and poorly edited.

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I think the story dialogue is alright but stuff outside of that like the emails were clearly translated by someone else who had no idea of the context. Lots of wrong pronouns (not just gender but the subject/object of the sentence in general) and the multiple choice questions are also usually just the first answer broken into two lines so it doesn't make any sense.

 

[Deleted member 2669]

Yeah, it was incredibly noticeable while playing through the game that they never actually intended for anyone to play as the FeMC. The flirting, and the people who want to date you in the game always felt like it was aimed at a guy since it created a whole lot of gay and bisexual characters, which I kind of loved, but felt pretty unintentional. The fist fight between you and your male best friend to hash out a disagreement was another time that it just really felt like a "Yeah, they wanted me to be a guy for this scene" and that's a feeling I had consistently throughout the game and it's translation. It's a super fun game though, and if they just fixed the pronouns/misgendering the game would honestly have felt fine

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This novelty of all of this made it for me, plus the nonconformity of the character being gendered as masculine.

They should definitely fix this but also separate the gender option from the appearance option.

 

[Gradon]

How was Hacker's Memory's localization? Was it still babelfish-level or what?
Those can work sometimes, but they can sound incredibly unnatural in some situations and just don't work in others. Translating Japanese to English is a pain.

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Oh wow I forgot Babelfish existed lmao.

I'm not sure but when I've read about the 2nd game most people just say the game itself is "more of the same". Whether that include a bad translation or not I cannot say. You can't pick gender in Hacker's Memory either.

And yeah you're right about the pronouns tbh.

 

[cj_iwakura]

This novelty of all of this made it for me, plus the nonconformity of the character being gendered as masculine.

They should definitely fix this but also separate the gender option from the appearance option.

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Best just to assume people are idiots, because Ami is characterized as super mega feminine.
(And a giant dork, she's amazing.)

 

[Deleted member 3294]

Those can work sometimes, but they can sound incredibly unnatural in some situations and just don't work in others. Translating Japanese to English is a pain.

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I think people more just need to get used to how singular they works, just think of how singular you is used. Besides, plenty of nonbinary people (including me) have they/them as pronouns.

 

[Kirbivore]

Oh wow I forgot Babelfish existed lmao.

I'm not sure but when I've read about the 2nd game most people just say the game itself is "more of the same". Whether that include a bad translation or not I cannot say. You can't pick gender in Hacker's Memory either.

And yeah you're right about the pronouns tbh.

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It's more like a Pokemon Black 2/White 2 kind of thing

 

[Madison]

I think people more just need to get used to how singular they works, just think of how singular you is used. Besides, plenty of nonbinary people (including me) have they/them as pronouns.

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Same. All of language is incomprehensible noise given sense by our own cultural systems. They/Them takes a minute to get used to but after that its just another category of pronouns.

Source: my own life lol

 

[Deleted member 16876]

Best just to assume people are idiots, because Ami is characterized as super mega feminine.
(And a giant dork, she's amazing.)

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Her reactions to many of the things happening in the story are so good. She doesn't give a damn.

 

[Shining Star]

I liked the MC in this game a lot, so I didn't really mind that bad localization lol

 

[sensui-tomo]

The game had a poor localization effort, the digimon game with the better effort was the ps4 digimon world game(having a dub also kinda makes things better for translation.) I believe the side story game had a better localization but that was due to the fact the previous 2 games sold far better than they expected.

 

[Andri]

sad
looks like a terrible game :X

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But but, its better than pokemon in any way, cause the devs are not lazy...

 

[Leviathan]

Extremely annoying and, unfortunately, extremely common in anime and anime-style games that allow you to make this sort of choice. One of my big pet peeves and it absolutely destroys immersion for me.

Best just to assume people are idiots, because Ami is characterized as super mega feminine.
(And a giant dork, she's amazing.)

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Is she? I only got a little way in but I was, coincidentally, just thinking of picking this back up. What sort of characterization is there of that sort?

 

[Einchy]

You know you're in for something special when the game basically tells you up front that the localization isn't great.

It's like all of those built in tutorials for re-released decade old fighting games that just say "Don't play this character if you want to win."

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Lol, you gotta admire this level of self awareness.

"Look, our shit's all fucked up. So, you know. Yeah."

 

[Pla-pla-place holder]

The game has a really rough localization. That's pretty much all there is to it.

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Yeah it's honestly most likely this.

 

[Nappuccino]

Someone just Ctrl+f searched the text, forgot about some common gendered words, and barely read the actual text.

Definitely disappointing.

 

[Perona]

I remember hearing that the localization for this was really bad. One thing I recall is them translating "garakuta park" as "Galacta park" when "garakuta" actually means trash/junk. And there's even an NPC that says that the park is "made of Galacta"

 

[Zemst]

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This was one of the best quest in the game.

 

[Velocity:Design:Comfort]

sad
looks like a terrible game :X

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It's really not terrible...if you like FFX. I'm not gonna defend the localization at all but it's an enjoyable game.

 

[Tempy]

Lazy programming. It's not like this isn't a solved problem or super hard to do. You can try bugging the publisher/dev about it I guess, but chances are they don't give a fuck.

 

[Harry Potter Obama]

I remember hearing that the localization for this was really bad. One thing I recall is them translating "garakuta park" as "Galacta park" when "garakuta" actually means trash/junk. And there's even an NPC that says that the park is "made of Galacta"

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Fuck, how didn't I realize this??

 

[Illusion]

Well, that's what happens when your language doesn't have gender neutral pronouns, you don't have the budget to make two separate scripts, and have multiple people translate the game from a spreadsheet with no context or knowledge of the game itself.

I think the DLC refers to you as a girl regardless of your character's gender too so it goes both ways.

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Crazy stuff these low budget translations are.

 

[Sub Boss]

It's really not terrible...if you like FFX. I'm not gonna defend the localization at all but it's an enjoyable game.

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First impression looking at those screens looks like an smartphone game with zero charm and probably bad gameplay, and terrible localization

But if you say its good then it might be worth complaining about

 

[ValKiryuSonicEX]

This game was poorly localized, plain and simple...and as some of have cited, they even misnamed a few things.

 

[Princess Bubblegum]

This reminds me of Atlus USA's blunders with the Persona 3 Portable, although nowhere near as egregious. Are they expecting fans to fix shit for them with the Steam release?

 

[maouvin]

Hacker's Memory did a way better job at localization and formatting (but kept some bad translations for consistency, like Kowlonn and Galacta).
But it doesn't have a FeMC, so who knows if they'd catch that.

CS definetely needs some localization fixing for PC/Switch, and hopefully Ami gets remembered.

First impression looking at those screens looks like an smartphone game with zero charm and probably bad gameplay, and terrible localization

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Holy shit

 

[Terraforce]

It's shit localisation, basically.

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This. It's less misgendering and more shitty translation job. Not the worst they've done, but still not good. I noticed this while playing CS as well.

 

[Justified]

just poor localization like the Bakemon thing and some of the multiple choice question

 

[Weltall Zero]

I assumed they gave you a transgender / nonbinary option and they botched it, but of course it would be even worse than that (botching the female option and no tg / nb option at all).

 

[P-Tux7]

I assumed they gave you a transgender / nonbinary option and they botched it, but of course it would be even worse than that (botching the female option and no tg / nb option at all).

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I would approve of it, but I cannot think of a single time there has been a non-binary option in any game but The Sims 4. If it were to show up in an extremely anime JRPG like this that would be on the future is now level of like, flying cars to me.

 

[SchroDingerzat]

That's a pretty trash localisation. Got this game when it came out and never played it. Might have to have a go this weekend.

 

[Tizoc]

just poor localization like the Bakemon thing and some of the multiple choice question

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Wouldnt that place the game during the era of bamco's poor localizations like with sao?

 

[KillstealWolf]

The game is quite notorious for it's bad translation.

 

[Strings]

The game has a really bad localisation, so I imagine it's a result of that? Hacker's Memory is way higher quality, but that game has a set character with no gender option.