Mini review: Ni no Kuni has Dubtitles

Title says it all, doesn't it? I bought this game at full price because I thought that I could play it with the Japanese audio. Unfortunately, the subtitles are all set to match the English dub. Basically, it's just not a faithful translation of the Japanese, so you're not getting that experience. Just the dub one through text.

This is kind of annoying as a Japanese fan because, that's the whole reason I was hyped to hear that it came with the Japanese audio. Was it naive of me to think that the game would fully support that aspect since they bothered to include this feature in the game? Frankly, if I knew the game was going to be released this way, I wouldn't have paid full price... and maybe I wouldn't have bought this game at all. I'm very picky about my experiences, and it's important to me that everything is perfect for me to enjoy something.

Like arbitrarily changing a character's English name from Mark to Philip, that's the sort of decision making that should worry people about the translation. As an Amazon review put it: "I'm sorry if your name is Mark, but it's too Japanese. Why don't you try changing it to a nice American name like Philip?"

I'm surprised that I haven't seen this mentioned in any game reviews that I've seen. I'm almost certain that I'm in the minority in this, but I do feel like I was cheated by the promise of Japanese audio and English subtitles. It's 2013, so why is this still a thing that happens in games and movies? I really don't expect studios to care unless I'm actively taking money out of their pockets. I guess people like me who have my set of tastes just don't matter to them.

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