Bit of a shorter update today; I'm completely swamped with games to play since my birthday on the 23rd. Yesterday, I picked up Volition's Red Faction: Guerrilla, which I find to be amazing thus far. Also, my girlfriend was somehow able to secure BlazBlue, which I have been pining over for the past month or so as a belated birthday present. I say somehow because Wednesday was Canada Day, which meant that everything meant to come out this week was sitting somewhere waiting to be shipped, much to my dismay. Having received BlazBlue around 7 PM or so last night, I promptly proceeded to play it for 5 or so hours straight, and that was just the training mode...

However, in a roundabout way, BlazBlue has got me thinking about something that's on the mind of a lot of Japanese gaming fans here in the west; what's the deal with publishers who refuse to give Japanese games a dual language option? When I popped the game in to my 360, and headed to training mode, I was scrambling for the options menu once I heard Bang Shishigami's English voice. Thankfully, there was a dual language option. But, what about the games that don't give us a choice? I think the only rationalization is that it's a condition borne of pure laziness, and more developers need to start adding dual language options (I'm looking at you, Atlus, and your Persona series...)

Watching terribly dubbed anime on TV as a kid, and suffering through terrible voice acting in English localizations of Japanese games throughout my teenage years, I've often wondered why many developers just don't give us the option to choose ALL the time. It wasn't exactly hard to add Japanese language tracks on CDs or DVDs, and now on dual layer or BluRay, it's even more ridiculous to not add a few more MB of audio. I'm afraid I just don't understand why companies can't give fans something that they actually want, or for that matter, why their dubs can't be the same quality as the Japanese. Now, I don't mean to start a subs-versus-dubs debate here, but a lot of dub work we have to put up with is frankly sub-par. Actually, Just the fact that I'm trying to walk on eggshells as to not spark an angry debate about "japanophiles" or whatnot speaks volumes about how we view other cultures, even in this, our beloved gamer subculture.

"But Musai", you say, "People who don't understand Japanese can't hear the difference between a dub or a Japanese track!" Yes in most cases that is true, but that isn't the point. The point is that localizations and dubs as they are now completely rob media of its sociolinguistic context when they don't allow a choice on the consumer's end. Even if one can't understand the language, there are subtleties in accent,intensity and prosodic information that English voice actors fail to capture a lot of the time. This isn't necessarily completely on the heads of the voice actors. I mean, there are bad voice actors out there who don't deliver their lines with enough emotion, but a result of a bigger problem: bad localization. I had assumed that by 2009, that not only would we be in Jetsons-like cars, but that we would be beyond awkward localization attempts. I'm sorry, but having your voice actors, in their best falsetto, run around calling everyone "-san" and "-chan" awkwardly is not my idea of a localization; it's embarassing.

Phoenix Wright did none of this. It somehow retained the humour of the original while relating to an audience that did not necessarily understand the cultural references, or the puns. At a time where the industry is becoming less polarized between Japanese and English developers, can we really afford to force a user to play a game with only dubbing, or a terribly localized game?