Sorry no images on this one either unfortunately.

So what I wanted to talk about is the localisation of eastern games. This has been sparked by the release of Lost Ark now server issues aside the game (from what little I've managed to play so far) is pretty solid ARPG although I am terrible at ARPGs, so why am I bringing it up? And why have I included it in the title? Well it's because of the controversy surrounding its English release.

I'm not that far into the game but I've already noticed localisation issues, namely the poor lip synching and heavy handed censorship (I stripped the armour from my first character and you could see where they covered up the skin, it was done fairly sloppily) and this got me thinking about what a localisation team SHOULD do and it got me comparing the localisation team from Lost Ark with the one from FFXIV. The FFXIV localisation team works alongside the story team and only have an input in matters relating to the translation (to my knowledge, there are some parts that are a bit tame but that's probably in order for the game to keep its teen rating) so if the dev team wants to add a bit of skimpy armour in the localisation team have no choice but to accept it. As opposed to Lost Ark where Amazon, who where only supposed to localise it (they say they're the publisher but I'm willing to bet that Smilegate could get any publisher they wanted really,) and also promised not to touch anything, decided to censor the game on top of the various other edits they've done (I've seen images of the skin darkening on certain NPCs, it looks fucking terrible) that go well beyond the purview of a localisation.

Now yes Amazon are technically the publisher but this also applies to publishers as well, especially if said publisher is pretty much just an intermediary between an Eastern game developer and the West (in the case of Amazon and Lost Ark, Korean) they exist solely to get the game into people's hands, if that means putting pressure on a slacking dev team to pick up the pace or if it just means translating it from Korean to English that is their one and only job. Meddling with a game, especially one that is already complete, to pander to the twelve psychopaths on Twitter and Reeeeeeeeeesetera who won't buy or support the game anyway is just asking for trouble.

So yeah short ranty entry for you all.