And, in most cases, they suck. The Inside Out ones I’ve seen are acceptable because they’re minimal and, as they say, “They learned that some of their content wouldn’t make sense in other countries”. But 4Kids didn’t do that. They literally turned Japanese anime for teens into American cartoons for kids.
Removing any hint of a deep message in everything and making every series a travesty is nowhere nearly comparable to what Pixar, or other modern companies did. Pixar altered things to get the same message across, 4Kids did it to remove any, and change it with one of their dumb jokes (which, albeit often funny, were slammed in serious situations and killed the mood of everything. Make an original series if you want to do that).
I mean, I wouldn’t call that sexualization, it’s intentionally framed to make you uncomfortable (you’re playing as Okabe in the VN after all).
And still, it’s two scenes with 16-year olds, pretty sure most western teen dramas do far worse. The stigma is because of stuff like SAO or Code Geass where they literally can’t let two episodes pass without a butt in your face.
Ah yes, more denaturalization of the original product = higher quality. Wonder why they didn’t have Captain Europe when localizing Marvel movies.
And then people wonder why anime dubs have a bad reputation when the biggest companies producing them were literally in a race for who could fuck more shit up.
Not even that extreme. There’s stuff like Monogatari that they didn’t even try to dub because of the sheer amount of puns and japanese double-meanings they’d have to adapt. Unfortunately, a lot of good series can’t work in a different language without footnotes explaining stuff, and at that point I might as well watch the sub.
Uhh… no? Despite the fact that a lot of anime they dubbed was shounen, so for teens (but obviously they wouldn’t know because cartoons are only kid stuff in their head), if they only censored sexualization of minors, or sexualization at all, people would be much, much less mad.
They censored every small mention of blood and death and most japanese cultural references, changed 90% of the names and soundtrack, straight-up skipped episodes and oversimplified dialogues dumbing down every message the series might’ve tried to convey. That’s criminal. Yu-Gi-Oh is literally a different series outside of Japan. I’ve seen series/games where the only censorship is on sexualization, and the backlash is nowhere nearly that bad.
Not to mention they also had horrible practices towards voice actors and licensors, so really, there’s no reason not to hate those pieces of shit.
like in Fate/Zero when Saber first appears. In the dub she says “are you worthy, to be my master?” Which is definitely the intended meaning especially once you get further into the show and know how she is, but the subtitles just say “are you my master?” which makes her seem not quite like a dumbass… but it does make you go “wtf kind of question is that?”
I mean, it’s been a long time since I watched it, but I really don’t think that was the intended meaning. Saber had always been a very detached and humble person, I doubt she wanted to “test” Kiritsugu or anything. Iirc she’s also the only servant to retain memories between summonings (as she’s not a “copy” but Artoria herself), and it was the fourth time being summoned, so I assume it was just a routine at that point for her, kind of a plumber asking “where’s the leak”.
Although the issue is when spelled out in English, it does sound like a dumb question, and it’s also shorter than the Japanese so it wouldn’t match the timing well. I don’t blame them for changing it, but it’s still not the same as the original.
The point is also that it’s impossible to determine if a dub is good or not unless you’ve seen in their entirety both it and the original version. You may watch one episode and say “hey, I like the voices and the performance”, but maybe they made a mistranslation of something important and you’ll never realize unless you watch the original too. Maybe the first episode is done well but a bad voice actor later ruins everything.
All in all, sub is the original experience and you really can’t ever go wrong by watching it, as opposed to the dub which has an added layer of translation where stuff can potentially be messed up. I’ve personally watched dub first when my close friends recommended it, and did the same for them when I found good ones, but if I have to watch a series none of them watched dubbed yet, I’m not risking to ruin my experience.
It’s done well (usually), but it’s still not the original. Something will inevitably be lost in the adaptation anyway, and if you know even a slight bit of Japanese (or whatever the original language is), subs are the better choice for a first view, imo.
Then, if the series/movie was good and I feel like watching it again, I’ll go with the dub when available. Rarely, if ever, I found a Dub that was better than an original version, but a lot have been at the same level so it’s definitely worth it.
I’ll admit I never played that one, but it really doesn’t have “that handful of weapons/loadouts/whatever that are competitively viable and overshadow all the rest”?