NOTE: The following critique contains minor spoilers. However, care has been taken so as not to include any screenshots or plot details that would spoil major elements of the game when divorced from in-game context.
Platform: Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 Publisher: PQube Genre: Visual Novel Audio Language: Japanese Text Language: English/Japanese
It’s a strange thing to say that a game “shouldn’t be localized.” To the average listener, it just sounds like shameless gatekeeping from the type of self-congratulatory elitist who thinks they’ve more of a right to experience a given work than those who haven’t dedicated years of their lives to learning the language. And to be sure, this doesn’t hold true for Raging Loop when considered as a multi-faceted work of art. The game has undeniable merits that transcend the boundaries of language, resulting in a story that many fans of horror novels and “whodunnit” mysteries will find inherently compelling, regardless of whether or not they can pick up on every cultural nuance. And indeed, all translations lose some amount of information conveyed by the source text, simply by virtue of being translations.
However, it’s not a stretch to say that Raging Loop’s script contains several major elements that essentially preclude English readers from getting the true experience the author intended. After all, the only translated works that can truly be called “inauthentic” simply for not being presented in their original language are those that rely heavily on the innate facets of said language; for example, non-English readers miss out on a lot of the more theatric elements of Shakespeare — the rhythmic meter, the rhyme schemes, and the general poetry of his verse. However, like with all great works of fiction, the core drama and wit still survives translation, and many of the things that don’t can be explained away in the footnotes of more scholarly translations the world over. The same can be said for comedy that relies on double meanings and wordplay, or secret codes hidden within a piece of text — all things that can be explained to and understood by foreign readers if provided with contextual information in the form of translation notes. But can explaining why something is powerful and moving ever be truly equivalent to experiencing it for oneself? Perhaps in some cases it can come fairly close, but unfortunately for Raging Loop, this is one English localization that largely fails to deliver on that front.
The biggest offenders here are the game’s many “kanji tricks” — plot twists and contrivances that rely on the written etymology of certain names and places within the game’s world and what kanji characters are used to write them. By breaking apart certain characters into the particles that comprise them, rearranging those particles, and combining them into new characters, the identities of various plot-related entities and locations are revealed to be far more sinister than they originally seemed. While these instances served as revelatory “aha!” moments for Japanese readers, the localization simply plasters the kanji alongside the romaji for these terms in a flaccid attempt to give English readers the same experience — but all it really succeeds at doing is making their eyes glaze over with characters they can’t read or understand (examples of this can be found below). It essentially feels like the localization is saying “We know you probably don’t get it, but just trust us on this one.”
This issue also applies to the song “Prayer to Shin’nai” that serves as a centerpiece for much of the game’s lore. This song contains several hidden bits of wordplay and information that only gets revealed to the reader in fragments over the course of the game’s many routes, but as with any text with multiple meanings encoded deep within, gets thoroughly neutered in translation — even mistranslating one of the lines entirely despite heavy context clues. Unfortunately, this is probably the safest route the localization team could have taken, especially given that the project was clearly done on a tight budget (and probably an even worse deadline). The only way to truly give English readers the same experience would be to pull a Phoenix Wright or Banshee’s Last Cry and localize the entire story from the ground up — a herculean task for a relatively low-budget game in an already niche genre, especially when the game’s lore is so deeply intertwined with Japanese mythology to begin with. So while the approach taken by the localization team to convey these plot points certainly muddies up the experience quite a bit, it’s also understandable given the constraints they were no doubt working under.
What’s harder to forgive, however, are the many grammatical flubs, overly literal/awkward lines, and even a fair few mistranslations littered throughout the script. (Select examples for each of these types of issues can be found below.) While it would be unfair to claim that a majority of the game’s text contains serious readability or comprehension issues (plenty of the text reads just fine), these problems are still prevalent enough to be considered non-negligible. The script shows inconsistencies in regard to character voice and flow throughout, to the point that at times it almost seems as though each successive line was translated in a vacuum. There is very little creativity on display in terms of word choice and general willingness to adapt, though this could be a matter of the localization team’s personal preference — which may be for the best, as the few times the script does attempt to do something creative with character voice or slang are quite jarring and usually don’t stick the landing.
In one instance, the protagonist is spoken to by entities that speak in a semi-archaic form of Japanese that is still commonly spoken and written today. The localization team’s solution to this was to use Chaucer-era “ye olde English” that many readers will probably have no experience ever reading before in their lives. For example: “We shul yeuen ye the brok.”, which the protagonist immediately translates internally to “We will also send you the badger.” This example sticks out because it also presents a continuity error, given that the protagonist didn’t even know what a badger was at the beginning of the story, and as such would certainly not know the ancient English word for one (“brok”). The Japanese uses the same word for badger in both instances, of course, and in general doesn’t really use any odd words or spellings that the average Japanese person wouldn’t have heard before. The localization has thus introduced more plot holes and flaws into the source text.
This is to say nothing of the apparent need felt by the localization team (whether due to preference or time constraints) to adhere to the exact sentence structure of the original Japanese text and use exact 1:1 dictionary parallels for most of the descriptive word choice, even when this results in a baffling Frankenstein’s monster of a sentence in English. Inconsistency also runs rampant in terms of what words and honorifics they chose to either localize or leave in romaji — romaji that will be utterly meaningless to all but the most devout of Japanese media consumers (unfortunately it’s usually the latter, which isn’t great in a game that has far more appeal to the average Western gamer than the vast majority of visual novels).
Under ideal conditions, the localization team certainly should have been able to avoid most of these issues from the outset (either with a better base translation or more time and effort spent in the editing process), but it’s worth noting that even the best professionals in the industry can produce output of low caliber under poor working conditions, and it’s no secret that deadlines for console localizations are notoriously awful. Any and all faults with this game’s script are the result of either poor vetting on PQube’s part, unrealistic expectations regarding how long a game of this complexity takes to properly translate, and/or a complete and utter lack of English text QA (which seems likely, as no testers or quality assurance personnel were listed under the publisher’s section of the in-game credits).
It’s an unfortunate thing when you feel like you can’t recommend a good game to a friend without a bunch of caveats. Like with most lackluster localizations of well-regarded works, however, the game’s brilliance still does shine through underneath it all. It’s just such a shame that PQube wasn’t able to give this game the level of care it deserves. While it’s by no means unreadable, it’s extremely frustrating when the tension of an emotional or climactic scene is brought to a screeching halt by a series of lines that are so awkward or incomprehensible you can’t help but laugh as you try to piece together what the characters were actually trying to say. This happened to me more times than I could count over the course of the story, which is the last thing you want during a suspense-driven thriller like Raging Loop. Casual readers will likely shrug these things off and chalk them up to the author’s writing style or what have you, but make no mistake — no matter what the author may have intended, it certainly wasn’t this.
Verdict: Tolerable
Gallery ofSelected Examples
NOTE: Some screenshots beyond this point contain more substantial plot details for the purpose of demonstration. While there are still no overt spoilers for the major plot twists and reveals, readers who intend to play the game with as little prior knowledge as possible may wish to stop here and revisit this section later.
Exhibit A – Mistranslations
If the thought of a magician turning an entire audience into cherry blossoms raises a few eyebrows, it’s because this is a mistranslation. While サクラ is a homonym for 桜 (sakura), or Japanese cherry blossoms, here it actually means “a paid audience member/shill,” or more specifically in this context (JP: 観客全部がサクラだとかね), the entire audience are “plants” who are in on the magician’s trick.There’s nothing in the Japanese to suggest anything “turning into” something else here, and while it’s likely the translator simply didn’t know about this secondary meaning for サクラ before, the use of katakana and the fact that this interpretation makes little sense should have at least tipped them off to the possibility that they might be missing something here.
The word 湿っぽい in this sentence does not mean “humid,” but “dreary/gloomy/depressing.” This is likely another case of picking the wrong definition for the context, though it’s worth noting that this more figurative usage is very common.
There are many ways you could translate オープンな人 in this context — while it’s generally used to describe people who are “open” with their emotions, wear their heart on their sleeve, and are generally confident and well-liked, in a romantic connotation like this it’s more like “uninhibited” — someone who’s a bit adventurous and maybe even a little promiscuous in their love life. Someone who’d be “open” to just about anyone’s advances, if they played their cards right. And as we can see in the next screenshot…
…even the context clues clearly support this interpretation. As stated above, there are many angles you could take to convey this one, but “available” certainly isn’t one of them, and as a result this exchange makes little sense in English.
While this lore-rich chunk of text has several deep-seated issues that would likely take an entire separate article to explain (and to be fair, was undoubtedly the trickiest part of the entire game to localize), there’s one mistake here that really shouldn’t have happened. The very last line here in Japanese is 霧立った (lit. “the fog has rolled in” or “the mists are here”), and is simply the past-tense version of a phrase from the third line, 夕霧立ってば、宴の支度 (“prepare for the feast when the evening mists arrive“), yet the localization translates this single phrase in two completely opposite ways. The image of the mists “rising away” gives the song almost something of a happy ending, implying that the tragedy is now over, yet the intended progression is most definitely “watch out, the mists are coming” → “uh-oh, they’re here.” The protagonist even comments on how this is a bit of an eerie way to end a song intended for children (it’s even in a minor key while a majority of the song is in major), and it’s used on one occasion in an attempt to scare the protagonist by another character, who pops out of nowhere holding a knife and covered in blood to say the line right at the end of another character’s recitation of the song.
Exhibit B – Overly Literal Translations
“Bothersome” is definitely not the first word I would use to describe being forced to suspect my loved ones of murder and sentence one of them to death each day.
Not something we generally say about people in English, is it? Humans are social creatures, so just about all of us are “used to people” by the time we reach college age. Aside from those who’ve been kept in a sensory deprivation tank from birth, I suppose.
Where else would the protagonist be seeing it through, if not his eyes?
A common literal translation of 見苦しいところをお見せしました, a standard expression in Japanese for “I’m sorry you had to see that.” For reference, this is what you get if you run the phrase through Google Translate (as of time of writing, at least):
Another common literal translation (this time for the Japanese word 殺気), and one that avid readers of Japanese media will probably recognize on sight. While the other common stock translation for this (bloodlust) wouldn’t have worked well in this context either, the script uses “killing intent” multiple times in places where a bit more creativity could have made things sound a lot more natural.
These are examples of sentence fragments commonly found in Japanese media, wherein the speaker begins to voice a thought but leaves the rest unsaid, though there’s usually enough context to deduce what they were meaning to say. This happens quite a lot in Raging Loop, and while retaining these sentence fragments could be considered a justifiable stylistic decision for some, there’s no denying they don’t sound as natural in English.
Occasionally you get sections like this, where there’s just a complete lack of a logical throughline between the characters’ words and thoughts.
Though at first glance it might seem like there’s a missing word or two in this sentence, it’s actually a bit more convoluted than that. First of all, the implication is not that the children themselves are unfair, but that it’s just generally unfair that children get special treatment. Secondly, it’s not that the children are “worried about X,” but that they have adults who will “worry about” (i.e. watch over and take care of) them even if they get into trouble. While it can certainly be argued that this line does contain all of the information it’s meant to convey, the poor wording and unwillingness to stray from the Japanese sentence structure makes even simple thoughts like this difficult to parse.
Exhibit C – Awkward Grammar/Word Choice
Read this second sentence aloud to yourself, then try to visualize in your head the sentence she’s actually trying to say. The correct answer is: “I mean, not that I want to accuse Rikako-san either, but she’s just as much of a suspect here as I am!”If you were able to correctly parse that on your first try, give yourself a pat on the back.
What even is a “brotherly life,” anyhow? Imagine this being the final sentence in your late mother’s last will and testament. T’would be a riddle that’d haunt me for the rest of my days.
My best guess for this line is that it was an accident introduced during the editing process — maybe the base translation was something like “He was already old when I was still young,” and the editor tried to simplify to “He’s BEEN old ever since I was young” (which makes more sense, since he still is old in the present day), but some wires got crossed and only the first few words got replaced.Happens to me sometimes, admittedly, but that’s what QA is for, and all signs point to PQube not having done a lick of that.
This is an issue of adhering far too closely to the Japanese sentence structure. A more natural way of saying this would be “I’d never crashed and gone flying out of my seat like that before.”
Now, I’m not entirely sure on this one, but it sounds an awful lot like a robot trying to describe the act of checking one’s footing so as not to trip and fall.
Actually laughed out loud at this one. The simplistic word choice and juxtaposition of these two lines just makes them sound hilariously redundant. (e.g. “It just hit me that the way I described that cashier wasn’t very nice.”/”I basically said she was mean.”)
For the record, Chiemi is not actually a kindergartner. This line just makes her sound like one.
You might describe an open world game with 200 hours’ worth of menial fetch quests as “excessive in terms of content,” but saying this about another region’s local faith or mythology seems a bit odd, if not outright rude. You don’t see me running around to other people’s churches saying that six of the twelve disciples should’ve been DLC.
Ladies, if a man ever suddenly embraces you without warning and then says something like this, you need to file a restraining order immediately. In all seriousness, though, this is meant to be a pretty major scene in one of the early routes, and it’s downright littered with awkward lines like this that take you right out of the moment. This is actually the first line that you see after this CG appears, and while I know this is supposed to be a horror game, I don’t think this particular scene was meant to induce primal fear.
Exhibit D – Kanji Tricks
As promised, here are a few more examples of the “kanji tricks” mentioned in the main text of the critique. Because it’s difficult to properly judge the effectiveness of these sections in isolated screenshots, I’ve included one example of how these full conversations read below:
Well? Have you figured it out yet? We won’t be spoiling it here, but the “big reveal” that comes right after this is something that a Japanese player would have certainly figured out by now, if they hadn’t already predicted it well in advance. This is what we mean when we say English players are merely “told” these things and not given a chance to figure them out for themselves.
The deep dives the game does on the Japanese etymology of the in-universe terminology and texts just don’t have the same effect for English-speaking readers, unfortunately.
Exhibit E – Questionable Adaptation Choices
More examples of the “ye olde English” mentioned in the main text of the critique. While this approach was likely taken in order to make a clear distinction between the old-style lines and the protagonist’s simplified translations of each, this direction still comes off as quite a bit over the top, especially in the badger/brok instance described above. Since the language used in the Japanese was for the most part still in use during the 20th century, perhaps a better equivalent of this semi-archaic character voice would have been to simply get a bit more eloquent with the word choice, but certainly no more archaic than Shakespearean-era English.
This delinquent character (pictured on the left) has a short temper and uses crass language constantly, dropping F-bombs left and right. He even calls his own mother ばばあ (which the localization renders as “the hag”). This is all well and good, until a certain point in one of the routes where said mother meets an unfortunate end in one of the game’s branching routes, and he suddenly transitions from calling her ばばあ to calling her 母ちゃん, a much more loving term of address for one’s mother. This is a rare instance in which his rebellious veneer wears thin, and a fairly sweet moment in general. Unfortunately, with the way the localization decided to handle this, we have the foul-mouthed punk going from “hag” to “Mommy” in the blink of eye, and it’s just too infantile to be believable.
The character speaking (or singing, rather) in this line is a small child reciting the song we discussed above. She doesn’t quite have the lyrics down pat, however, and so she doesn’t get all the words right. In essence, this is the “misheard lyrics” version of the localized line “Seven, the corrupt yomibito rise to oppose the mountain.” While some of the misheard words seem to vaguely rhyme with those of the actual line, this approach ultimately comes off as a bit excessive compared to the Japanese, though this is admittedly up to personal taste.
Exhibit F – The Final Send-off
At the very end of the credits roll, there’s a bit of text thanking the reader for playing, followed by this valedictory message. Hard to say if this is just a simple typo that was never caught due to lack of QA, or another misguided attempt to use some outdated ye olde English form of a common phrase. We presume it’s the former, as making a deliberate choice to write something in a way that 99% of readers will see as a mistake would be indicative of poor discretion.
Localization Credits: (Localization Outsourced to Lemnisca LLC) Localization Director – John Hooper Translation – Andrew Hodgson Editing – Christopher Foxx Proofreading – John Hooper Translation Assistance – John Hooper
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