I' m not surprised, they recently half-assed Duodecim' s translation and often don' t even bother to translate their handheld games at all. Over the last decade SE made efforts to release the same games in Europe as in the US, instead of just giving us the leftovers, but it looks like improving their localization effort is dropping lower and lower in their priorities list. I mean, KH 1&2 were their most spectacular European localization, their only good one actually, so that decision regarding DDD says a lot ...

Further proof that Kingdom Hearts is steadily losing ground. Excellent news.

Seriously though, some of you other European countries need to just learn English. You are the reason why we get games so late.

Hell, Square could have just given Key to Truth/Truthkey the game's files for a bit and he'd have all the text translated into all the other languages in about a month, haha.

But seriously, though. If they didn't have time translate the text, they could have given it to a few selected fans to do it for them. That's what 0verflow is doing with School Days HQ. It's really not that bad of an idea.

Personally I couldn' t care less, all my consoles are set on English by default anyway.

Well, true, we suck at learning English compared to your country, but when a debate on the subject arose last year (when Duodecim was released) some people raised some very good points :

- Not everyone is cut out for learning English, or any language, or school in general. Some people also chose to learn other languages. They like video games as much as anyone else. Most SE games are aimed at wee kids anyway.

- Some people who do understand English would rather play in their own language.

- The language issue is SE' s problem, not ours, we are the clients in this picture. European and American developers have no problem translating their games in every major language there is on the market, why the fuck is it so hard for Japanese developers to do the same elementary thing ? It' s, like, courtesy 101. After all the years they had to change their methods regarding this issue it is hard not to read their enduring lack of caring as insulting.

- Last but not least : untranslated games clearly have lower sales, especially RPGs and their walls of text.

So ... can you think of one good commercial reason for them to avoid an easy and cheap way to make more money and at the same time prevent them from being perceived as self-centered pricks ? I sure can' t.

Most of their French translations are on amateur level anyway. FF VII for instance is just horrendous, it looks like they gave the job to their janitor' s dog or something.

Really? I've never played the French FFVII, but that sounds unfortunate. I guess Square's picking the wrong people for the job. If they could get people like the modders for Bethesda games (the translations for mods for Skyrim and Oblivion are amazing) or even for some of the people who do fan-translations for visual novels over at Hongfire or Amaterasu Translations, then they would be able to save time and have a quality translation.

...

Thats not too bad, because most of the people who play the game will understand at least English. Its sad for people from Italy or Spain, but I think SE needs to make a cut somewhere. After all, people from for example Denmark, Finland or Sweden don´t get their own version either.
The only thing I´m actually missing is a special edition of the game for European gamers, I think thats an opinion nearly everybody across Europe shares with me....

Eh, doesn't really matter to me that much. Though i would be happy it there were Japanese voices with English subtitles.

Amazing how this happens sometimes.

I agree, the story is hard enough to follow, yet not putting it in a localised language for people who have trouble with a second language to understand it?

Yeah, great move.

Square wouldn't necessarily do this because they are lazy.

It's more likely that they've done the maths and it wouldn't simply be worth the extra money it would cost to add in more languages. Handheld Kingdom Hearts sales have been less than stellar and combine that with DDD's timid sales in Japan they probably don't see it doing amazingly well. Square reported a $76 million loss in profits in the last fiscal year and was only sort of saved by Deus Ex and Final Fantasy XIII-2, so they aren't exactly doing well. At the end of the day they are a business.

Not to mention that localisation is surprisingly costly. Hiring the extra staff to translate it, hiring the programmers to make the changes to the text. Even if they use people from in-house then they could be using those employees time to translate a game which is expected to sell better. Square have quite a lot of gaming coming out in the next year. Outside of the Japanese Developers they have Sleeping Dogs, Hitman, Tomb Raider and more recently Heroes of Ruin and Quantum Conundrum. That's a lot of games to translate and chances are the London Studios are going to want to concentrate on the London Studios games first before they think about DDD.

(Random Fact, Square publish CoD in Japan)