It is indeed a very difficult and tiresome task to localize a game from an original version to be adopted into English. A number of reasons account to how such an endeavor can end up being a great failure as it is tough to produce a faithful adaptation of a game in its localized version. The Japanese games undoubtedly hold the top position among the victims of localization.

Issues In Ar Tonelico 2 Localized Version

Ar Tonelico 2 is a Japanese Role Playing Game that was developed for PS2 and it is one of the best examples of botched localization scenarios one example. The game was initially released in Japanese and made a good reach. Hence the game makers wanted to develop a US edition for the players in the west.The translators and editors are in charge had to decide the tone of translation incorporating the cultural themes of the United States so that the people in the country could relate to the game easily. However, team NIS America had dropped the ball and missed a few things that left the game with bad grammar, deleted scenarios, lack of proof-read content and most of all weird game-breaking bugs.

Localization Led To Cutting Half The Game

It is notable that about half of the original game was cropped to make it ready for its English dubbed version. Nichegamer has reported that the localized version came chopped out totally with a translation that was explicitly sexual, weird, and absurd.

It even resulted in the President of NIS America, Mr. Haru Akenaga apologizing about the mishap to the fans in press in 2009. However, it is indeed a luck that the game series has a loyal fanbase who wanted to revive the localized version.

Ar Tonelico 2 Loyal Fanbase Rejig The Botched Localization

A group of translators and game coders came together under a re-translation mission named Project Metafalica. They have been redoing the botched localization. They replaced the overtly sexual dialogues into enjoyable ones, added back the chopped-out scenarios and re-worked on the bugs. DualShockers has reported that the fan-team has actually done the job of those paid professionals who should have done this already. Nevertheless, the fan project is complete and it can be downloaded from the US site at2.metalbat. The downloads are available only for the US version and not the EU version.