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NEWS: Atlus 'Looks Into' Releasing Japanese Voice Track as DLC for Persona 5

IIRC, it was a guest cameo by Tokio, which also explains why the first-season OP also had to be scrapped from the US release, and references to T**** had to be removed from all subs and Japanese audio as well.

Thus bringing it back to the topic at hand: Insanely greedy/stickler Japanese music and artist rights.
You can argue fan-devotion and preservation-ethics all you like, but never stand between a Japanese corporation and its ownership money.

It was obvious from the start that P5 was going to be English dub only. I really don't have that much of a problem with P3 and P4's english dubs. except a couple of voices here and there. Fuuka's does kinda irk me a bit, but is still tolerable enough.

Persona 4 Arena did have a dual audio. Arena 2 also has dual audio but for the fighting portion only unfortunately. I really don't like Labby's english voice. The same with Sho. love vic, but hate sho's voice he did. The Dvd's had the Dual audio too. I have no clue why Atlus japan has such a fear with reverse importation. it's just ridiculous.

EricJ2 wrote:

Thus bringing it back to the topic at hand: Insanely greedy/stickler Japanese music and artist rights. You can argue fan-devotion and preservation-ethics all you like, but never stand between a Japanese corporation and its ownership money.

There is no similar situation here. There's no member of Johnny's in P5 or any Johnny's performance. All the announced talent working on P5 have had many of the works already distributed over here with the Japanese audio in tact. Hanazawa? Sugita? Satou? Aoi? They're all immensely popular seiyuu.

It's funny how dub enthusiasts keep screaming "HOW CAN THIS POSSIBLY BOTHER YOU?" when they would react in a similar fashion if the opposite was happening. It's got nothing to do with "bad" or "good," it's all "original" or "not original." Let's recall all Seinfeld DVDs and make sure Italian is the only language option. That's essentially what is happening here.

https://twitter.com/HProtagonista

Someone who works with localization (XSeed to be precise) gave quite a detailed explanation on why Dual Audio might not happen.

So yes contrary to what most people think, getting Dual Audio is not as easy as brushing your teeth.

I certainly don't go around forcing English dub fans that their way of enjoying their entertainment is in some way wrong or abnormal.

theNightster wrote:

so you're going to skip out on what may be a really good game? and it's over something minor like the lack of Japanese voice track?

I think you need the try to understand the mindset of someone who is not only an anime fan, but a gamer as well. One who probably and strongly prefers watching anime in Japanese, wanting to buy a heavily anime-inspired game of Japanese origin, and expects a Japanese audio option. It's not like this hasn't become more common these days with other anime-inspired games like Disgaea, BlazBlue, and what not getting dual audio options. It only makes sense, but I guess either the US or Japanese companies involved are either stuck in their ways, living in the past, or just being outright stingy.

yurigasaki wrote:

i am honestly so confused as to why people are so indignant about the lack of a japanese voice track (in a game series that has never, in the games I've played, featured one) that they're willing to boycott a perfectly good game.

Mind you back in the days of the PS2, I went ahead and played through Tales of the Abyss, despite the fact that I would have much preferred to have played it with the Japanese audio, but I definitely did enjoy it and wasn't too hard pressed about it being dub only. Nowadays though with the advent of Bluray and less technical limitations, not to mention it becoming more common for dual audio games, I think it should be the standard practice for localization of Japanese RPGs to include the original audio in its English release, the same way the anime industry handles it. It's just disappointing when part of the fandom can't get what it wants.

yurigasaki wrote:

then here's a simple solution: learn japanese.

While that would be a nice advantage to have, not everyone has the time or patience (or wants to) go through the extraneous trouble of learning how to read a new language. Something like that takes an extreme amount of patience and dedication, and doesn't happen overnight. It can take years to master a new language. It would make more sense for a company who is releasing a heavily anime-inspired Japanese video game into English to want to follow standard protocol and at least try and release a game with dual-audio options if possible.

Well at least Atlus has came out and said that they're aware of the demand and are going to try. It'll be interesting to hear a follow-up on this and their excuse if the deal is a no-go.

...Outside of Disney movies, American voice acting industry is not influenced by celebrity culture. It's influenced by an actor's ability. If you compare the English voice actors of Durarara to the Japanese ones mentioned above, you'll find they have more vocal range, emotive-ness, and voice flexibility. Which is funny because the English actors aren't even the highest paid voice actors in the American voice artist industry, while the Japanese ones are. So I find it pretty comical, when people (who don't know Japanese well and/or don't understand good voice acting) say Japanese voice acting is "better" than English. This very rarely is true. Most of the time, they are pretty equal.

This, as well as all of your other points, are the best ones I've read in this thread!

Outside of Disney movies, American voice acting industry is not influenced by celebrity culture. It's influenced by an actor's ability.

(As an addendum, as a non-English native speaker, when I see sales being lost because there aren't voices in the speaker's language -which I perfectly believe is something that happens- it feels pretty weird. Over here, we get texts in English-only as often as translated to our language(s) and extremely rarely do we get voices that aren't just English and/or Japanese. And we might complain, but that very rarely translates into lost sales. Just thought this might be a nice perspective to consider)

Will this be a thing? I'd like to see this happen with a lot of games. But this is nice news.