I’ve recently been looking at the boyishly alluring, clean shaven features of Mr. Goichi Suda (SUDA51) of Grasshopper Manufacture fame. Naturally he’s doing the press kit pom-pom dance for his upcoming No More Heroes sequel; Desperate Struggle. Without going too much into it I’ll just say that naturally the game is looking as inspired and awesome as we’ve come to expect from the man.

As a westerner though I have to ask myself; does the western release of the game really need an English dub? I find myself thinking this more and more these days, if any western based distributors took the time to run a survey targeting gamers between the ages of 20-30 (which encompasses almost all gamers today) they’d find very quickly that your average nerd likes to watch their Anime, J-Horror, Hong Kong action cinema and Korean arthouse SUBBED! As an adolescent we might have been a little turned off at the prospect of having to read subtitles as it might have been too much of a detractor from the entertainment at hand. Although we realized before long that our interest in all things east was to become a fetishistic craving that simply must be an authentic experience.

Why is it taking so long for games to be available to the west in their native language with the option of subtitles? Sure there have been isolated cases out there, though they’re categorically few and far between. If I buy a Japanese videogame I want to hear the Japanese characters (based on Japanese cultural and intellectual concepts, developed by Japanese developers in the Japanese country of Japan) to SPEAK JAPANESE DAMMIT!

Making English language dubs for foreign media almost always results in considerable compromise where the narrative is concerned, characters names are changed, intonation of dialogue altered, and sometimes even the plot needs to be massaged in order for localization changes to make sense. Then there’s the voices… *shudder* …Barely one out of ten Jap Anime’s have decent English voice dubs, and by ‘decent’ I mean acceptable, the rest are usually abysmally overacted with asinine overuse of expletives and exposition thrown in for gap filling and vege-head appeal.

Why, I remember when all the eastern-to-western film adaptation madness started with Gore Verbinski’s interpretation of Hideo Nakata’s staggering masterwork Ringu; every partially illiterate couch potato in the west was about to get a shake & bake education in cutting edge J-Horror without ever having to experience it firsthand. It was a sad time indeed, I spent months leading up to the release of Verbinski’s remake running and screaming through the streets, approaching random people and begging them to go watch Ringu immediately, before it was too late, before they were given the option of seeing it without having to read subtitles. But alas; people are dummies who needed a work of art to be homogenised for them instead, like infants need their stewed apple slop to be cut into bite size pieces before rubbing it all over their face.

Its just not fair when this sort of thing happens to our games. We need more options; we need original dialogue with the option of subtitles instead of stupid-ass westerners putting on whacky embarrassing voices. And THIS MEANS YOU TOO, NO MORE HEROES!!

Incidentally, even Suda’s been dubbed into English for the sake of this interview… but I think he might have intended it or something… he’s artistic like that sometimes or whatever… enjoy…