Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse: English version contains two untranslated lines
On Tuesday, Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse was released in North America. As usual, Atlus USA localised the whole thing themselves, but it looks like their localisation team left two lines of Japanese untranslated. A pretty amusing oversight, that Atlus talked about and explained in a blog post shared on Monday.
Those two lines of text are found at the very end of the game, but it’s not the reason why they weren’t translated. Quite simply: it was an oversight, that the QA team also didn’t catch. Why didn’t they catch it? Because they were “too good”:
The two instances of Japanese text left in the game happen during a boss battle near the end of the game. As you may know, SMTIV:A has partners that are permanently with you throughout the game, and you can select the partner based on what abilities they have that complement your play style. (No more worrying about a randomly chosen Walter casting Agi on demons that resist fire. WALTEERRRRRR!)
Anyhow, just like in SMTIV, partners can get attacked and knocked out. In this particular battle, partners will return after 3 turns, and the errant Japanese text only shows up if you get to a point where the boss gives you a dialogue option WHILE your partner is KO’d. Our testers, who have been with the company for quite awhile, and who are well-versed in all things SMT (I think a few of them also were QA for the original SMTIV) were so good, they never ran into the situation of having an unconscious partner during the fight, and henceforth the dialogue in question.
In other words: the two lines only appear under very specific circumstances, and the chances of you encountering them are pretty low. Therefore, those two “rogue” lines definitely shouldn’t impact your enjoyment of the game, and you don’t need to rush to learn Japanese before playing Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like this rather minor issue will get fixed any time soon, and we don’t know if it will be corrected for the European release (slated for this Winter, which is going to use the same localisation).
Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse (3DS) comes out this Winter in Europe.
Source: Atlus
