Sell Me on These Awful Games

[Forsaken Lover]

I think it's less mistranslations or errors and more a conscious choice to change everything. The parts of LR I already know about are also the parts I don't care about Like B-dude being the main villain and hitting on Lightning at the end. That is removed from the English version and is the only substantial change i have heard of. We don't need our villain to be in love with our heroin and voice Toriyama's fantasies.

And the difference between 'spirit" and "soul" or "heart" and "soul" isn't that confusing. It's a big part of Buddhism from what I understand. It was already used in a much more complex fashion in Xenogears where a guy had his soul reincarnated into the main protagonist yet his spirit lived on by possessing people. If I could unravel that, it doesn't seem like I'll have a hard time grasping whatever LR talks about.

And I already found a whole blog talking about the changes from LR's Japanese version to the English version. It's what made me make the initial comment because it was rather presumptuous of the person who wrote it. he just assumed the localization team were incompetent and screwed up when I bet you dollars to donuts it was a conscious choice to make the changes they did.

Here's the article
http://hikamitz.tumblr.com/post/1114...n-error-in-the

I skipped most of it because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers about stuff I do care about but I did read the opening thesis. My buddy told me that he's wrong about some stuff anyhow.

"Tamashii" doesn't mean judeo-christian Soul. It can be used in that way but it isn't exclusively that way and i would say for a Japanese person it wouldn't be the first thing they'd jump to. It is very often used to mean the emotion or spirit that drives a human. In fact I have a Japanese textbook which states that thinking of Tamashii as meaning "the spirit of the dead" is a mistake more likely to be made by foreigners than Japanese speakers. There are translations that have used it that way but they are contentious and unlikely to be used by a native Japanese spaker.

For example the english phrase Team Spirit, the Spirit there would be Tamashii. (And indeed a lot of sports animes use this term for example!) The claim that it is just for the immortal soul or even primarily for the human soul is erroneous. Trying to use Tamashii exclusively as Judeo-Christian Eternal Soul just doesn't work. If anything tamashii has a very heavily emotional aspect to it. It is very much considered to be 'what makes up a human.'

It literally means soul in Japanese just as kokoro literally means heart but that doesn't mean they translate over directly as such. There are also cultural differences at play here which make it even more complex because even though there is an idea of spirit and an idea of (emotional) heart in English they don't translate over directly. There are some differences in the core LR translation but I don't think the actual important context (B-man can take souls but he can't see inside human hearts) is missed.