Oh no! Word has gotten out that there exists an instance in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse where you can run into the original, untouched Japanese text. The situation can occur during a late game battle only where a dialogue choice is given and if your partner is knocked out when that comes up. The chances of both requirements being met for this to occur are pretty slim, so it appears Atlus testers did not catch the text before the game was manufactured.
Atlus USA has been quick to apologize for the untranslated text and found one additional spot upon a thorough search. Of course, some people will use any opportunity to complain, and at least one GameFAQs poster has.
In a forum post titled “The game costs an extra $10 and it has no quality checking (MAJOR SPOILERS),” he posts a picture of the Japanese dialogue and berates Atlus. “Good job, Atlus. You couldn’t even bother to make sure that everything was translated.”
Usually I scoff at anyone who insists that gamers are entitled, but in this instance I think it applies well. There are huge projects exponentially larger than Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse with crazy budgets that ship with absolutely game-breaking or more horrendous bugs all of the time. This falls under a fairly benign issue that can easily be overcome by using a web search to find out what the correct English text should be.
Atlus has pledged to look into a possibility of correcting the errors somehow, whether it be possibly patching the game, changing the eShop version, or adjusting future shipments of the game in some manner. It’s also possible Nintendo will make doing any of these things nearly impossible due to their archaic systems, so I wouldn’t hold your breath for it.
I do have an easy solution to this problem in the meantime. If you don’t suck, you’ll never encounter it.
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Are official translations not made using a text dump? This is something I never saw with fantranslations.
The official blog post alludes to text files being utilized. I don’t know that there’s a search one could do to find remaining text by a computer and someone would have to go through line by line for a final check, I’d imagine. Which, honestly, should be part of the process.
Without looking at what that person would be seeing, it’s hard to tell. Is dialogue mixed in with Japanese comments from the original version? If so, it would make it a little less obvious when looking through it and make these mistakes more understandable.