I feel like this is entirely a localizer-added thing, and the original Japanese version was very different. I could be wrong of course, but this is just my gut feeling considering the time TYD released (and honestly it isn’t too much better nowadays).
Now, people can argue whether drastic changes like that are good or bad (I would say it is a massive “it depends”), but personally I would really prefer localizers stick to something as accurate to the original as possible while still being understandable in the target culture, and then include an altered or changed version as an option.
Like being able to choose between the ADV or Netflix dub for Evangelion.
I don’t mind if someone wants to add their own spin or whatever, as long as that doesn’t become the singular defined version for an entire region as is all too common. The original creators had a vision, and I want to see that vision, not the one a localizer is adding on that the original creators didn’t have.
For example, in a culture that doesnt have bread cakes, but they do have rice cakes, I would want a localizer to say characters ate “a food similar to rice cakes” or “an exotic food.” As an absolute last resort “a rice cake” is okay, but certainly not “the characters ate a big feast of pork and jelly donoughts.”
Yeah, that’s kinda what I mean. I think we agree. It’s just that recently there has been more attention on more… questionable… changes that localizers have been making to entertainment media, some I agree with and some I don’t.
In the 80s and 90s, it was common for overseas versions to change names to be more Western sounding. Personally, I don’t mind this kind of change. It usually doesn’t effect the overall story much, but sometimes a character might have an exotic sounding name in the Japanese version, I would hope that they also have a similarly exotic sounding name. However, it was also common for the entire story to be altered pretty drastically, even with the entertainment itself being chopped up into something entirely different. Which I don’t appreciate. I want the foreign media because it is different and from a different culture, changing it to match my own culture defeats the point of me wanting to engage with it.
Sometimes though, entire conversations are completely removed or changed entirely from their original versions. I mean, completely different, the difference between a character saying “I love you” and “You will always be my dearest friend.” I believe the Fire Emblem series (which I haven’t played very much so I have only minimal experience with) has had a few of these kinds of changes. In those cases, I believe that is a malicious change the developers may not have known about or may not have fully understood when they approved or signed off on the localization. Or the localization agency may have either thought they had more creative license than they actually had or deceived the original creators to push their own version instead.
Jokes are a bit different IMO, since humor is pretty different between cultures. Jokes in entertainment often rely on an understanding of the local pop-culture, so naturally jokes or geographical/historical references may need to change. It is understandable in those cases.