entertainment

Overseas edition of 'Prince’s Proposal' getting turned down by fans

15 Comments
By Master Blaster

Unlike American game makers, Japanese video game companies often sweat over every detail before selling their games overseas to make sure it fits the culture. Although the sentiment is appreciated the results are often poor, as people in other countries enjoy those cultural differences more often than not.

Case in point is "Prince’s Proposal’s" (Ojisama no Puropozu) treacherous journey abroad. "Prince’s Proposal" is an otome game where your character, a university student, has a chance encounter with six princes whom you must find romance with by making the right choices throughout the story.

Its recent Westernized incarnation called "Be My Princess," however, decided to replace the stylish anime princes and characters with rubbery, emotionless ones.

"Prince’s Proposal" had earned a good deal of success in Japan both critically and with players. Its storyline has enchanted women everywhere, especially when an English language version was released through the SNS GREE on Aug 1. It received an average rating of 3.9 and recently hit 500,000 downloads. The biggest criticism it seemed to get was being “too addictive.”

However, developers at Voltage had decided to make some “localizations” with their wider android release on Aug 13 leading to disastrous results, achieving only a 2.1 rating and eliciting comments like “is this a joke?” On the other hand the game made improvements with the payment style and no longer required an Internet connection to play.

All of the characters seem to look at you with an expressionless psycho-killeresque stare. I can see the "Twilight" influence, but – I mean – the guy from "Twilight" was kind of a murderous monster, right?

The good news is that the character’s faces are the only things that changed. The original stories, music, gameplay and backgrounds are all kept the same. Also this could just be a case of shock for fans of the original, since actually after playing through the free trial version it didn’t seem as strange as I had originally thought – for the most part.

But in the end, I think Japanese game makers should keep their original visions without compromising to other countries people. We appreciate the thought but anime’s popular enough now that anyone should be able to get into it.

Source: Tabroid

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15 Comments
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I wonder how realistic the Japanese version of "Prince's proposal"really is?

Please make your choice Princess,do you choose,1-Your Prince is waiting for you at a cheap Roppongi nightclub at 1am. Or 2-Your Prince is an English teacher and asks you to study after class at his Castle(1DK apato).

2 ( +3 / -1 )

rubbery, emotionless ones.?????? What on earth can this mean?

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Source: Tabroid

Come on JT, surely the sperrchecker is working?

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

TABROID is the correct spelling.

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Tabroid. Another laughable bit of Japlish takes root.

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I don't think it's true that American game makers do not sweat over every detail. There are many excellent, high-quality American games. In fact, with so many console titles, the Japanese are more likely to have a higher number of games with sloppy production.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

I don't think "the devil was in the details" per se.... the basic idea / theme for the game may have been the problem for women outside of Japan.

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Sir_Edgar: "I don't think it's true that American game makers do not sweat over every detail. There are many excellent, high-quality American games. In fact, with so many console titles, the Japanese are more likely to have a higher number of games with sloppy production."

The point is the Japanese worry more about the details of the game before ship ping overseas whereas the US and other game companies worry less. They need to make sure the games appeal not specifically to elements of Japanese society, but also to people in other countries, whereas it's far more likely the Japanese will consume the product is (minus language, of course). There are exceptions, of course.

-3 ( +0 / -3 )

Sorry JT. Should do me lesearch better.

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@smithinjapan I guess they have forgotten that little gem called ''Zero Wing'' and the awesome phrase ''All your bases are belong to us''.

If you're a true gamer, you will know this phrase.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

SpanishEyez: Wasn't Zero Wing a PSP game a few years back? and I only dabbled in it, as I'm not a true gamer.

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Interesting, I read it slightly differently,

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

yawn!

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The thing I hate the most about the video game industry is "localization" because they do not just translate the games, they just love to changes many other things in the games. I really hate that, often times this creates a very inferior game.

I wish video game companies would stop doing such bad changes when they release a game overseas. Just a language translation is fine, no need to change anything else.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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