River City Girls Zero Shows Increasing Concerns with Localization
Mastering two languages is a commodity in a globalized world, especially if one of those languages is English. While poor translations can make for good video game memes, with the number of high-quality multilingual translators in the present day standards for game localization should be higher than ever. It's in this context that, on February 14, 2022, River City Girls Zero saw its English-localized debut on Switch.
The original game, Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, was a Japan-exclusive belt-scrolling action game released in 1994 on the Super Famicom as the fourth installment of the Kunio-kun series. The 2022 localized version River City Girls Zero brings a few modifications to the 1994 game, including a new theme song and voiced manga-style cutscenes to tie back with 2019's River Girls City. However, this is still only a localization; it's not a remaster, and it's not a reboot. Yet when River Girls City Zero released, fans noticed that there were two different translated script options: a literal script, which is an in-house translation by WayForward, and a new script that does a full English localization for the West.
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The issue with translating foreign works into English is it's nearly impossible to please everyone. If the translation is too literal, Western fans might find it difficult to follow the story, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily better to completely change the script into something unrecognizable. Ultimately, the goal of an English localization is to offer fans as close an experience to the original game as possible while making it comprehensible for Western audiences — which is a delicate balance, especially dealing with
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