i saw on twitter a screenshot (i forgot to save it, sorry) of an interview by localizers admitting that they've completely scraped the Japanese dialogue of entire scenes and completely changed entire story scenes before.
That's how bad it is. We need to look at Japanese games over the last decade or so and retranslate all of them i think
I'm OK with this if its something like ghost stories strangely enough. An already mediocre anime made funny is a lot better than what they do now. Even making fun of politics was fine there, why was this a once in a life time thing though? I never got that.
All anime and manga deserves to be faithfully translated regardless of the quality of the story.
The dub of the anime The Devil is a Part-Timer had a reference to Super Size Me in the first episode.
To my shock, it was also in the Japanese audio track...and the original light novel.
References to American stuff like that is so cool when it's actually part of the story and so bad when it's being invented by a nasty freak.
Yeah, I rolled my eyes at this too, until I learned that was also in the source material.
Doesn't change what they did with the second season's dub, which IS cringe. They put in a Spongebob joke, among many other things...
References to American media in Japanese media aren't rare. There's a reason Katawa Shoujo, a loving western parody of eastern visual novels, had a character just wearing Bush/Cheney For President T-shirts... Long after his presidency, both in development and in-universe. They like random Americanisms.
But those are their references to make, not the localizers'.
The difference there is that no one involved in Ghost Stories ever pretended they were really trying. They were selling it as a joke thing they made because otherwise it wasn't worth the time and money for such a generic series to dub.
Have you ever heard of the super milk chan show ADV dub? No? well, that. Sometimes it just doesn't work
Ghost Stories never pretended like it was telling the legitimate story. No writer went "yes, this is what the author intended", or worse yet, "this is an accurate translation of the context, bigot." It was clear from scene-1 that they were taking the piss.
Worse, that one show got the worst dub director in all of anime, Steven Foster, job security for about a decade.
Foster eventually got himself blackballed from the business by the very actors he was directing, because he gave absolutely no shits about doing anything resembling a passable job.
One of these days, look up dub scenes from the second half of a show called Guin Saga. That was a Steven Foster dub, and he was so checked out, he didn't bother to check to see if the actors had stopped taking the show seriously--because THEY KNEW he was too lazy to check.
As a result, completely serious scenes are loaded with silly voices, because Steven Foster went "yeah, sure, whatever" and let them stay in the show!
I specify the second half because the FIRST half was played straight.