The writing in terms of the plot is very couched in Japanese conventions, so sometimes I find myself scratching my head at how characters react, because I'm not expecting it. Especially since this game deals so much with politics and policing, the expectations are totally different. I just go with it, and accept it as the game's own world. It's more acute at the start of the game because they don't reveal until much later the reasons why things go as they do at first. Like your first instinct is to think "this is obviously bullshit and why does nobody question it?", but when it's later given some context, it makes sense. Really as players we needed that context delivered up front.

The localisation doesn't help, or maybe I should say it adds to that sense that the whole thing is obviously being translated from a different culture. The further I get into the game the more examples I get of jarring lines that make me double take. It's just... clumsy English. One from yesterday -

Well, it'll be a nice change of pace! A lot of nasty stuff's continued lately!

It gives the world its own strange sort of flavour, which is certainly memorable and doesn't ruin my enjoyment. I am playing with the English voices which probably makes the disconnect worse. I imagine using the Japanese VO makes these missteps more forgivable because you are expecting translations and clumsy text. It's sad that it often pops up at intense moments, one character giving a big speech:

If this is a ship that's bound to a rotting dock and destined to sink, we might as well destroy it once.

If they had decided to go for a different type of localisation, they could probably have addressed this problem, and added in some context clues and extra help. But they seem to have done just a very literal translation job, for better or worse. For me, it gives it a certain charm, but I do wonder if there is a potentially much better written or delivered game that could have existed with more thoughtful localisation.

Quirky writing is what I love about Persona. If you want to scrutinize this game and hold it up to real world logic I'm afraid it'll fail and keep failing, but so would most games with a 90 hour plot set in the real world with fantastical element.

@kestrelpi: What I'm really asking for I guess is variety, or recognizing that you don't always have to plug in your decided upon replacement word every time it comes up. It's a common trap in many localizations, even really good ones like Yakuza, to just find the most convenient way to translate something and repeat it over and over. It's 'accurate' but rarely do people ever talk like that.

That line is actually specifically one of the lines that was listed on the site that I didn't think had any issues, and this is kinda why I posted what I did. That is a completely proper and natural English sentence that I wouldn't second-guess at all if someone said out loud to me tomorrow. If I was going to change something, I'd probably change 'might' to 'may' and 'a variety of things' to 'various things,' but that's just because I, personally, prefer to speak more colloquially/casually than formally (though, it could be that the writer wanted the principal character to speak more formally; we have no way of knowing. This is why a lot of the lines that Sae has that people have pointed out as 'wrong' (the line is something like 'Keep your responses brief and only of the truth') just read as characterization to me. Sae is shown to be a prim and proper DA/prosecutor, so it only made sense to me that she would speak in a stilted-and-unnatural-but-focused-on-being-proper-to-a-fault tone, and that was reinforced to me by just how many of her lines during the interrogation sound that way. At a certain point, a lot of the proposed rewrites I've seen on that site and elsewhere no longer seem to fit the voice of the character. It's all up to interpretation, I guess.).

This was actually the kind of thing that stood out to me in P5. There were a bunch of phrases that felt unnatural that they used over and over again. Just off the top of my head:

Ryuji says he's "going to memorize their faces" like six times in a 10 minute period
They consistently talk about "those adults"/"shitty adults"
Even "make them have a change of heart"/"change their heart" doesn't sound particularly natural, though I will say that that one would understandably be much harder to substitute given its importance in the story/marketing/game visuals.
etc.

These phrases wouldn't have stood out nearly as much if they had just thesaurused out a few instances of them. "Remember what they look like," "people/older people," or even just "change them" would all have made things sound more natural if they had substituted them in a few times instead of just using the same phrase over and over again.

I realize this might read like I'm saying "there is no need to rewrite things" and then immediately saying "rewrite things," but I believe there's a subtle difference between 'completely rewriting entire sentences with different intonations' and 'occasionally substitute out these specific overused phrases.'

Another wonderful thing about language that's vaguely relevant to this conversation is that I can use 'thesaurused,' a totally-made-up and not-real verbed noun, but you still understood the sentence I used it in perfectly. Ultimately, is that not all that writing or translation need to do?

The localization problems for most people is very much localization vs. straight translation. P5 does a much more straight translation than most games and some people don't like it. I very much prefer it to something like the nightmare of a localization that was Fire Emblem Fates which completely changed characters,removed dialogue for no reason, and just wrote nonsense sometimes in an attempt to be funny. This might also be because I watch a lot of subtitled anime and am playing P5 with Japanese voices, but the translation has been very good so far with some minor mistakes here or there. Seems perfectly reasonable in a game that I've played over a 120 hours of and still haven't beat

I general I agree (and actually one of the criticisms on that site is that they go for replacements of Japanese stock phrases with stock translations that become repetetive. I think I'd make a case for 'big bro' here though as it's meant to emphasise that she considers him close family now, and I just... can't think of many other phrases that would be a suitable replacement in that situation. Also, young kids DO speak in a more repetetive way. Something I've noticed watching my nephew grow up is that he'll latch onto phrases and then use them over and over, even when it's not quite appropriate. Nuance and variety come much later so I find Nanako's speech quite believable here. If she was a 13 year old or something I'd think it was weird.

I'm not quite sure of what you're getting at, but I think that perhaps related to it is that yes - I think that good writing/translating should take advantage of the flexibility of language, especially of one like english where there are so many different ways to say things in comparison to languages with stricter grammar or smaller vocabularies or even fewer sounds.

Something that I really liked in Yakuza 0's localisation is that occasionally it'd just throw out a great turn of phrase which you just know is likely not to be an exact translation from the Japanese, but is' the localiser's way of getting a similar idea across and they had some fun with it.

I get that occasionally in P5, too - gotta imagine the text of the survey forum posts in the loading screens etc is pretty much completely changed from Japanese style internet-speak to English style internet-speak, and it works really well and they clearly had a lot of fun coming up with analogous turns of phrase, but you rarely see the main story dialog come to life in the same way, which I find a bit frustrating as someone on the receiving end, because I think there might be a whole bunch of character nuance we're missing because of it.

@kestrelpi: Honestly I'd just have let it go. That relationship is gonna shine through just fine.

I'm not a native speaker and I've come across quite a few lines in the English localization that sounded unnatural even to me. I've got no problem with that. If I had to explain why, my best guess would be that it has to do with the setting of the game. Apart from some manga and anime - as well as some basic reading on Japan, its history and its mythology - I've had little contact with Japanese culture. For me, dialog that seems to be unnatural in the English translation just enhances the feeling that the game takes place in a social and cultural setting that is somewhat different from the one I am accustomed to. This is neither meant to be a defense nor an indictment of the English localization, just something that came to my mind while reading this discussion.

The addition of "Funky Transfer Student" would have fixed everything.

The only thing that truly bothered me was having Ryuji say "what the eff" over and over. Just have him say hell instead and it would have been fine.