Okyakusama wa kamisama.
There's a rule whenever a property is being translated from the Eastern world to the western one; that someone with absolutely no clue what they're doing is going to rock up with their 'can do' attitude and totally cock-up the adaptation in some significantly horrible way. It is an inevitability of life. Typically a marketing executive. And you can understand why in a tortured and beaten way. When you're a western marketing executive who's thinking of the next way to sell a product to an audience you think you know, and someone throws a box on your desk that is written in another language; I can only imagine your brain totally haywires and shuts off. At least, that's the only excuse I can think of for why a living human being would conceive of replacing the gorgeous Japanese bot art for classic masterpiece 'Ico' with a 3D model picture from Blender's worst nightmares.
I don't know why it's so very hard, aside from rank incompetence, for marketing executives to really ask themselves the core questions "Why does this appeal to the Japanese audience" followed by "How can I translate that for a Western audience." Many would say "Just don't change a thing" and whilst in many cases that is absolutely the right question, that's not a permanent done deal. Some things just don't work as well in English as they do in Japanese and if your job is to match the success from the home country out in the wild west of America, then liberties have to be taken. But do not misconstrue my devil's advocate talk for an endorsement of the marketing profession. I am well aware that most marketing decisions made on a monthly basis are born solely out of some upstarts desperation to validate their own job to their superiors. The minimalist brand logo trend didn't start out of nothing!
Still, sometimes even the best intentions don't pan out quite as you'd like. I can't pretend to know the machinations of why the Biohazard franchise was renamed to 'Resident Evil' when it came to the western territories, but I certainly don't feel anything cynical or inherently superfluous there. I can see the thought-process: "Horror game set in a mansion, Biohazard sounds a bit too vague and bland on the store shelves" it makes sense to me. Still the series creator despises the Resident Evil name, and today it doesn't really reflect the franchise anymore, does it? The game abandoned it's 'residence' in the second entry to explore whole cities, other continents, a couple of European villages and pretty much the entirety of America in one entry. Overall, Biohazard stood the test of time better.
And then there's the odd marketing decision that, whilst not exactly an inspired idea, looks genius next to whatever the home team were thinking. 'Sonic Unleashed' is not a great name for a video game, it's pastiche and unoriginal with a central focus on a mechanic that inherently missed the point of what Sonic was about. It's a game about speed; why would you focus on the Werehog segments; they weren't even all that good anyway. Still, I have to admit that Sonic's American redone title sounds loads better than the original. 'Sonic World Adventure', are you serious? Not only does that shamelessly rip the naming convention from 'Sonic Adventure' despite sharing nothing in common with those games and their wide cast of playable characters, the box art tries to desperately balance the Werehog central figure infront of a mismatch of location screenshots below a cracked planet; it looks honestly amateurish. I feel like 'World Adventure' should be the bad American translation of Japan's 'Unleashed'. (That's a topsy turvy situation right there.)
But there is one instance of an American re-mixing of a franchise that I not only whole-heartly agree with, I think it was the exact right choice to make. Even though it took some while to blossom, and the franchise is currently undergoing the process of totally reversing it; I think that for the time, whatever the marketing executive who made the decision was, it did the franchise a service for it's western discoverability. I whole-heartedly agree with the choice to rename the Ryu Ga Gotoku franchise to 'Yakuza' in the west. I think that someone that day had their head on straight, they read the room, and upon learning that the literal Japanese translation of Ryu Ga Gotoku was 'Like a Dragon' they made the wise move for the game's future prospects.
Not that I dislike the name 'Like a Dragon', at all. I think it's both a great title and better fits the breadth of a franchise that, whilst it surrounds the Yakuza, is more interested in the themes of that lifestyle than the criminality itself. Still, 'Yakuza' is a stark and straightforward title, isn't it? It's blunt and abrasive, confronting the audience with a recognisable name that carries it's own daunting connotations already. A western audience hearing the name 'Yakuza' for the first time thinks they know exactly what they're looking at, and for a market that was already in love with crime drama titles set all over America, the title of 'Yakuza' promised something fresh and new. A different face of a genre the western market was hopeless addicted to thanks to the sustained success of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Even to this day, the glamorisation of criminal life is a piquant siren call to the game buyers market, if only anyone could make a title to match what Rockstar put out these days.
But what about 'Like a Dragon'? How would a franchise named 'Like a Dragon' fare in the western world? Well to be quite honest, I don't think it would have stood out in the pack. It sounds mythical and fantastical but unspecific, inherently. The title 'Like a Dragon' would draw the eye of fantasy fans, but the front cover of snappily-dressed men with short haircuts would confuse and likely lose a lot of the interested. 'Like a Dragon', on it's own, too easily melts into the deluge of other fantasy game titles that were booming in the early 2000's; and even Japanese game fans would end up subconsciously associating such a game with the dime-a-dozen JRPGs that littered game shelves all the world over. Chrono Trigger, Xenoblade, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Grandia, Like a Dragon: it just slots in there doesn't it? But 'Yakuza'? No, that's a franchise which has no place among those others. A Japanese title that deserves to stand apart, and go it's own path. (That's what you call a 'pun' see; because the Japanese word for a Yakuza member, Gokudo; has been adopted to mean 'the extreme way' or 'going your own way'. That's a... that's how my pun worked...)
Nowadays the Yakuza franchise in the west is a few months away from it's period entry 'Like a Dragon: Ishin' marking the official point where this franchise will finally have a unified naming convention across the world, and I support it. I think 'Like a Dragon' sounds cool, and now that the franchise has fully cemented itself in pop culture thanks to the runaway success of 0 and the mainstream appeal of Yakuza 7; the franchise doesn't need to use tricks of naming to stand out from the crowd. The Yakuza name has served it's purpose well and fully, and now it's time for the franchise to retire it for good. Except, for prosperities sake I'd appreciate it if we didn't just drop the name from history. I think it would do us good to remember the franchise as it was named when it struggled and eventually rose in western markets; and wear that title, the only good marketing idea ever conceived, with pride. Besides, if we apply 'Like a Dragon' retroactively, then Yakuza 7 becomes "Like a Dragon 7: Like a Dragon" and I'm just not ready for that, let alone the world!
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