#4

There have been complaints, especially by industry professionals. However, you'd be hard pressed to find a major review site that actually makes note of the errors in Persona 5. And indeed, some people have said that the translation is fine, or even extremely good.

So what gives?

This is actually a chronic pattern for media translated from Japanese into English. Here's an abridged explanation of why that is:

#1: Japanese media is relatively niche, and started out even more so.

For a long time, the only reason fans were able to consume Japanese media was due to the dedicated efforts of fan translators. The modern economic viability of Japanese media in the West is largely rooted in their efforts to bring Japanese content into other languages.1

Fan translators rarely have professional experience or an expert understanding of Japanese, and fans were tolerant of mistakes. The following are hallmarks of the era:

Literal, word-by-word translations

Stilted writing that mimics Japanese sentence structure

Stock translations of common phrases

Leaving Japanese words untranslated even when they have English equivalents

Translation errors

#2: Early official translations couldn't be trusted.

If fan translations were often flawed, official translations were often downright incomprehensible.2 But that wasn't the root of the problem. The root was this:

The official translations sometimes... sounded good.

But while they sounded good, they were also often censored, altered to be more “friendly” in the West, or even completely rewritten.

A new belief was born within a significant segment of the fan base: translations that sounded good could not be trusted. Only fan translations were guaranteed to be faithful to the original creation—that they were often stilted and contained untranslated content was proof of this authenticity. And importantly: it was proof that could be identified without knowing Japanese.

All it took was a glance and anyone could tell.

#3: Japanese translation has a global audience.

If English-native fans felt starved for content translated into their native language, fans whose first language wasn't English were even more so. Many ended up consuming English translations in order to experience Japanese media in a language they had at least some knowledge in—and this still happens.

Skill levels vary, but speakers of English as a second language are understandably less likely to identify awkward English writing. In fact, flawed translations are often a blessing: the awkward wording, limited vocabulary, and stock lines that appeared in fan translations makes the content much easier to understand for some non-native speakers.

#4: Video games are more than just text.

This one's pretty simple: if a game is fun enough, it can distract from weak writing. When translated games are dubbed, talented voice actors are also able to supply intonation to awkward lines that makes them seem less so. However, this greatly limits how good their performance can be and results in an inferior dub.

* * *

The result of the above factors (and more) is that complaints about awkward, literal translation are often countered with accusations of wanting to remove all references to Japanese culture.

In Persona 5's case, there's one more factor: people are pretty upset by Atlus's streaming restrictions. Understandably, this has drawn attention away from the poor quality of the translation.