Oh hai. Nice hack you got there… I was wondering, how much text changes have you made? It would be nice to have a comprehensive list. (Eg. did you change the characterization of Starmen from click whirrr noises to ALL CAPS like some others did? Did you fix the “sent back from the future to die” line as proposed by Legends of Localization? Etc…)

Personally I’m mainly a fan of Earthbound as it is – it’s a beautiful localization, and all the “decensoring” attempts seem kinda weird to me. I mean, reading through LoL, like 99% of that wasn’t even censoring, just good scriptwriting. Like, in the US mentioning “God” out of context is necessarily a Christian thing, while “heavens” or “guardian angel” are more generic and a better equivalent to what the original script said. Or why drugstores don’t say “DRUG” on the counter – has anyone ever seen a WCS or Duane Reade with a big sign that says “DRUG”?! Lol. That’s no censorship, that’s common friggin’ sense. Or Ness in pyjamas, I mean sure in Japan being naked may have some connotations, but outside Japan it doesn’t, and has other connotations, which we don’t want. Not because of being prudes, but because it just won’t mean the same thing and this isn’t a Samurai movie where we need to keep it Japanese. It’s pretty much 100% Americana as seen by a Japanese writer.

That said, there are a few things that could use fixing….

Not big “philosophical” decisions like Ness in pyjamas or no physical child abuse at Porky’s… and while there heck I can even live with Pokey, I mean it’s Picky and Pokey, and the original Japanese name is both Pokey and Porky at the same time, it’s an untranslatable play on words – which to choose in localization is a coin toss decision mainly (I did play M3 and there Porky is more correct, but hey it’s EB we’re talking here)… I guess I’d get behind replacing the click whirr of Starmen with ALL CAPS whether they are robots or no, but if they do come from the future, they probably ARE robots, no spoilers I guess but we all know how robots relate to coming from the future.

I mean more like stuff that seem more like the result of rushing it, or misunderstandings… Like the demonstrably mistranslated lines like “sent back to die” or some of the uglier tile editing. Like okay red crosses have to go, but why mess up the indentation and look of hospital signs? As a better solution I’d just replace them with big blue letter H’s in boxes, that’s the international traffic sign for a hospital… Or replacing bars with cafés is okay, but why not tilt the letters isometrically like in the original.. Or restoring the NPCs that were “lost in translation” for no good reason… I mean fixes like that.

A mod that sets out to do all this little polishing stuff while respecting the localization decisions that made Earthbound Earthbound would be so nice…