Why I Believe Persona 2: Tsumi (Innocent Sin) Will Never Be Brought To The USA By Kya (originally a livejournal post from August 3, 2002) There is much discussion and petitioning for Tsumi to be brought to the USA these days, as I hear. I don't keep up with Persona fandom much - I prefer to participate where I want, and stay out for the most part. But I've been looking at a few livejournals owned by Persona fans, and I decided that the world needed to hear my fact-based feelings on why this game will never make it to US shores. 1) It's OLD. Yep, people. The game was released in what, 1999? 2000, at the latest? That's two or three years old right now. Tsumi is a Playstation game, and the Playstation is basically a dead platform. Everyone is developing for the PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, and similar systems. The only PSX games that are still coming out are ones with giant fandoms. As much as you'd hope that Persona also had a huge fandom, unfortunately it is much more of a niche market in the USA than in Japan. The graphics, while certainly pleasing to ME, can't compare to Final Fantasy X. 2) Since the game is old, Atlus USA has said they aren't going to translate it. Working Designs says it's too creepy and dark for them to work on. And Agetec...okay, I don't know about this. I wouldn't want Agetec translating Tsumi, simply because their translations are sketchy and they censor games. Sure, they brought Last Blade 2 over for Dreamcast because there was fan demand...but they also censored parts of it that I suppose are too realistically bloody for Americans to handle, such as people being cut in half with one sword slice. Yeah, that's about to inspire kids to go out and kill people. Uh huh. I can't even imagine what they'd do to the content of Tsumi. And IMO, it's better for something to not be brought over here than for it to be heavily edited and reprocessed to Better Suit An American Audience *coughcoughPersona: Revelationscoughcough* 3) The game content is not something that most companies, especially third party companies, would want to touch with a ten-foot pole these days. Let me make a little list of things that appear in this game that might be considered slightly offensive or inappropriate by Western standards: - the resurrection of Hitler and the Nazis - school violence, including students killing teachers and vice versa - orchestrated terrorist bombings of major city buildings - Christ imagery, which never goes over too well - drug use and other sorts of questionable behavior by high school students - the whole Ginji Is A Pedo thing - persons of nonstandard sexual preference The list probably goes on, and please ask me if you want specifics on these please ask me privately because I'm sure there are people who don't want major plot elements of the game spoiled for them if they plan to play it in the future. I don't think that Lisa and Eikichi's speech patterns will have anything to do with the game being brought over or not. They went ahead and translated Eikichi's Engrish for Eternal Punishment...I know that when Eikichi introduced himself in Batsu, he babbled on about being KasuKou's NANBAA WAN HANDOSAAMU na KYUUTO BOI or something like that, and it was pretty much directly translated into English. Stuff like that can either be brought over by the translators or ignored, and while I think that Eikichi really loses something when he's NOT speaking Engrish, I also don't think it's enough to stop the game from being brought over. The same goes for Lisa. The claim that she 'won't make sense if she's translated' doesn't have a lot of merit. I mean, Jun and Maya also don't speak English, but they'd be translated into perfect English nonetheless. And her story is explained in the game - you don't have to see her speaking Japanese to understand that the concept behind her character is that she's a gaijin raised in Japan who never learned to speak English, therefore she's fluent Japanese and speaks less English than Eikichi, despite what her classmates think. I think that there might be some difficulty in presenting some of this, such as the scene in which she's interviewed on the radio and has to demonstrate her lack of English ability, but that would be something that the localization staff would have to deal with. Most game fans aren't stupid - they know that when they're playing Persona that it's set in Japan, 'cause nobody's hiding it anymore *coughLunarvalecough* and they are ready and willing to admit that your characters are Japanese nationals. Also, I don't really think they can change Hitler and the Nazis like was done in Maken X. Now, I haven't played Maken X, but what I was told is that things were merely digitally edited. Maken X is also a fighting game, and character stories can be changed in a fighting game much more easily than in an RPG. Hitler and the Nazis are actually a rather integral part of the Tsumi plot, and I'm not really sure how they could change their appearance without altering the story of Tsumi significantly. Atlus won't release it - they knew that the content was something that would go over wonderfully with the Japanese fandom but not strike the same chord with the US fandom. This is why Atlus probably didn't choose to bring the game over when it was originally released and enjoying a lot of popularity in Japan. Working Designs doesn't want to put their name on a game with so much tragedy, death, and the game's poignant yet unhappy ending. And I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't want to play the game in an edited form. So, what to do, then? Well, you can always play the game in Japanese. Which means you're going to have to be able to read hiragana and katakana at least. And use this translation. That's what it's for. If playing Tsumi in Japanese isn't something that you can do, then what other people are saying is right - be happy that Eternal Punishment IS available in English. At least US fans got half of the series in English, right?