Reason: Original series titles. I understand that Nintendo franchises are a bit goes-either-way, so this is more being brought up for discussion. Much as I enjoy seeing "warioware" there, among others, I think bringing in 'policy' would be "neat" (it's happened for the MOTHER seri-- game(s), but their inconsistent release elsewhere comes into play). Not sure how the individual Fire Emblem games would be handled, but that's a tad outside my scope. Threw in a mass nintendo implication for ease (or something).
I might think of having pokemon > pocket_monsters in there, but Japan seems to like the shortening well enough to leave that alone (though I would argue pocket_monsters_special, since it was known as, what, "Pokémon Adventures" here?).
Agreed with all except the [x] -> nintendo implication. That's been discussed before, though I'm too lazy to dig through the forum for a link; basically, it was decided against.
FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS, BUDDHA AND THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER
Zeruda no Densetsu? No, really, "Zeruda"? ZERUDA? I understand we've got certain guidelines, but hadn't we agreed not to stick to them so annally with the Castlevania fiasco? Is it really necessary to do this stuff when the names are so thoroughly ingrained into everyone outside and even inside Japan? I already need to restrain myself from arguing every time someone brings up a change from a title into another that's the exact same damn thing but less known and in Japanese (I thought the Jojo alias was just silly), but really, this just blows my top.
Is this helping in any way? Is this making stuff here better organized? Is it making searches easier? How many of you actually knew what the hell Hikari Shinwa was before reading this? Just how much of this is actually benefitial to organization and how much is sticking to guidelines for guidelines' sake?
Haha, I was kind of wondering if there'd be an outburst in my jojo alias thread, but I guess it managed not to surface until this thread, eh? Well, whatever, if they're aliased it's hard to find any problem with it, IMO. It certainly doesn't make searches harder in any way, nor can it make stuff less organized. And hey, if you didn't know what hikari shinwa was before reading this, you've learned something new, thanks to the localized->original naming scheme. ;)
The problem is more of a principle thing, is the name displayed in a tag meant to be the exact original that like five people know about, or the recognizable one? What is the priority here? For an English speaking site, ALWAYS taking the Japanese names as the hard-assed strict choice in EVERY case even when all but the bare minimum of the user base would most readily recognize the much more popular English ones just seems... backwards. There's just some titles none but the most gigantic weeaboos would ever register and zeruda_no_densetsu is the epitome of that.
You stick to a guideline because it makes things clearer and better organized, here it seems like the guideline becomes its own purpose. I'm not asking for a complete disregard of it, using ganbare_goemon instead of mystical_ninja is well within the acceptable margin for instance, but try to use some flexibility in the very drastic cases. It's friggin' Zelda for God's sake, what's next? suupaa_mario_buurazazu?
In my defense, I'm suggesting ZELDA_no_densetsu, as I think a principle here is to romanize/non-romaji-ize the non-Japanese parts of titles (besides, it's probably "Zelda" in the Japanese SSBs (from whence casuals would also find Koopa and Purin)).
Reverse the alias direction on warioware (made_in_wario -> warioware). No on everything else.
I'm with Ephyon on this. The aliases suggested in this thread go off the edge of weeaboo, tantamount to the infamous "Just according to keikaku" line in Death Note.
Honestly keikaku doori would be better than just as planned. The tag specifically refers to the act of uttering the phrase, 「計画通り」, not just some object which is called 計画通り in Japanese and "just as planned" in English. An even worse example of this is take it home. Are you serious?
The reason everyone is making such a fuss about this is simple. Much fewer people play non-localized "mainstream" games than watch non-localized anime, play nigh non-localizable H-games, or read non-localized manga, and so many more people therefore find the original titles of mainstream games "obscure", "absurd", or otherwise somehow offensive. This is ridiculous. We have a policy and should stick to it.
0xCCBA696 said: The reason everyone is making such a fuss about this is simple. Much fewer people play non-localized "mainstream" games than watch non-localized anime, play nigh non-localizable H-games, or read non-localized manga, and so many more people therefore find the original titles of mainstream games "obscure", "absurd", or otherwise somehow offensive. This is ridiculous. We have a policy and should stick to it.
But the reason we have that policy is that for anime and manga most people prefer the original versions over localizations. As you said, for most console games we have the opposite situation: most people have only played the localized version and often aren't even aware of what the game or characters are called in Japanese. I think that whenever the EN->JP policy was agreed upon people mainly had anime and manga in mind and now we're blindly trying to apply a policy to a situation that's never been fully considered.
Are there any specific reasons the policy should apply to console games other than "it's what we do for anime and manga"?
Is that a bad reason? It promotes consistency. What about games that aren't localized - are we not allowed to upload images from them to danbooru? Should we change the tags we use for such games if and when they eventually do get localized?
Just because a majority of users prefer original versions of anime/manga but localized versions of games doesn't mean that we should make an artificial distinction. As Ephyon said, it's more of a "principle" thing, and it really doesn't affect the casual user (or even the heavy user) at all, since searches return the same things for localized terms and tagging by localized terms still works within the system. And if it's all about principles, it kind of makes sense that we should have a principle, don't you think? It makes no sense to differentiate games from anime and manga in this regard.
I would probably prefer we treat them like the "fine-art" titles from forum #18040, where we use the English name if one is commonly known, the native name if one is not.
This is inconsistant with anime/manga titles, but one of the primary reasons we focus on the original Japanese name in those cases is because things get posted well prior to the English release of the series.
Usually in the case of games that have any chance of an English release, that release pretty quickly follows the Japanese, and an English title is established pretty soon. In the case of anime it can be years before a series is dubbed or translated and published.
That's because there's not much of a fan translation scene for games these days because of more advanced anti-meddling game engines I suppose. There's a big difference with the fine-art titles - as 葉月 noted, those can be in any language, whereas since this is danbooru, "original titles" of copyright tags are almost always going to be in Japanese, so we can afford to make a blanket rule. I still think being consistent is more important than pandering to what's the most "well-known" name, but that's just me I guess.
Oh, also to cite precedent for what it's worth, we decided to keep Pokemon names English in forum #7689. So whichever way we decide, there will be inconsistancy either with that decision, or with the anime/manga titles.
I don't particularly think these aliases are a good idea, and we do have things like the Castlevania decision that are relevant here. But on the other hand consistency is easier, in that we don't have to sit here and hash out which games get exceptions and which don't.
Of course easiest is nobody making the thread to begin with and us going along with what's always worked, but the can of worms is opened, and what's done is done. That's what the forums are for. ::shrugs:: I'm just not sure what to go with. The outcry is quite negative on these aliases and I imagine it'll just get worse if I do them... but then that's not going to be the primary factor in the decision.
I guess what we need to do now is make some arguments as to why each of these should or should not be aliased to the Japanese. What rationale would each of you propose for leaving them in English? And which ones? And why not others? This is why, despite liking the English name better for really popular series, it's just much, much simpler to make an argument from the "consistency" perspective.
BTW, T5J8F8, suggesting more aliases here and there in the middle of a heated discussion makes them likely to get lost. If you have more suggestions please edit them into your original post. Thanks.
My argument: Pokémon was excepted due to the complexity of the massive amounts of monsters involved. Since these creatures are largely minor characters (and what major ones there are often share their Japanese trademarked names), and since a good number of the Japanese names are obnoxiously generic (Thunder, Coil, etc.), it's easiest to go with the unique and known-among-us names (of which the only conflicts have been with Mew, Tauros, Kabuto, and notably Gloom). We have kept the character names consistent according to their Japanese names (esp. since even within our dub some characters have gotten multiple names), aliasing only when a character's reached ~30 images. I believe an alias to Pocket Monsters and Pocket Monsters Special would be fine, since people oughta figure what they are, the comic was known as "Pokémon Adventures" here, and we can finally avoid that damnable accent mark. For Castlevania, the complexity is in the game titles (the most complex character names thus far are Trevor/Ralph's, Carrie's, and Alucard & Dracula (if we ever decide to implement their full names)). Japan's "Castlevania" is our "Lament of Innocence", Castlevania [64] is Legacy of Darkness, and the Japanese materials have shown either support for our localized title (Portrait of Ruin) or an odd Englishization themselves (Concerto of Midnight Sun). Since our titles tend to have a steady format of "somthing of something", they work easiest. I still want a subtitle-to-full-title alias (as was done for the Kingdom Hearts games).
For the others, they have enough consistency, we have the wiki, and some are obvious enough as to what they are (purple tags with "Zelda" and "Kirby" in 'em? not too hard there). 'bout the only that're out there are Kid Icarus and Animal Crossing, but there are so few AC pics as to make that relatively moot, and I'd wager most people searching for Pit are under the SSBB rally. And, as always, there are the aliases (and luckily, our series names don't have punctuations to foul things up).
