Is it really that much to just chuck a subtitle track on there and leave the japa va's? Sure it's some work but from what I understand of weeaboos that buy these games most would actually prefer just having subtitles and the og va.
Probably a stupid question, but why don't they do the translation as they're making the game? assuming there is a chance it will release in the western market, wouldn't it just be easier? it seems now like there is the finished Japanese game, and then a group has to translate the whole thing, and then they release it.
This is feasible but very, very rare. The reason being that most teams keep changing stuff until the minute and do not know the definition of the term "text lock." This also drives the Japanese sound teams crazy because they have to have the actors come back for pickup lines.
When people DO attempt this it usually involves a ton of wasted/thrown away work, since they decide the 30 side quests with 1,000 translated words aren't fun at the last minute and should be just cut after some poor translator slogged through the whole thing (and got paid for it, too).
The larger the project is, the more of a nightmare it is to keep everything in sync. It's totally doable for small games like Tekken. (Well, the old Tekkens, not the new one with the 10 hours of cutscenes and the distinguished mentally-challenged 100,000-word story mode script)
Is it really that much to just chuck a subtitle track on there and leave the japa va's? Sure it's some work but from what I understand of weeaboos that buy these games most would actually prefer just having subtitles and the og va.
It is very, very difficult to get a game greenlit for US distro if you do not have an English voice track, even if the weeaboo population is screaming to keep Jonny Yong Bosch out of it and keep the original Japanese voices. Remember that those people are a very vocal minority.
I haven't been following it lately, but I was wondering if any medium to high-profile games have slipped through with only subtitle tracks (aside from Yakuza).