One of the reasons why I work really, really hard to provide what's hopefully natural-sounding dialogue in my localizations is to help players recognize and embrace the intellectual foundation underpinning what might otherwise be dismissed as naively sincere premises or themes. A consequence of the legacy of slipshod translations in Japanese media for decades is that it's historically misrepresented creators' capacity to create thoughtful, contemplative material worth probing at a deeper level. As a translator, I always feel that it's imperative that I write material that invites such engagement from foreign players, even if the original Japanese may, at times, have rhetorical or argumentative weaknesses for any number of reasons, which it often does. The point is, if I don't take the material seriously as often the first English speaker dealing with it, I can't expect players overseas to take it seriously, either, and at that point, I've effectively failed the game and its developers.
This is doubly true with "anime" games, by which I mean, not necessarily just licensed games, but ones which derive their storytelling techniques and dialogue style/rhythm from anime. If not handled carefully, especially in terms of cadence, such material, no matter how smartly crafted the Japanese might otherwise be, can be liable to being divisive among people who don't otherwise actively consume a lot of Japanese media and have built up that insight about how characters, themes, etc. tend to present themselves. A lot of foreign media publishers, especially anime licensors, don't invest in the time, money, and talent to achieve that extra polish because they feel that the existing audience is large enough that a translation that's good enough for those people is sufficient and that may be the case from a fiscal ROI perspective for mainstream genres. But anything with less penetration gets kneecapped even worse than usual by such an approach because such translations fail to bridge what might very well be vast genre literacy gaps between native Japanese and foreign audiences.
But when you do put in the effort to write translations that intellectually respect and embrace that sincerity, it pays off. You might never get everyone on board for the ride, but at least you're being creatively honest in conveying that work's fundamental identity and giving the people open to engaging genuine reasons to care. I saw it in people's responses to my dating sim LPs, games that have been dismissed overseas for decades as being indulgent fluff, and I'm lucky and grateful to see it in their responses to my professional output, as well. It will eternally be a point of pride that my team and I on Tales of Arise got as many people to care about that story and those characters as we did for a game that for many people comes from a franchise that's the epitome of "anime" games. We only got there because we respected the material we were handed, we did the work, and we spent a lot of long nights over the course of years crafting a translation that strove to make the characters sound both intelligent and heartfelt in equal measure. Knowing that premise and those plot points, it's very easy to imagine a world where that game was given less care and thought in its translation and got written off as "just" another well-playing anime game like so many other Tales installments.
Looking at the group of writers who worked on Forspoken and seeing how they pretty much all come from film or, at least, very film-influenced backgrounds, it's not terribly shocking that the game maintains the particular affectation that it does. I won't say that there isn't a market for it when that sort of writing clearly sells to a mass audience elsewhere, but I think it, like so much other mainstream western media, makes the mistake of regarding sincerity as intellectually vapid and too soft to be capable of making a point when it's sincerity that makes any good material relatably impactful in the first place. And the thing about sincerity is, sometimes it's clumsy and dopey in how it presents itself because people tend to be clumsy and dopey creatures when being sincere themselves. We aren't always eloquent or refined in the moment and a very quick way to rob a work of any sincerity is to, in some ways, let writers go about their job a little too professionally and compose material that's relentlessly polished in a marketable way. It's not to say that game writers shouldn't strive to iterate upon their work and refine it before delivering, of course. Sincerity can be elegant and smooth when it matches the personality of the character and the tone of a scene or a work. But elegance and smoothness by themselves are no substitute for sincerity.
