I've been playing Ghost of Tsushima on PS5 and taking advantage of the updated animation that means the Japanese audio is no longer out of synch during conversations. When I played the first act or so on PS4, that drove me nuts, and I quickly switched to the English audio which is actually perfectly good. And it should be: it's an American game made by an American studio, despite the medieval Japanese setting, and the English language audio doesn't suffer from the pitfalls many English dubs of Japanese games fall into. Still, the setting means the Japanese language track sounds more natural than hearing English dialogue interspersed with Japanese names and terms, and I'm definitely enjoying having that as a baked in option.
It also means I get to compare the Japanese translation to the English subtitles. Usually when I'm doing this, I'm comparing the original Japanese to the localisation team's subtitles; this is the opposite experience, and it's fascinating. One of the more obvious changes is that whenever the English subs refer to someone being Japanese (as distinct from the Mongolian invaders) the Japanese audio instead tends to refer to someone being 'of the island', e.g. 島の女 [shima no onna] 'woman of the island'.
There are also a number of name changes. I'm used to these in the other direction, where Japanese names are perceived as difficult for English speakers to parse (or too similar to other names in a narrative). In the original, now-revised localisation of Sega's Yakuza / Like a Dragon series, Kazuma Kiryu's father figure and mentor had his name changed from Shintaro Kazama in Japanese to Shintaro Fuma in English. No doubt the similarity between Kazuma and Kazama was deemed confusing -- it's worth noting here that this fear of confusion can extend into adaptations of English language properties too even when translation isn't involved: Game of Thrones altered a number of names from A Song of Ice and Fire to make them more distinct.
In Ghost of Tsushima, I was initially struck by a change to the names of Masako Adachi's sons, giving them both the same 'Shige' root. I wondered if that sounded more natural or traditional to a Japanese speaker. I discovered a bigger change upon starting the Iki Island expansion added with the Director's Cut: protagonist Jin Sakai's father is renamed from Kazumasa Sakai in the English subs to Tadashi Sakai in Japanese. It's a fairly striking change, and I don't know the cause. I can find some speculation that it's basically down to the number of syllables: as it would generally be accompanied by the honorific -sama, Kazusama-sama wouldn't fit for lip synching during scenes, but Tadashi-sama would. I'd love to find something more definitive.
