(Edit: Hey, future-me here to issue a correction. Turns out based on what others have noticed there's a good chance FM2 isn't an MTL at all but rather a more conventional type of inexcusably bad translation: https://twitter.com/HardFeelings21/status/1711678658421911776)
When I heard that there were going to be remakes of the first three Front Mission games coming out on Switch (and later other systems), and that they'd all be available in English, I was excited. Particularly for Front Mission 2—that one had missed an English release back in the day and so would be new to me. Not to mention pretty much everywhere I've looked considers it one of the best games in the series—and yes, the "no official English release" and "one of the most liked games in the series" riders both apply to FM5 too, but FM2 hurts more for me because it's a gap in the series, y'know what I mean? Learning that Square Enix weren't directly publishing it themselves but rather leaving it to some company I'd never heard of called Forever Entertainment made me a bit worried, as did the state of their remake of the first game in the series once I played that, but their FM2 remake didn't seem to have the same graphical failings of their FM1 remake and that was my biggest issue with that one, so I figured it couldn't be too bad.
The fact that I'm writing this says it all, doesn't it?
Except no, it doesn't, because I have to explain how it's bad and why this is a big deal. Because what Forever Entertainment have done is machine translate the game. More specifically, what they've done is something called a machine translation, post-edit (MTPE for short) where they throw the script into a computer, then hand what it spits out to an editor to touch it up. And if you know your stuff in this field that's all I need to say, but most people don't so I need to go into more detail.
Machine translations always suck. They can't not suck, because they're being done by a computer program that doesn't understand or even have the ability to understand things like context or colloquialisms that you need to understand to be able to translate things effectively. These days you have stuff like deepL that talks a big game about using AI to be better at this and can actually produce complete grammatically correct sentences often enough to fool people who aren't looking carefully into thinking it's better than the old Babelfish-style stuff, but that just replaces one kind of garbage with another. What that kind of translation software actually does is it outputs what is effectively a weighted average of how pre-existing translations of similar text wrote it, which means it completely flattens character voices and invariably gets things catastrophically wrong because, again, it can't tell the context of its source data.
Having a human editor sounds on paper like a way to minimize these problems, but it doesn't work because, again, the machine translation killed the original text's voice and completely changed the meaning of a bunch of lines. Which means that editing the text effectively requires you to look at the original source text in order to correct everything the program got wrong. I've seen a fair few translators on Twitter mention that this effectively requires you to throw the program's output out entirely and translate it yourself to get something that actually reads well, and I see no reason to assume otherwise. Which means it's almost always gonna suck, because if you're replacing your translator with a computer you're doing it because you want to save money, and with game localization being a dreadfully underpaid field as it is you can probably guess that MTPE rates can't possibly be enough to convince someone to care. So the end result is that almost every MTPE reads identically in ways that are extremely easy to notice once you've seen a few, and that makes it really obvious that the people responsible just didn't care. A MTPE, then, can effectively be read as the execs flipping off everyone who actually cares about the text and the artistry thereof.
Obviously this is always a bad thing, but Forever Entertainment's take on Front Mission 2 is even more insulting than most MTPEs because it's a MTPE of Front Mission 2. This is a game from probably the most respected era in Square's history, that's part of this huge sweeping military sci-fi epic full of intrigue, drama, and realpolitik. It's incredibly respected and considered one of the best parts of the series. It finally getting an official English release after over twenty years should've been huge, finally bridging a gap in the English releases that everyone expected would never be bridged.
And Forever Entertainment machine translated it.
How do I not see this as one of the worst insults ever leveled at a video game series and the people who love it? This is Forever's management saying that, to them, the extremely detailed long-term plotting of the Front Mission series doesn't matter and can be safely thrown into the MTPE meatgrinder, its writing transformed into the most generic drivel imaginable, all in the name of saving a few bucks. It's a disgrace, honestly.
It's especially absurd that they thought they could get away with this considering their version of Front Mission 1st used the DS script, which is a real localization and thus has actual character to it. Which makes their FM2 script's worthlessness even more obvious since a comparison that shows what it could've been is right there.
So, what do I think should be done? Well, for starters they could apologize. A public admission from Forever that they fucked up would help. But they'd also need to fix it. Ideally, this would involve throwing the entire machine translated script out, hiring a real translator-editor team to redo the whole thing from zero, and paying them enough to care about the result. If they're willing to do that, then they can probably fix things.
But that's a pretty big "if"
