All weebs and whatnot aside, I find this whole discussion about JP localization fascinating!
I've got a basic understanding of Japanese, and I often notice how English localizations attempt to garnish every single ね and よ with some random weird phrasing.
A very simple example that got stuck with me: in Shenmue 3, Ryo saying "kore..." ("this...") when opening a drawer, is subtitled as "what the...", which sounds so randomly rude!
It's relatively annoying, and some cases are more jarring than others — as an Italian, every attempt to translate "itadakimasu" in English sounds jarring to me.
Ultimately, IMHO, it's all about accepting that the Japanese language is built upon culture, traditions, habits, and sensibilities that are just completely different and unrelatable from the European/American ones.
Localizing Japanese in English is practically impossible, as it's impossible to satisfy everyone's expectations. Even the folks working on Yakuza/LAD, rightly praised for the quality of their localizations, take a great deal of liberties in their work!
There's a lot of things that are untranslatable, and that can be a real problem, because sometimes it's strangely relevant, not only for characterization but also for the plot.
And that puts a lot of translators into a pickle, for sure. Especially if it's for the long term in a manga, or a game series like Trails where there's sometimes some oopsie and rewriting to be done to stay in line with what was intended.
Can't really avoid that, you can only do your best to make decent prose instead of adding -san and nakama everywhere, with some fixes when needs be.
But there's also some translations that really try to adapt content properly to their market... and that can be very detrimental despite the good intentions. The
adaptation might be correct, but I distinctly remember reading GTO in French... fair enough all around.
Except at some point one of the characters really go out of their way to interact with the marginalized part of Japanese society, outcasts, homeless people... that find some common ground with their love for enka music and old 60s-70s singers.
They adapted that using Johnny Halliday, the "French Elvis", which does fit the period and the music somewhat.
So now you have older, largely culturally disconnected, traditionalist Japanese men that sing old French rock songs. And mate, this DOESN"T WORK. The immersion is suddenly mauled by a bear, and of course they didn't redraw everything, so they still have old female singers painted everywhere.
Which they explain with annotations, talking about the said singers.
And
that's where the problem lies, nowadays there's some terrible fear that translations cannot involve any annotation, as if people can't read or understand that they sometimes lack the cultural references, as if that wasn't how adapting any cultural artifact was done.
Sometimes, you need the annotations.
It shouldn't always be replacing references with different ones because they're easier to understand for the public, translating a joke is doable, replacing the religious background with another because it's more relatable, much less so.
I've seen that often, conflating karmic concepts with original sin because it's easy and "close enough"...
Not that it applies for Eiyuden in this case. At least I hope so.