[SilverSyko]

Originally Posted by Klashikari

I find extremely odd and exaggerated to think that cussing is actually "appealing" the NA audience: it surely put the audience in a cliche that many would definitely not enjoy, moreso those who are versed in anime stuff.

Look at American media. What's the most successful animated show there? South Park. Look at the kinds of games Americans play. What are the most successful titles? The Call of Duty series.The most successful animated film? Shrek 2.

Tastes of the North American general public are vastly different from the Japanese. Based on the facts I don't think it's exaggerated to say North Americans find crudeness and violence very entertaining. Editing a game like Neptunia to include some of that to a reasonable degree makes tons of sense to me.

And for some reason, other localization of very "japanese" game do not have such treatment even for US releases: you don't see FF games with that kind of stuff, right?

Well for one thing think about what kind of goals and tone Final Fantasy has compared to Neptunia. While I have never played a main FF game for longer than an hour or two, I know they're much more serious in tone and try to tell an engaging story. Neptunia on the other hand does not. It relies mostly on it's comedy, references and cuteness to get by. I think in Neptunia's case it's allowed to get away with larger amount of "Americanization" since it needs a lot more of it to have appeal to Americans, but not too much that it loses it's Japanese flair. That's why it's the dialogue and behaviors of the characters that have changed the most out of everything.

Really, while the "flavor" change might please "some people" in getting characters in a very non subtle way, I sincerely have hard time to believe that such treatment would make the game more suitable for NA public.

Well unfortunately based on what's incredibly popular in North America I can't really agree with this. It's a shame but....yeah.

Also, no, some speech pattern obviously lead to differences and perceptions of a given character to a certain degree. Really, having a character talking all the time about food and using 5 years old joke give a -much more- juvenile and dumb image than if the speech was moderately normal, but in a hyper way.
Overal personality cannot be exactly considered the same when interests and actions are shown in a very different light. That's like having K-on heroines talking about boys instead of cakes.

Well I'm just going to leave it at this then since I don't think there's much more I can say on the subject. I never played the Japanese version, I don't intend to, and I'm completely fine with how the characters are portrayed as they currently are in the NA version. I was given expectations on how they would behave and I got it. Simple as that.