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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah, they claim it’s because of ‘local distributors’ to that region not giving them the subtitles, but I know, for example, that Korean movies are 99.5% always released on DVD, even in Korea with English subtitles. Yet in Korea, half the Korean content wouldn’t have English subtitles, yet in other markets it did. Ironic that my spouse and I find it easier to consume Korean content outside of Korea than inside Korea.

    You see this on youtube as well. Inside Korea a lot of movies are available through youtube with Korean subtitles embedded on them. They’re cheap too, Often you can get new movies for under $5 (purchased, not rented), older ones can often be around $1. Same movie in another country, no subtitle, or certainly not Korean subtitles. Youtube has native subtitle support and they don’t use it. At least we can VPN into Korean youtube and purchase things.

    Amazon is bad for it. If you go into a show and look at the subtitles some of them are clickable. Meaning it searches by that subtitle language to show you more content that has that language as a subtitle. Problem is their subtitles are regional and they don’t filter based on region. So when you search for Korean you might get 100 results with less than 30% actually having Korean subtitles. But they return the result because they have Korean subtitles in another region. My guess is in the US or Japan as Korea does not have it’s own Amazon region since they don’t operate there.

    Disney plays its own games. Extraordinary season 2 is missing most of the Asian subtitles that were available for season 1. So we can’t pick that up even though we enjoyed season 1.

    Being a multicultural family and trying to consume content legitimately is exhausting to be honest.


  • The worst part is when they geo-block accessibility. Netflix likes to make subtitles regional. In their mind no one ever moves to another part of the world to a country where they aren’t 100% fluent in the language. Doesn’t happen. I’m assuming their execs don’t hire any staff in their mansions that aren’t completely bilingual. You compare this to something like Disney and Apple who have a subtitle list a mile long on every show, Netflix will just heavily region restrict and even restrict subtitle availability by profile language. Lived in Korea, on my english profile Korean subtitles were available. A month after moving to an English speaking country, Korean subtitles disappeared from my profile (on the android TV app, they’re still there in Desktop view, sometimes). A korean profile on the same android TV app? Korean is a choice. Their android TV app just cuts off several subtitle options for no reason.




















  • I’m old enough to remember these terms developing. I can remember when the first Diablo came out and called itself an ‘ARPG’. There was some controversy over this term and simply the use of the term RPG. As video games developed, there was some prestige around the ‘RPG’ label. By the late 90s, you were looking at a lot of well loved and top games using the term. Gold Box Games, Bard’s Tale, Ultima, JRPGs like Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.

    Diablo is the first game that I can recall that really prominently advertised itself as an ARPG. They did this of course because it wasn’t really as deep as the rest of them. There weren’t a lot of ‘choices’ to be made in this game. You set up your character and ran through the dungeon. They wanted to use the ‘RPG’ label because it was well regarded at the time and helped move units. It was a lot like calling an RV a sports car because sports cars have wheels, doors, can drive on the road. ARPGs had RPG mechanics, in that there were things like stats and you could choose abilities/spells on level up. But they really weren’t RPGs.

    Around that time in PC Gamer there was a great column about what made an RPG an RPG and it was clear that games like Diablo weren’t it, the key from that was an RPG had players making meaningful choices that had a lasting impact on the game world. Whether you threw fireballs or lightning bolts wasn’t exactly a meaningful choice that had impact on the game world.

    When it came to JPRGs vs RPGs, the difference was always fairly clear. RPGs were of the D&D variety. While they featured magic, the system itself was somewhat grounded in reality. JRPGs had a distinct style. Big numbers, wild combos, certain aesthetics, etc. To me the JRPG label makes sense, because it is a different style of game. I would note that JRPGs though really didn’t fit the definition of RPG for the most part, a lot of ‘RPGs’ didn’t because there was very little decision making. They were quest style games where you had a party that levelled up, but you weren’t making many decisions in the game that had much an impact.

    I think the labels are absolutely important for distinguishing the type of game it is. People want to know what they’re getting into when they play it. If I’m expecting Baldur’s gate and get Diablo, I’m probably going to be a bit disappointed.