So, recently, there has been a bit of a discussion on social media about localization that stemmed from disgruntled Latin American fans of Undertale and Deltarune. I won't bother to recap the whole thing; you can read Toby's response here.

I find both the initial Latin American reaction and the subsequent reactions to Toby's response very interesting. Most posts made are just Undertale and Deltarune fans being upset that the games don't have Spanish and Portuguese translations. Fair enough, I guess. There's also some discussion on the Undertale concerts never coming to Latin America despite it being advertised as a world tour. Yeah, that's fair too.

But I'm also seeing a lot of people say that Toby is being "pretentious" or "arrogant" for wanting to oversee the localization process himself? Huh? I'm seeing some imply that he's being racist for not localizing the games too, on top of all sorts of other insane shit. Why do we have tons of tweets (one with at least 20k likes) calling him an Israeli over this? What? How did we get here?

What is localization?

See, I think of localization as more of an accessibility feature than anything else. It exists purely to remove a barrier between a player and a game.

The thing is, localization can be quite expensive, and it demands a lot of oversight to get right. And, like many accessibility features, it can compromise the original work in the process.

The original puns might be lost, the cultural context might not fully land, and if the localization isn't done carefully, the whole meaning of the game might change. This actually happened with the original fan translation of OFF (the game the original tweet was about), where the ending's meaning was completely changed by accident, and it wasn't fixed for YEARS. Heck, it wasn't just the ending; the whole game's narrative was made into a mess because the translation failed to properly portray the different pronouns used to differentiate between two of the characters.

A good localization team can work around a lot of this, replacing puns with equivalent ones, finding ways to carry cultural context across, and rewording sentences to convey context that'd be impossible otherwise... but it will never be the same as the original. At best, it's a different experience; at worst, it's an inferior one. It's a compromise.

To some developers, that compromise is absolutely worth it. More players, more revenue, more reach, hooray! Other developers might decide against it, or want to do it properly, which, as we've already established, is hard and isn't always viable.

Then I started reading the comments...

As I started looking through the comments and the quote posts, I started seeing some people claim that accessibility should always come before artistic integrity, as a non-negotiable hard rule. You know, as if artistic integrity is some sort of luxury concern, the self-indulgent worry of creators who don't want to do the work of inclusion or whatever.

Needless to say, I disagree. If anything, I see it as an inherently anti-art take. Not because accessibility is unimportant, but because it treats art as a product that simply needs to reach as many consumers as possible.

Art is often defined by its specificity, and some of that specificity creates barriers by design. Think about Kaizo Mario hacks, for example. They're difficult as shit, often requiring a series of near-frame-perfect inputs, appealing to a very small subset of an already relatively niche fandom. Yet nobody considers them moral failures, or even failures of game design. The barrier is the point, and we all instinctively understand that.

Yet when it comes to games like Dark Souls, we start arguing about whether an easy mode should be added, or if the game should be as hard as it is in the first place. Won't someone think of the disabled people! The difference, of course, is popularity. Kaizo hacks are niche enough that nobody feels entitled to them. Dark Souls got big enough that people started feeling like its difficulty was something being done to them, rather than a deliberate creative choice they were free to take or leave.

That's the pattern I keep seeing with localization too. Once a game reaches a certain cultural footprint, the barrier of language stops feeling like a neutral fact about the world and starts feeling like a personal slight, a gate being kept specifically against you. It's no longer "this game isn't made for me", it's "this game is being withheld from me".

And once we enter the moral accusation territory, people stop asking the actually important questions:

• What does the work lose when it's adapted to appeal to me?
• How viable is it to adapt the work so that it appeals to me?
• Should the creator be allowed to decide if those tradeoffs are worth it?
• Is the creator right in wanting to have full control over how people experience their work, as opposed to handing the adaptation process off to a third party?

TO BE EXTREMELY CLEAR, none of this is an argument against localization as a concept. Most games benefit from it massively (as long as they can afford it), and many developers do decide that the tradeoffs are worth it to have the game reach a wider audience. This is an argument against the moralization of the choice, and the assumption that refusing or limiting localization is an act of exclusion, or even racism, rather than a legitimate creative and logistical compromise.

And no, not everyone who pushes back is one of them "gringos" who come from privilege and don't understand your situation either.

A bit of background

For those who are unaware, I am Turkish. I grew up in Turkey, and I still live there to this day. Much like all the other Turks, I grew up without being able to read a word of English. Things were even tougher for me back then, as not a single game would ship with any kind of Turkish support. The first high-profile video game to ever get one was, believe it or not, the original Crysis. And it was a big deal. So I get how much it means to be able to play a game in your own language. I get how important localization (and accessibility in general) can be.

But still, when I was growing up, we all just accepted that as the reality we lived in. Turkey was simply not a major market that'd make them money. There wasn't much incentive to cater to us, and we all knew it. So we either didn't play those games, played them without understanding a word of the dialogue, or went out of our way to learn English. Capitalism sucks, but we all live in it.

Looking at the situation of Spanish and Portuguese localization in video games today, I'm not seeing a similar picture. At this point, Spanish might as well be the most supported language in the industry after English, and I'm sure Portuguese isn't too far behind. Undertale is, really, one of the few massively popular games without an official Spanish or Portuguese localization.

It's not like those are the only languages skipped here anyway. The game is only available in English and Japanese in the first place (the languages Toby speaks), yet nobody's arguing that Toby is exclusionary towards the Chinese, the French, or even Turks.

Look, it isn't my intention to say "be grateful for what you have" because that's lame. Things can always be improved, and I don't think we should ever settle for less. But, to me, the reaction here seems kind of out of proportion and misguided. Even if it's coming from an understandable place.

Either way, accessibility matters. So does artistic integrity, creator autonomy, and the logistical realities of game development. All these things are often in tension, and, in my opinion, that tension deserves honest analysis rather than a hierarchy that declares one is more important than the other. But, unfortunately, that kind of nuance seems to be missing in online discourse these days...