I keep meaning to write a formal blog post on this subject, but as the one who subtitled the panty sequence into Japanese on YouTube and NicoNico mostly just to see how her really hardcore fans would react over there, it's been really interesting to compare the Japanese impressions with the semi-tumultuous ones we've seen from westerners here and YouTube. As the fact of her virtual concerts going international shows, Miku's not exactly lacking in devout fans on both sides of the ocean and since fans are generally keen on trying to expand the audience for the things that they like, you'd think the Japanese side would care as much about how Project Diva F is being represented in that video and take similar offense to the guys' apathy and general facetious roughhousing.
The reality so far is actually that the Japanese fans have been more or less entirely inviting of how the guys covered that game. Part of that lack of outrage can probably be attributed to how I massaged some lines in the translation here and there to play better with that audience, but a lot of it also probably has to do with the general lack of aggression that there is to be found on the Japanese-speaking Internet outside of places like 2chan and Hachima, both of which I still visit regularly myself because the discussions are typically still pretty grounded and sane. So instead what I'm mostly finding in the Japanese comments on NicoNico and Twitter are people that are just laughing at and with the guys' antics. I didn't subtitle the whole video because 50-plus minutes is a whole hell of a lot of footage to translate into Japanese as a one-man outfit, but the majority of the comments are just innocent bemusal over how these three foreigners seem to know so little about something that's so ubiquitous where they are. A lot of Japanese people have a genuine interest in how the things they enjoy and just take for granted in their day to day lives are received by people outside that circle and so the people who responded to my subtitles mostly found the video to be in good humor from that standpoint, regardless of how "wrong" or "misguided" they might have been in their impressions of the game and how they played it. And when I say most, I don't even mean in the sense that there have been any vocal detractors; I just mean some people liked it more than others for various reasons, as you would naturally expect. What's more, a lot of people found Jeff's sarcastic tirade over the panty stuff specifically to be really funny since the Miku brand is generally pretty puritanical by anime girl standards there and it's not at all often that you find people over there calling out the more perverted otaku in any fandom there, so they generally found the whole affair to be pretty refreshing.
My point is that without having that history of knowing what a Quick Look is or what Giant Bomb is in general (they had a very light Japanese Internet presence previously, but not much), pretty much all of the Japanese people who have commented on that video grasped what that video's aims were and took it in stride. I made sure to provide context for the video in the descriptions on YouTube and NicoNico, so it's established in Japanese too that the video was part of a greater piece that also dealt with other parts of the game. Viewers over there seem to know that those Miku games are designed for a pretty specific subset of her Japanese fanbase in particular and since they already understand it's one of those products where you're either probably convinced of its merits ahead of time or not, they just took it as a fun video to watch where they could see how people who are mostly "Miku virgins," so to speak, take to a product that is very much so not designed to introduce them to the brand. That's just as true for the original Japanese version as it is the localized product; Sega didn't exactly localize it with the expectation that they'd suddenly trigger a Miku boom over in the West or anything, but rather that there were enough people already interested in what that sort of game has to offer that they don't necessarily have to go on a PR blitz or do anything extravagant to try and convince the masses it's worth buying in order to make a profit. In my mind, any collateral attention that the game gets from videos like that Quick Look is just extra marketing that the game gets without Sega having to expend the effort. I know I read a pretty good number of comments for the original video here that made it look like it actually convinced some people to buy it in spite of the staff's reception; some of those might be sarcastic, but I know from experience that I've purchased some games after watching similar Quick Looks because I saw something in those games the staff didn't and wanted to play it myself.
I'm not saying it's inherently wrong to like or dislike that video. I think by virtue of the fact I went out of my way to subtitle part of it that you can infer which side of that spectrum I fall on. I'm just bringing all of this up to show that hardly all of the Miku fandom is mad at what Jeff put out like the thread title might imply and that in fact he more or less won over a lot of members of its most vibrant and dedicated segment in Japan. If I'm being honest, knowing what I do about a lot of Japanese people having lived over there, I wasn't actually expecting it to be so well-liked either, but I think it speaks to their Internet culture that they were able to more or less embrace it without feeling like its depiction of the game was in the wrong or anything of the sort. They just took it in stride and carried on in good humor. In fact, I also subtitled a similar breakdown Jeff had over Gal Gun a few years back, a game that's much more gratuitous about indulging his fake panty fetish, and that's also been well-received. And for what it's worth, I get messages on Twitter from Japanese fans, many of them Miku diehards specifically, waiting in anticipation for my next subtitled video; they're just legitimately interested in seeing how their humor and philosophy as Western players applies to other games they're interested in.
Just wanted to mention all of that since I know those subtitles got some attention here and that there aren't necessarily a whole lot of other members here who are capable of really looking into those sorts of things because of the language barrier. I'm not here to sway people one way or another so much as just add a wrinkle to the whole discussion. Carry on.
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