@blobtronic:I am also Chinese and split time in the US. Different people have varied degrees of reactions, which is normal. I commend the devs for trying [note I didn't use "racism" either], but I keep circling back on 2 thoughts:
1. The Chinese characters in the UI are used for aesthetics/style. They look cool, thematic, and mysterious to the outsider's eyes, but actively worsens the product for anyone who can read it. They are then essentially appropriated for non-Chinese-reading eyes to fetishize. Kind of like (but not as bad as) tattooing google-translated nonsense.
2. I'm not nitpicking certain scenes or minor aspects, this is the game UI, the most non-changing and in-your-face parts of the presentation. Death, XP, and Gameover are probably the most commonly seen UI elements in this entire game, and they are all wrong and distracting to me. The devs can't convince me they truly cared and did all their homework when these mistakes are still around. And again these are unforced errors, AC:Origins didn't do this. Sekiro doesn't even do it this much with their homegrown devs. Without the random Chinese thrown in, the visual style of the game is entire fine. No one asked for this, if you are unsure you'll get it right.
They do it on their official website too. The words used is an adjective, meaning "novel". "News" should be "xinwen" (I see GB is blocking Chinese characters, was this from the Korean spam wars?).But could it be descriptive of the news? Well it is rarely used that way either. And the rest of the section headers appear to be 1:1 translations, even if I think they also made weird choices. These mistakes just make me think "you didn't actually want to put in the work to appreciate and communicate Chinese culture, you just wanted the look" (or maybe "man you really got scammed by some consultant that didn't actually have a grasp of Chinese")
I just hate the amount of Chinese characters side-by-side they paste into the UI.
1. Why?? Some are directly translations of the English, others not?
2. For the ones that are not, the actual Chinese localization don't even use most of them - so clearly they aren't informative
3. Some are also just plain wrong, like the "XP" - pasted with characters meaning "an interesting experience", not the words for "accumulating experience" - this is fixed in the Chinese localization, so they know it's wrong but just didn't fix. Also the popup on the side of "Death" is a word for "falling" never used for death.
4. Environmental text is aggravating to look at. If you put scrolls up on both sides of a door/path/room, they are suppose to pair up in rhyme, not be the same text or just random.
5. I'm pretty sure one of the key symbology in the game (5 characters with 1 at the center) is wrong and different from the in-game text box explanation.
No one would bat an eye if any of the above weren't there (Do you play AC:unity and think there's not enough French in the UI or on the wall?), especially if you can't get them right. I can only conclude that the devs just wanted Chinese characters there to look cool and give players a sense of vaguely Chinese atmosphere. Embarrassing surface-level cultural tourism type shit.
[note I do not critique objects/people/ideas represented in the game, because Chinese-speaking culture is vast, and a piece of art/entertainment should be able to simplify/modify. However the Chinese text issue is just black and white and hard to ignore]
Overall the game is fine, and I hope the devs keep doing good work. But this should definitely be disqualified from "Best style/ Best looking" awards.
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