That's the sort of thing I hate and I think it's a slap in the face to the original developers. They spent all that time trying to weave a story that would actually have some gravity, only to have the localization team suck all the color/life out of it turning it into something patronizing rather than engaging. And why? Because Americans foolishly underestimate children and have a habit of going to great (unnecessary) lengths to shelter them from reality.
To be fair, most of the time these days the original writers/developers are explicitly signing off on any changes made in localization.
I personally don't see localization edits as a bad thing most of the time; cultures are simply different the world over. Some things that are acceptable in Japan aren't acceptable here, and so they get changed. Some things that are acceptable here aren't acceptable in Japan, and so they get changed too. As just one example, in most cases when a Western cartoon series is dubbed into Japanese, if the characters were drawn with four fingers, the art is altered for the Japanese dub to give them five fingers, because while in the US a four-fingered hand means nothing other than the animators choosing to be abstract in the character design to divorce the show from 'reality' or possibly even just being done because it's easier to draw, in Japan a four fingered hand carries significant connotations of association with the yakuza. (Disney works are one of the few exceptions, because Disney has specifically disallowed this kind of editing.)
Cultural standards also change over time, and sometimes can be reactionary to current events, when remakes come around (example: the South Figaro scene in FF6 Advance being edited, and the various edits to the 3DS port of DQ8). *Those* kind of edits are what, IMO, should actually appropriately be called censorship (for all that it's self-censorship): removing something that was in a previous release in the same region because it's now become culturally uncomfortable. (Fundamentally, there isn't much difference between this and the people who, for example, argue that the N-word should be censored out of various classic literature in which it appears.) I specify "same region" because, as alluded to above, I don't consider localization edits to fall into this group.
So that brings me back to Fire Emblem, and I'd certainly say that Fates' localization was on the heavier end of the scale. But that comes back to what the actual point of
localization (that is, as opposed to straight translation) is: a quality localization, in theory, should give the reader the impression that it was originally written in the target language to begin with, while maintaining the overall spirit of the original work. Whether the latter was achieved or not is a debate I'm not willing or able to get into - I don't speak Japanese myself, and I haven't played through all of Fates either. Treehouse definitely appears to follow this logic in their work, though, sometimes extending to redefining some characters' personalities to use tropes more familiar to Western audiences instead of those more familiar to Eastern audiences, because they feel the former will resonate better with the mass-market audience they're seeking. (And let's be clear: it is a mass-market audience they're seeking, they really don't care about the small American otaku minority.)
In the end, localizers (and designers, even) always must make a judgment call as to what American audiences will respond positively (and negatively) to. Sometimes, they do well - Final Fantasy XIV is a strong example of a game that has an outstandingly good localization for the most part - from what I've heard, the game's Japanese text is actually quite bland compared to the style the localization employs. Conversely, look at Final Fantasy XII for a mistake on the design side: the story was clearly originally conceived and written with Basch as the protagonist, only for Vaan to be forced in by the Japanese marketing division because they feared a character like Basch would not appeal to Japanese audiences as a protagonist. I've seen people theorize this probably hurt FFXII's western sales to some degree, and it certainly at least shows up in people's reaction to characters; Vaan remains a popular character in Japan, whereas in the West he's one of the least popular characters in the franchise, as most of the Western audience liked Balthier and Basch more.
Square-Enix clearly learned something from this, as evidenced by the fact that they made two completely different versions of the game Nier, with the same story but with a completely different protagonist. The Xbox 360 in Japan got "Nier Gestalt", where the protagonist is an older man (not unlike Basch) and the illl girl is his daughter; the PlayStation 3 in Japan got "Nier Replicant", where the protagonist is a younger androgynous man (not unlike Vaan), and the ill girl is his sister. And then, when they localized it, rather than keep this dual-game approach in the US, they instead ported "Gestalt" to the PS3 as well, so both consoles in the US got "Nier Gestalt" with the father-daughter pair, because they likely recognized from the FFXII reactions that the US mass market would prefer this style of protagonist.
Topic: Are Localization Teams to blame for today's censorship? (Read 10561 times)