I've seen some (valid) criticism of the lack of any real "Kansai" dialect in the Like a Dragon dub - So naturally, here's a *very* lengthy thread on the topic of accents in dubs, and how ours ended up as all over the place as it did. This one's a beast.

"Localization team doesn't know what the hell to do with Kansai accent" is a problem as old as time, and when recording in EN, the easiest fix is usually "IDK, southern?" But this colorful cast of Scottish, Boston/Brooklyn, and Welsh? All Kansai in their original Japanese audio:

For Yakuza, even capturing Kansai in subtitles was a challenge, because personally, I dislike the idea of localization mapping not just an accent, but a *culture* to another. When our characters speak Kansai, it's because... they're from Kansai. This isn't a fantasy RPG.

I'm on the record about Kansai too. Here's a Yakuza 0 interview where I characterize what I tried to do with Majima, and how much of a pain in the ass I inadvertently made it for other staffers to imitate the style: (full interview: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-quality-localisation-makes-the-yakuza-series-great/)

I distinctly remember a moment in the office in 2016, I'm plugging away at Yakuza 0, when Sam Mullen turns to me and asks, "Hey, would you ever wanna try to dub this series?" I thought for a sec, and I said... "No, it’d be impossible. It's too grounded in Japanese." We laughed.

FF to 2018, and I'm being asked to dub Judgment. By then, the data has proven Japanese audio only *is* a barrier to entry. People are less likely to recommend a game in a foreign language, retailers are less likely to take quantities, and a spin-off is the perfect test bed.

Judgment was where we first encountered the Kansai problem. Murase, Shioya, Kajihira, and every Kyorei Clan thug should technically have had an accent. This wasn't a simple "Hey, cute mascot character speaks with a dialect!" problem; it's like, 1/3 of a cast.

When an accent is that large-scale, the only *good* way to do it is to use a studio in the region you want to base the accent off. Let's say I wanted Brooklyn. I'd need to split the work between LA and a NY-based studio and a NY-based cast to *realistically* pull it off.

The *bad* way to cast an accent is put out an LA-based casting call: "Can you do a NY accent? We need you!" and then end up with like three maybe suitable for the character NY transplants and a supporting cast of "Sure, lemme practice to the mirror before I audition" jokesters.

I'll remind you, this is a *dub*. One that we weren't even sure was going to land. I'm not working with Rockstar budgets, and even if I was, and it did land, I'd be setting up the series to have to fly out to NY every time? Utterly unsustainable, if not irresponsible.

But Judgment's dub *did* land. Sure, many core fans played in Japanese. But new players? Most of them played in English, proving the data even more right. And the performances for Shioya, Kajihira, and Murase were rock solid, even without the accent.

Enter Like a Dragon's dub: The Kansai accent is now a (minor) plot point. Great. An even bigger cast of mains who would need it: Tendo, Ishioda, Saejima, Watase, and Yakuza 0's Kansai King (despite the "he fakes it"), Majima. Not to mention that bodyguard and a host of Omi thugs.

I entertained going back on my own word about slapping a different accent on an entire culture. My team did accent research. We explored casting. But it all fell apart from the top. Bringing PS2 Yakuza's cast back was a big brained idea, both as a cop-out and... a redemption arc.

Obviously that didn't fully pan out, but in a world where the main Kansai speaker was reunited with his original actor, the idea of being like, "can you do what you did 15 years ago, but also add [x] accent" was so utterly inconceivable, it unraveled from there.

What, do an accent for the other mains and not *him*? It'd be ridiculous. The difficulties were already insurmountable, and I finally just said... NEUTRAL. Everybody is accent neutral. Kansai is now just written out like we do in the subs, and actors can add their own spice.

I didn't realize at the time I had just green lit CHAOS. Rino Romano's Ishioda does have a slight NY slant. He's one of the original video game Spiderman actors, if you didn't know. Tendo, Saejima, Majima, Watase... They sound great! Neutral, with their own ever-so-slight slants.

And then you've got this crazy party chat with Saeko and Adachi. Elizabeth, a Texas native, does a perfect southern belle, and we were like, YEP. Kansai was now... every accent and no accent, we had officially gone to plaid.

The bodyguard was probably the worst of it, because that dude was supposed to be able to *switch* and quite frankly, being unnamed, he was such a minor part, I didn't even look at him until the end, realizing too late he needed more TLC. That's my bad.

To put a bow on the beast, I'm weirdly happy with how it turned out. I'm glad we didn't force people who can't do accents to do them. I'm glad I didn't railroad future titles into one. And I'm glad I didn't say Kansai is now Brooklyn. But I acknowledge: It's not perfect.