Persona 3 Portable was removed from the PSP chains last Thursday and Persona 4 Golden also received a major update. Both games, wherever you play them, now have full support for French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS) subtitles, thanks to the work of localizers brave enough to take on the lengthy and cumbersome games. But now it has come to light (via Kotaku (opens in new tab)) that the people responsible for actually doing that localization work have been omitted from the credits, with only senior employees of Keywords – the localization company that handled the work – mentioned by name.
The issue came to public attention following tweets from game translator Tamara Morales Gómez (opens in new tab) and Katrina Leonoudakis (opens in new tab), an ex-localization coordinator at Sega. Leonoudakis, who worked on the P3P and P4G localization projects until she left Sega last year, tweeted that she had been adamant that everyone involved in the localization of the games was properly credited when she worked at the company, stating it even in her farewell email to the company, but it clearly dropped down the priority list after that.
But Leonoudakis told Kotaku that the problem isn’t really with Sega; it’s with keywords, which she claims she prefers to be referred to collectively as keyword studios, rather than listing each individual localizer by name. That means companies like Sega have to specifically push the company for full listings to make sure anyone who touched a game’s localization is credited properly, which obviously doesn’t always happen. Leonoudakis also claimed that she has heard stories of Keywords employees not being allowed to speak out about this practice, and that some of them have felt “understated threat” about it.
I’ve reached out to Keywords for comment on these claims and will update this piece if I hear anything.
Regardless of whether or not Keywords have a concrete policy against providing full lists of localizer names or not, it’s woefully inadequate to think that a blanket credit for the studio as a whole does the same job. The ability to point to your name in the credits of a major release like Persona is a major boost to a resume, so having years of your work ignored in the final product can be a blow to both your professional pride and your future prospects.
Persona is far from the only game that has attracted attention for failing to credit its employees recently. Developers of The Callisto Protocol, who worked under difficult circumstances to get the game out the door, also found themselves erased from the game’s credits (opens in new tab) in the last few months. Even the co-creator of The Last of Us made headlines recently when he complained that he was omitted from the credits of the HBO show (opens in new tab)although I have to imagine he’ll have an easier time getting future work than the Callisto developers and Persona localizers.