NIS America -

[wtfNeedSignUp]

NIS America is a video game publisher, specifically well known for their Disgaea franchise and publishin lesser known (and a lot of time shitty) games from Japan. The main reason I think they deserve a thread is that they have a bizarre amount of haters online, who seem to hold more hate towards the company than any other publishers that are objectively worse. The reasoning in the hate seems to be primarily in the publisher dropping the ball in either translating the games, having buggy/unoptimized releases or censoring (usually because legal reasons). An hate that seems kinda pointless considering the only way to actually play the games NISA imports is learning japanese since nobody but weeboos give a shit enough to justify translating them.

So if you hate the company what are your reasons? Do you know any particularly insane haters online (I can only think on weirdoes on Discord channels)? Or just talk about your opinions about the publisher like favourite games.

 

[Megaroad 2012]

I think their shit translations and bugged as fucked games is worthy of contempt. Y's 8 was pretty lol with its localization. I remember some Disgaea games apparently being broken.

I think they draw attention because they're more prevalent than more smaller import companies. I've seen worse dubs and translations from other groups but most of them I haven't heard from the 00s.

 

[Islamic Creampie]

I only know them for the Ys and Legend of Heroes games. Ys 8 had a pretty wonky translation, but I could deal with it. I hear they redid the whole thing but I had beaten it and moved on before that came out. They definitely seem like they could put more effort into this stuff, but I'm just glad this stuff is getting localized in a timely manner.

A lot of the hate I see these days comes from them snatching the Falcom stuff from xseed. xseed did a fantastic job with those games, but they were slow as fuck getting anything out. It's no wonder Falcom decided to give their stuff to another company, and they seem to be more popular than ever since they have.

 

[BananaSplit]

NIS America has a long record of screwing things up in localization, either be censorship, introducing bugs that weren't present in the original japanese releases, and questionable translations. They're also known for half-assing PC ports like the massive fuckup that was Ys 8 (until Durante himself fixed it 2 years later), Coven & Labyrinth of Refrain that can randomly crash during the late dungeon runs, or Disgaea 5 "Complete+" which never had the online features available on the console releases (despite NISA previously marketed the PC release would have everything) and history seems to repeat itself with Disgaea 4 Complete on PC.

The hate against NISA is legitimately justified on that regard.

 

[agility_]

These are all just love letters for the "pc master race" reddit retards.

 

[Dammit Jim]

There was that drama that NIS (not NISA) had with IF. If I remember correctly, NIS refused to pay their employees overtime which caused a huge fracture both between NIS and IF and within NIS itself. There was a mass exodus of employees and they went to Compile Heart/IF. NISA still promotes the Neptunia series, since I believe they're technically a separate entity from NIS.

That being said, NISA's translations are hell. People mod Nep games to make them actually match the source material.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Considering that YS 8 reached prominence in spite of a bad translation only proved that XSeed was holding the series back.

Even Cold Steel picked up in popularity after it left XSeed's hands. It took fucking eons to get Cold Steel 1 and 2 out and Trails in the Sky Trilogy still doens't have a phjysical release in the US outside of the PSP game of the first one. NISA was able to get cold steel 3 and 4 out in a timely fashion and are working on both Trails in the Blue games.

NIS/NISA isn't perfect but they seem better than the known alternatives. Aquaplus is apparently exploring self publishing shit in the west, both of the Atlus Utawererumono games have been delisted because the rights ran out, Aquaplus may be following in Spike Chunsoft's footsteps from going from needing a publisher to becoming a publisher. So we may wind up seeing less reliance on publishers like NISA, Xseed, and others going forward.

 

[BananaSplit]

There was that drama that NIS (not NISA) had with IF. If I remember correctly, NIS refused to pay their employees overtime which caused a huge fracture both between NIS and IF and within NIS itself. There was a mass exodus of employees and they went to Compile Heart/IF. NISA still promotes the Neptunia series, since I believe they're technically a separate entity from NIS.

That being said, NISA's translations are hell. People mod Nep games to make them actually match the source material.
View attachment 1869374

NISA is also responsible of the translation in the Atelier Arland games, and besides the known example of Esti Erhard (which was changed into Esty Dee by NISA because lmao lesbian aids), you can see other various instances happening like this one:



"I was scared... "It's a witch! It's a witch!" that's what the people around me were saying".
Implying the villagers were calling Lionela a bitch wasn't even a thing in the OG script.

Disgaea 1's translation was actually decent but that was originally handled by Atlus before on the PS2. So yes, the horse's weiner scene was an actual thing in the JP version.

 

[Arm Pit Cream]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned THE best NISA story, in Disgaea D2 in only the English dub, if you or your enemy cast the fire spell it would literally melt your PS3's processor

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

How do you even make an English dub that can melt a CPU? That's a talent virus makers of old would kill for.

I know the PS3 had a weird architecture, but surely not so alien that you can't prevent a game from working like a machine destroying virus.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

i wanted to buy The Witch and the Hundred Knight but stopped myself since i heard rumors there existed bugs that could destroy your system.

 

[Shield Breaker]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned THE best NISA story, in Disgaea D2 in only the English dub, if you or your enemy cast the fire spell it would literally melt your PS3's processor

How does that even happen? Endless looping a process forever?

 

[Arm Pit Cream]

How does that even happen? Endless looping a process forever?

From my understanding it would cause a memory leak that somehow bypassed the cooling so your system would be flipping out while the fan wasn't working, so if you didn't unplug the system it could cause a fire.
This occured on multiple different NISA games on ps3 too, and always exclusively in the english version.

 

[ZMOT]

The hate against NISA is legitimately justified on that regard.

this. the first time reading "esty dee" in atelier I wanted to punch someone. if I want regurgitated reddit tier LOLRANDOM XD humor I'd go to 9gag, not buy weebgames.

How does that even happen? Endless looping a process forever?

that would just mean it never stops, you'd need to stress the processor hard, to the point the failsafes should kick in. similar how people test with prime95 etc to see how a system fares under 100%.
permanent hardware damage usually means the hardware manufacturer fucked up (either with design that can't handle it and/or having no protections in place).
still, that form of fuckup takes some effort. but that's NISA in a nutshell.

 

[Marissa Moira]

To be entirely fair, the earlier PS3 Atelier games were very fucking needlessly wordy and took 5 whole paragraphs where a sentence would have done since all the info kept getting constantly repeated. Putting an STD pun in there was probably the least of the problems.

There was also the fact that gust never coded the character's mouths to stop moving when the dialogue was done until much much later in the series.

All the games that came after the PS3 games were all handled properly. Ryza 2 pre-orders broke NISA's store since demand was overloaded, they wound up staggering pre-orders over a series of days to meet demand and Gust even expanded initial pre-order numbers which was a first in the series history for this to happen. The west wound up taking a shine to a series that used to be considered a budget title.

 

[Poop A Loop]

Any time I want to get butthurt about NISA I remember that without them Trails would have gone right back into the category of "awesome games we'll never get" after XSEED fucked up the Trails SC translation by handing it off to a sadbrained goon who got suicidal when people asked him about deadlines and then took years to get Cold Steel over here while Japan was mainlining new titles once a year. Meanwhile, Cold Steel 3 with NISA came out perfectly adequate and in a reasonable timeline given that Falcom doesn't let translators touch the game until it's done. I'll take that if I can get it.

Now I see their promotional stuff get to the front page of r/games and r/pcgaming and the series is now a staple of the JRPG genre in the west. Before that the most notable thing about Trails was the asskissing article Kotaku wrote about the goon who was singlehandedly responsible for Trails SC being delayed so much due to his chronic fear of timelines and responsibility.

Censorship and needless translation changes still suck though.

 

[Marissa Moira]

The special edition of Ryza 2 that Nisa made comes in a 15 inch tall box. The physical items you get in the box are all from Japan and the artbook included is not even translated.

But you get the same top quality art prints and wall scroll and it really does feel like a premium item, except the cardboard quality is kinda crap for the box itself. But at least it didn't come like Xseed's boxes where the glue would routinely fail and the box's binding would come undone by itself.