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It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.
Firstly, game writing has always been terrible barring a number of exceptions that can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.
Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.
The vast majority of bad game writing since the invention of video games, and probably still today, can be lain squarely at the feet of straight white (and Japanese) men. This is not in any way to suggest that wamen or minorities are any better (just look at modern YA fiction to see they are not), but it’s clear that the dire state of game writing is not their fault.
You made this point the last time, and just like last time, it's still wrong on multiple facets. I'd like you to list what games you think clear the standard of "good writing," because when I think of games lauded for their story or writing, I can think of a fairly deep list, and that's mostly limiting myself to computer games (Half-Life, Deus Ex, the "Shock" games, Myst, Command & Conquer, Ultima, Spec Ops: the Line, Max Payne...)
Your post also seems to discount the large number of impactful Japanese games, a number of which I'd imagine are lauded because their storytelling or writing struck a particular chord with people (Metal Gear, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, most any FromSoft game from like Armored Core 4 to today).
I feel like responders to 2rafa's post would have benefitted from defining what it is "good writing" means to them. Whenever conversations start about writing quality it seems like every person takes their own idea into it without explaining what that is.
Is good writing the overall feel of the narrative to you? Is it the plot itself? The prose, the dialogue, the characterization, the worldbuilding?
If I think of a great video game narrative, I tend to think of games that do something interesting with the medium, something like the adventure game 999. However, I wouldn't describe 999 as having good writing - the plot and dialogue are merely ok, it's how it utilizes the medium to deliver everything that makes it shine.
Similarly, some games basically abandon "writing" altogether; someone below mentioned Ico, and Ueda's games always opt for very minimalist stories, which is something you can get away with in a game but not in other mediums. However, simply opting out of writing shouldn't be called "good writing" even if it produces a very good game.
Meanwhile, titles like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid have very interesting plots and worlds, but the prose and dialogue are distinctly sub-par. I think this is what 2rafa means when they say the writing is bad.
Of course, both titles offer a lot to discuss in that regard. For example, how much of their experiences are defined by the technology of the time? Infamous lines like "What a shame" and "A bomb!" in Deus Ex might work a lot better with modern animations and voice acting. On the other hand, Kojima's 4th wall breaking was bold at the time but would be passé if done now. Plus, if they weren't very good games in other aspects, would anyone remember them?
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I can’t take seriously someone who thinks that Kojima’s writing is good. Cult classic in a weird, schizo, Japanese man has fever dream based on American popular media and current affairs type way, maybe, but good? Deus Ex’s writing is OK, the reboots are better and less hackneyed (and I think Mary DeMarle is one of the best game writers), but it still doesn’t reach network TV level, let alone beyond. Spec Ops does something interesting with narrative, the moment to moment dialogue is rarely impressive but I do really like it as a narrative experience and I’d say it’s on the list.
Writing doesn’t have to be good to strike a chord with people. Harry Potter struck a chord with many people even though Rowling isn’t a great writer (she’s not a bad one either). Sitcoms like Friends strike a chord with many people even though the writers frequently phone it in. Characters, their vibe, parasocial relationships with them, these are all big reasons why people find themselves drawn to very long stories (which a sitcom in syndication is, to some extent) like Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, Persona, I’ve met people deeply invested in World of Warcraft’s ongoing story lol. But that doesn’t make it good.
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This seems to be hyper focused on writing, which is odd because a lot of the most popular games ever made have basically no writing at all. Surely video game quality is not singularly determined by writing quality, I would contend that writing quality is actually pretty low on the priority list of things that matter when determining game quality.
Japan is a weird example to bring up when a manga like Demon Slayer can out sell the entire American comic industry. Demon Slayer is no The Sun Also Rises, but Japan is clearly doing something right. They are a lot less woke than the west, and are probably the second most powerful cultural exporter behind the US, Korea might be close, but they don't necessarily do better on the woke dimension.
DE feels way more leftist than woke, but it does have some woke elements.
Yes, the vast majority of video games have been made by white/asian men including (all?) of the greats.
I think this is mostly just that you are using a scale for evaluating writing such that 95% of writing is all crammed together in the 'shit' category and then acting like it can't be further differentiated. Shit contains multitudes.
I don’t think game quality is determined by writing at all! But the discussion was about a writing consultancy, so writing was the topic. Some of my favorite games have very little writing, like certain puzzle titles.
Oh, I didn't really get that it was supposed to be writing consultancy specifically. I feel like the two main complaints about woke in video games that I read here on TheMotte are with ugly female character models, and then random woke signaling (trans characters, pride flags), specifically that it can be hard to have anti-woke mods that remove such things because the mod hosting sites are all ideologically captured.
Still I think that woke ideas can and do make the 'writing' in video games worse in a number of ways.
One example might be illustrated by comparing Mass Effect and BG3, both being games that do not have 'great' writing in the general sense, but I think woke impulses make BG3 a worse story in specific ways. Mshep is far and away the most common play through, and Garrus (who can't be romanced by Mshep) might be the most popular video game companions of all time. Meanwhile people had to make mods for BG3 to turn off the entire approval gain function because it is literally impossible to be friends with any of your companions, they are all romantic interests who tend to get very sexual and often physical with you from the very first approval cutscene. This does not mean that any given scene has worse writing, or that the overall plot is worse, and yet, I think the story as a whole is weaker because of the inability for your character to have deeper friendships.
Then there are the generic ways that woke writing is bad, as it often does things that are just broadly considered bad writing. Being preachy, making the subtext text, and breaking suspension of disbelief by importing modern (American) issues into settings and situations where they do not organically fit the story.
There is a sense in which all video game writing is bad so woke isn't the thing stopping video games from being literary masterpieces, but I am not sure how relevant that is compared with the general complaint that woke makes things worse.
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Another thing with video games and writing is that a number of games approach writing and storytelling in different ways vis-a-vis the gameplay. You have games where you just wander around to learn about the setting (Myst, Gone Home), games that attempt to immerse you in the world so that you can directly participate in the story (Half-Life, System Shock), games that attempt to be movie hybrids (Metal Gear, Wing Commander), or games where the story feels more ancillary to your progression gameplay-wise and you aren't always the sole driver of the plot (Command & Conquer, MechWarrior).
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Why do you feel Disco Elysium is explicitly leftist? I'm not disagreeing necessarily, just curious. I thought the game satirizes and mocks all political leanings, including leftists.
Because the authors are commie goons (ex Something Awful posters). If you choose explicitly fascist or strasserist options "the world" (the writers) will punish you.
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As @Stefferi says, it makes fun of leftists the way leftists do so, communists are essentially occasionally misguided but pure hearted, liberals/centrists are greedy, venal, stupid or all of the three, and rightists are evil. The focus on making fun of the center-left is really the most telltale sign that the game is a socialist one rather than just generic lib. That and the fact that the game is literally made by self-identified communists who praised Marx at an award speech, I suppose.
I should say I don’t think it’s a terrible thing for art to carry the strong ideological views of its creators, I just think it’s an example of the fact that it isn’t leftist politics that’s responsible for poor writing in games, at least mostly.
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It's a common complaint on 4chan that Disco Elysium is super leftist, but actual evidence for it is quite thin. You can espouse communist viewpoints but in the end the character admits it probably wouldn't work out if implemented. There's also the blatantly corrupt union boss which is not something you'd normally see in a leftist work.
Beyond communism, I haven't heard many complaints that DE is actually woke. There was the lower class racist near the hotel who's made out to be repugnant, but he's a fairly minor character. There's the strange pseudo-black nationalist on the wall if I remember correctly, but his weird political theories are meandering and incoherent.
Beyond those I can't think of anything else.
Disco Elysium goes hard after leftists, but it goes after them in a way how leftists go after leftists, ie. all the burns about leftists just infighting and getting nothing done are stuff I've heard about (and witnessed) countless times myself in leftist circles. Also, many of the most notable leftist characters in the game are the sort of types leftists would encounter themselves: I've noted a number of times to friends that Evrart Claire literally not only behaves but kind of looks like a somewhat notorious minor Finnish left-wing union boss who features in news from time to time, and "The Deserter" (an old bitter communist who thinks he's fighting fascists but is homophobic, racist and sexist enough to pass as one himself) is not an unfamiliar figure, either.
There's plenty of things in DE that would code as woke (fascists are consistently portrayed as bad and Harry becoming a fascist is basically equivalent to him choosing the "evil" path in a standard RPG, Harry's complicated relationship with women is on stage several times, "race-neutral casting" of NPCs etc.) but I rather feel people don't see it as woke simply because it's good; the same thing as with some other media with similar features I've seen like Bojack Horseman, The Expanse etc. that some anti-woke people evidently just see too good to be woke.
That's not it. Get Out is both woke and good. It's really just that there aren't that many good woke pieces of media.
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Based on my own limited experience with Disco Elysium, I'd agree that it's not particularly "woke," and whatever political or ideological messaging it had seemed to be in the form of "fictional character has this opinion" rather than "this fictional narrative serves as a lesson for why this opinion is the correct IRL." I'll add, though, in my personal experience was that the only people who ever called the game leftist were leftists praising the game for pushing forward leftist (not necessarily "woke" or progressive) messaging. Such folks were the only reason I'd heard of the game and got interested enough in it to start playing, actually.
Interestingly, I've only ever experienced the opposite. I've only ever heard the game denigrated as leftist by right-wing forums complaining about the Communist bias. Although it should be mentioned that I don't browse a lot of leftist video game forums (are there even that many besides Resetera?).
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Admittedly I mostly play murderhobo games nowadays bc I consider many stories so bad that not having one is an improvement over the average in my book, but there is a large difference between catering to your audience and catering to something else. The first creates bad writing in a general sense, but as long as it's in a way your target audience wants you're fine. In the latter case - and catering to DEI is just a subtype here - you're just obliterating all goodwill for no goddamn reason. And DEI people have a particular knack for outright insulting the main userbase of beloved franchises to boot.
Though I guess we agree overall. I'm just pissed by my niche interest games always eventually getting captured by casualization in terms of game mechanics on one hand, and by wokification in terms of the story on the other, and it always seems to go this particular direction, never the other. I even agree on DE, while I think 'bordering on political propanganda' is an understatement, he tailor-made the entire setting to suit his political beliefs, but I did genuinely enjoy most of the story and he skillfully just barely dunks enough on marxists and unionists.
I don't think Kurvitz and Hindpere made it to spread leftist ideas, although they probably aren't unhappy with it doing so. I suppose it's similar to the question of whether you consider Narnia to be 'Christian propaganda'. Certainly Lewis wrote it as Christian, and deeply informed by his Christianity, and with a positive Christian message, but at the same time his commentary is pretty clear that a lot of it just came to him as an interesting story, and he didn't set out to write it teach children to become (better) Christians in a real sense, it's not pure propaganda designed to proselytize.
Yes, Narnia has always been a bit too much of an obviously christian setting with a christian message for me to really enjoy. I wouldn't feel awkward calling it "christian propaganda", I guess. I'm not full on death-of-the-author, but authorial intent is not very high in my book and so I only marginally distinguish between "explicitly intended for propaganda" and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that".
Yeah, I can see that for sure. There's a scale along which every writer, especially if they're a politically involved or strongly opinionated person (which most great authors are), pushes their views. I don't disagree that most art is in some way political. But I think if there is a distinction between intentional propaganda and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that" as you say, it's more about the fact that the author consciously employing tools to convince the audience of their politics usually translates into poor storytelling.
I actually feel like Narnia is a good example of this, in that I think that through the series, there's a very real change in it that pushes it more towards what I would consider to be propaganda, in a negative sense. Maybe that's my own tastes or whatever, but I think it makes something clear, that it's not such a cut or dry thing. It's not that certain ideas or concepts are in your book, it's how they're presented. (Although I still argue that I think it would be absurdly difficult to present the content of the last book in a way that doesn't go deep into this)
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This... this is perhaps the single most offensive opinion I've ever read on this forum.
It's not the greatest writing in the world, but it is a different kind of writing and pretty funny. Yes, I'm rolling my eyes when any kind of centrist/liberal content gets criticised, and as for being a conservative well that's just straight up Fascism, but I really like Kim Kitsuragi, the one sane person in Martinaise and noted speed-freak, as well as the adventures of Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau.
I think the burns on Moralism make the most sense when one understands two things: firstly, Moralism is basically EU: The Ideology, and secondly, Harry specifically choosing to be a moralism is basically him going "Yup, I live in a colonized hellhole that's being exploited by foreign powers and serve as their enforcer, and I'm completely OK with it, because hey, what's the alternative?"
Within the context of Revachol's particular situation, at least the other ideologies are trying to do something to the situation (even the ultralibs if Joyce can be trusted), while the Moralists are just sunk into self-serving complacency that allows this shit to go on indefinitely.
The game is fair-minded that the Communist revolution was shit for the people, and the Communists once they lost started on piling up the mountains of skulls as well. Moralism has a good ideology, but as it's practiced it's inane at best and actively repressive at worst. But so is Communism! Mazovian ideology was also good, but putting it into practice meant the mountains of skulls and the People's Nuclear Pile that irradiated everyone to death.
The digs at the EU are really spot-on for a European, but it's also that Luxembourg/Monaco/Switzerland rich person's playground and tax haven life that is criticised. For countries such as Ireland, the EU was a godsend in, basically, hosing money into the country for development that our own government could never do. That's how it should be for Revachol, but because of the Revolution, they're making an example of it. Though even there, parts of it are already comfortably on the middle-class, fuck the poor lifestyle, it seems to be Martinaise that is being deliberately neglected as an object lesson.
What I take away from the game is that you honestly don't know who to trust or believe; the bad guys have good points and the bad guys pretending to be the good guys are both doing good and doing bad, while the good guys who ostentatiously set themselves up as the good guys aren't that good. You can trust Kim because, ironically, he's been an outsider due to his Seolite ancestry all his life, hence he's not plugged in to any of the networks of influence or power, but he does his job. You can trust Harry because all he has left is his job, which he is scarily good at, and he's gone so batshit insane that he too is outside the webs of connections.
All that may be left is a miracle, and even miracles are not unalloyed wonders. There is a different reality outside what they all think they know, and it may be destroying them right this second while they squabble over history and economic systems.
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I do recall liking Kim the best during my 8-10 hours in the game, just for being the reliable straight man most of the time, though I also found him a bit on the dull side. Some of the other characters had really fun and outlandish personalities, but what got me for those was how much the writing just took me out of the game. It constantly made me picture some writer sitting at his desk typing out all this clever dialogue out in between break sessions to sniff his own farts. To some extent, I'm consciously aware that all video game writing is created this way, but when I think of writing in works like this being "good," part of it is that it momentarily, and perhaps only on an emotional level, makes me forget that the people I see on screen are merely marionettes being puppeteered by an author for the purpose of manipulating my emotions and instead makes me believe that this is a real person with a real history in some real world expressing himself. I want the writing to manipulate my emotions, not to remind me that it's trying to manipulate my emotions.
(Aside: this is a major part of the criticism - tangentially "woke"-related* - of the drop in quality of writing in the MCU, where everyone is a clever quip-machine all the time. When a handful of high profile characters like Tony Star talk this way, it was funny and somewhat plausible, but when almost every major character talks like this, the suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain, on top of just being tiresome).
To be fair, I think the voice acting, particularly the (likely intentionally?) overdramatic ones for the various emotions or characteristics of yours who would speak to you, didn't help. And the game started right off the bat with such internal monologue and never clawed its way back in my
eyesears. So I may be unfairly docking it points for that instead of just the writing.* Obviously there's nothing about the "woke" ideology that insists on stilted writing in and of itself. But it's still tangentially related, because the "woke" influence being discussed is modern political messaging being inserted into the writing for the purpose of influencing the audience's behaviors, and due to the totalizing nature of the "woke" mindset, the authors have trouble doing this with a soft-enough touch to feel natural within the fictional world. Which then reminds the player that they're being lectured to by a script writer, rather than being immersed in a fictional world.
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I think if you enjoy good (largely classic) literary fiction it's still pretty mediocre and does indeed read like the kind of fiction aging Baltic communists who overestimate their English writing ability would create, but by game standards it's certainly in the 99th percentile, I think it would be hard to dispute that.
As they say, there is no accounting for taste. I'd say it's probably close to 30th percentile, only avoiding going lower due to generally being coherent and internally consistent, grammatically correct, and lacking typos.
Fair enough, happy to disagree. What would consider the best (not necessarily your favorite) game writing, of what you've played?
I'd say Ico is probably the one game with the best writing I've played (aside: don't read the novelization Ico: Castle in the Mist; it takes a 5 hour game with a fairy-tale-basic story about a cursed boy and girl, a castle, and an evil queen, and stretches it to 400+ pages, including the first 100+ focusing on the religious back story of the boy and his village), though Bloodborne came close in the similar minimalistic style. For a game with lots of dialogue, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis stands out to me as one with particularly good writing, though I'd probably place the original Knights of the Old Republic and Odin Sphere at around the same level.
I think Bloodborne is an interesting game to bring up because it's an example of how comparing the writing in games to that of other media can be a difficult exercise. Many of the things that go into making the narrative of Bloodborne what it is, like item descriptions, optional NPC interactions as well as mandatory cutscenes etc are things without obvious parallels in films/novels. In particular, the ways these elements synergise mean that a Bloodborne film/novelization would necessarily provide a very different experience from playing the game, even from a strictly story-focussed point of view.
With all that said, I agree that Bloodborne is a well written game but I prefer to make that argument less in terms of the actual quality of something like the dialgoue (for example) in comparison to that found in films or books and more by emphasising how effectively it leverages the storytelling options that gaming provides and that no other medium does.
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I think it's not that great compared to all the games you dismiss as being terrible. I absolutely dispute what you're saying. How do we go about resolving this? What criteria are you using?
I don't know, do we agree on books? On film? Some of my favorite books of all time are Ulysses, Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, Dorian Gray, The Leopard, The Waves, almost everything by Waugh (esp. Sword of Honour trilogy, but also Brideshead of course). All very classic /lit/ babby's first canon stuff, I don't claim any esoteric taste. My favorite films, likewise, are Before Sunset (not the other two) and Taxi Driver. Metropolis is good. All basic again.
They're all stories that have something to say, that are written in an entertaining and well-flowing way. They largely respect their characters, treat human motivation as both suspect and organic, deal with interesting themes. They're obviously immensely well-known for a reason. Disco Elysium doesn't remotely approach their heights, but it respects its characters, has something to say (even if it is, of course, something I disagree with), respects its genre(s), understands people in a way that well-written fiction does. We can agree to disagree.
Those are good criteria, but the only one games are habitually not fulfilling is "having something to say", the thing is I don't think that makes them horrible. In fact, having something to say but doing it badly is way worse than knowing your limits and focusing on the other parts of the story. That's why I think most games aren't so bad, and why Disco Elysium is not so hot.
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edit @ArjinFerman, you deleted your comment, just wanted you to see my reply.
Sorry for the mess, was hoping to avoid it by deleting.
No problem, I do this occasionally only to find someone has replied to a deleted comment, it happens!
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Yeah... I wanted to take issue with calling it woke to begin with, but saying it's particularly better than other games appreciated for ti's story is wild.
I mean, it's definitely woke, it's not class reductionist leftist fiction that rejects wokeness in a Zizek-type way, it's very explicitly in support of American-style blank slatist wokism even if it occasionally makes fun of its excesses in an in-joke type way. Stuff like the way the game responds through Kim and your own thoughts if you make Harry a reactionary or sympathize with nativists is pretty clear about that.
I've only done one playthrough, and hardly paid that much attention to the dialogue, I recognize that "woke" lost a lot of it's meaning through overuse, but no, I do not recognize being anti-reactionary, and anti-nativist as woke.
Yes, I think it's frequently very witty, I laughed out loud many times while playing it (which almost never happens in games except guffawing at the worst pun-laden vanilla WoW quests), there are a huge number of well-crafted references to interesting history, philosophy and literature and the debate around them that's shared with a lot of fiction I enjoy (like Joyce, Wilde, etc). There's good wordplay, the underlying mystery is interesting as a fan of mystery/detective fiction which is a rote but often underappreciated kind of writing. It gets its noir tone mostly correct, I think the lore of the setting is just the right side of weird fiction and historical analogy to be interesting, I very much enjoy the effort put into minor details like fonts and fashion, and I think the cohesive setting as a kind of 'what if Königsberg had been the epicenter of a communist revolution' is fascinating. I never skipped a line of dialogue and was often positively surprised by it, and I think the dice rolling was well-integrated with the narrative.
It's Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, more than anything, down to its name (Tallinn used to be named Reval).
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Oh, definitely. It starts off looking as an open-and-shut, it's clear what happened here, we know who dunnit but we can't ever prove it case. Then Harry goes crazy and blows the entire thing wide open and it's all turned on its head - nothing happened the way we thought was so obvious and plain. And they make the twist work, even with the miracle ending.
It does work for a European setting; the Sunday Visitor being a guy who's some sort of EU bureaucrat in Strasbourg but just popping over every week to slum it in Martinaise, with all his development agency bullshit lines, is convincing. So is the idea of the descendant of the ex-royal house working as a merchant banker in Luxembourg (see the last Habsburg.) After the failed Revolution, the ordinary people are still living in bad conditions and maybe even worse off than before, while the displaced high status types landed on their feet elsewhere.
Yeah I agree, I do think the writing has a bitterness I find distasteful (especially because, come on, life in Estonia is way, way better than it's ever been), but it has a way of producing interesting characters that I think is really great.
I suspect being a communist in Estonia makes you extremely unpopular in a way that it doesn't in the west, an asymmetry that is oft complained about on the right. Not just when the game was developed, but especially after 2022 where nostalgia for communism is going to get associated with Russian imperialism even moreso than it already was.
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Sorry I moved the question on the general quality over to the other (now deleted) comment.
Well, good for you, but it's hardly objective, wouldn't you say? For me it was kinda enjoyable, and had some interesting ideas, but after the first playthrough I was done. I definitely didn't find it funny, the ending was dismally bad., and that you like the mystery / detective fiction bit also comes off as a surprise, because that's one of the bits that fell particularly flat to me (there's not really that much detective work in the game). I liked the worldbuilding, but "I have amnesia, give me a history dump of everything that happened in this world" wasn't a fun way of uncovering it.
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Obviously. This still doesn't really say anything.
I agree that Dragon Ball Z is badly written in many ways. The bloat is infamous, the way it handles succession to new characters (it doesn't) is bad, the plot is built on a loop of new transformations that boil down to differently colored hair and so on. These are all recognized flaws. So recognized that they literally invented their own Abridged series to handle the bloat. They charged people twice to get a passable viewing experience! And the fans bought in anyway. They know what they're getting.
Handing it over to woke American show runners would lead to a very different sort of bad.
Which is what fans care about.
I guess it shows how "good writing" really depends on the medium and the time period. DBZ worked great as an 80s/90s after school special, when there wasn't much else on TV for adolescents. You come home every day, hyped up to find out what will happen next, and get just a few minutes of action. Then the suspense just builds and builds and builds, and the kids don't realize it will never end because they're kids. It's just like pro wrestling. It wouldn't work at all now with so many entertainment options, and if you marathon it as an adult it's stupid, but watching it back in the day was amazing.
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DBZ Abridged is a fan production, not an official one.
I think he's referring to the official Dragon Ball Z Kai series.
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Which Japanese games have you played, which weren't filtered through non-Japanese translators? Because Japanese to English video game translation is notoriously plagued by rewrites, "punching up", and general disrespect for the original text.
I can't turn down an opportunity to introduce more people to Ghost Stories. Specifically the English Dub.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Stories_(Japanese_TV_series) https://dubbing.fandom.com/wiki/Ghost_Stories
https://youtube.com/watch?v=c8JRb3-W8uQ
It really is...something.
That is the greatest dub of all time!
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Translation might well impact on prose and characterisation, but I've never heard of plot being altered. And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots
Sometimes that's part of the fun.
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Several Yakuza games, the Zelda games, FF7, 8, 14, Prof Layton, Chrono Trigger on DS, most recent Persona games and many more in English; I don't speak Japanese.
I don’t really buy that it’s the translation making things much worse; if anything, translation to English by professional translators who also do books and TV scripts usually improves the writing quality of bad game writers (eg. my Polish friends have said the Witcher 2/3’s writing is more hackneyed and cliche in Polish than in English where there was some smart editing).
except that they aren't translators, they are localizers, and they proudly declare themselves as such. Jelly Donuts is their work's infancy. You may be interested in the current Unicorn Overlord drama brewing on X.
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