Random thought of the moment

 Okay, so I am currently playing Persona 3 Portable.

There are a couple of layers of reasons for this; the immediate layer of "why now" being that after finishing with Pokopia, I ended up dropping seven other games (in one case because it ran like garbage on the Switch, so I plan to try on the Switch 2 when my brother is done borrowing it, then on the Steamdeck if that doesn't work, but all the others I'm unlikely to return to) and wanted to pick something I knew I could and would actually complete (also I wanted to play some kind of Persona game this year because of the series' 30th anniversary, and it's awkward trying to play 1, 2 or 2 due to lack of modern console support).  The less immediate reason, the reason I even owned a (physical) copy of it, is that when Persona 3 Reload was announced, I saw people on Discord talking about how awful it was that they had left out the female lead from the portable version.  In talking about that, they gave examples of how much more personality the female player's dialog choices had, and I was won over to the idea that hey, maybe it was actually worth replaying to see her version of the story.

I hadn't realized just how different it would be, but that's not actually what I wanted to talk about.  What I wanted to talk about was this random thought I just had about the foreign exchange student that the player character forms an S.Link with.

As translated, he's from France (with an accent so overstated that it borders between comically overstated and downright offensive) but I don't know if he always was, or if in Japanese he was American and they changed his name to make him French instead.  Either way, what just struck me randomly was how absurdly stupid his dialog is in translation.  (More observant people were probably struck by this straight away, but I have a disturbing tendency not to think about this sort of thing while I'm engaging with media; I only tend to think about these things afterwards, and while I'm reading/watching/playing something I mostly only think about things like where the plot might go next.)  The character, Bebe, is overwhelmingly in love with Japan and its culture, so in the English translation of the game, he is constantly tossing in Japanese words then repeating them in English.  Common enough in American media when dealing with an otaku character...but he's supposed to be speaking Japanese, or the player character wouldn't understand him!!!  So wtf?  How are we supposed to interpret his dialog?  Is he actually tossing out French (or English, if he was originally American) words and then recalling the Japanese word he was looking for?

Or was he just given the most absurdly stupid translation possible?

😰

Pretty sure the answer is number two, there.

Which sucks, because he's one of the few boys the player can't force the heroine to date (I assume, since his S.Link is so far unchanged from the original version).

I absolutely do not intend to force the heroine to date any of the boys, ofc.  (Especially not Shinjiro!  I know what happens in the end if she's dating him, and it's actually pretty twisted!  (Especially since Akihiko is obviously into him!  Don't be denying the doomed yaoi, Atlus!))  If she can't date Aigis then she will not date.  (Given the ending of the game, isn't it better for her not to date anyone anyway?)

Anyway.  That was my random and pointless thought about one small aspect of the Switch port of a PSP reworking of a PS2 game from like 2006.  (Which I haven't played since its first release, 'cause why would I have wanted to replay it with that ending?)