JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle will have character names changed for the west, Namco Bandai have shared with Siliconera.
Because JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is heavily inspired by music, it’s always been a challenge to bring to the west in both game and manga form. Characters with names like Devo and Vanilla Ice are renamed things like D’bo and Iced during localization in order to skirt any sort of copyright issues. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle is no exception.
That said, there are a couple of interesting aspects to the game’s localization. For one thing, Namco Bandai are working with JoJo publisher Shueisha to make sure that the localized names for the characters fit with Hirohiko Araki’s intentions “while not offending any party”. Additionally, the localized names will be matched to the U.S. and European versions of the recent anime to ensure consistency.
Namco also confirmed to us that the U.S. version of the game will retain the Japanese text that appears onscreen mid-fight (since, as CyberConnect2 president Hiroshi Matsuyama commented, Japanese sound effects are also present in the localized version of the manga) and the Japanese voice acting. So, the mid-fight 無駄s and オラs will remain intact when the game reaches the west.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle is set for a 2014 release in the U.S. and Europe.
