Bad Export For You / Video Games

• Arcade games tend to receive lousy exports very often. In many cases, it's actually a form of region locking, in which the game cartridge detects the region of its underlying BIOS, and if it's running on a non-Japanese BIOS, locks away certain features and occasionally changes the difficulty. Examples:
  • Magical Drop II hides the challenge mode from North American and European Neo Geos, and switches to an alternate voice bank of sub-par quality (European) or a generic and annoying announcer (North American)^note The American announcer actually originates from Chain Reaction, a localization of the original Magical Drop that used a Completely Different Title.
  • Magical Drop III removes much of the characterization of the VS. CPU Mode (including all of the endings) on top of cutting the hardest difficulty level of said mode. It also reuses the voice acting from Chain Reaction once again, despite the much larger cast of III. It hugely strips down the boardgame-esque mode, removing all the competing characters and the story scenes. Finally, the single-play mode strips out the Kyu and Dan Ranks present in the Japanese version.
  • While the international version of the original Cotton translated the story into English, the international version of Cotton 2 removed the story entirely.
  • Radiant Silvergun, when played on a non-Japanese ST-V system, only offers two weapon buttons instead of three, making many of the attacks unavailable. This does not apply to the Xbox 360 version.
  • Many, many modern Japanese arcade games are susceptible to this, if not only because they tend to rely heavily on online features (which are only available via subscription services in Japan), thus locking players out of all the online content - which, in several cases, may be all of the content. In a way, this has served as a hard-coded enforcement of the "FOR USE ONLY IN JAPAN" thing that arcades had long been able to ignore in the past.
• Historically, Japanese and North American televisions used a 60 Hz refresh rate while most of the rest of the world, including Europe and Australia, used 50 Hz. This meant that console games needed to be altered to run at the lower framerate, and while some games would have their physics, logic, and timing properly adjusted to work the same, most simply ran about 17% slower. Thankfully, this issue started to fade away during the The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games, when PAL 60 started to become commonplace (with many games offering the option between the two refresh rates), to then disappearing in The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games which supported High Definition standards that were uniform across the world, and because programmers were tying physics to the framerate less and less.
  • An explanation from Nostalgia Nerd can be found in this video.
  • If the export was really bad, even the music was slowed down. Sonic the Hedgehog is a notable example of this.
  • A rare inversion was with the North American release of Colin McRae Rally 2.0 for the original PlayStation, which was somewhat watered down compared to its original European/Australian counterpart. Not only that it was a touch slower, Nicky Grist's co-driving and narration was replaced with American racing driver Ned Jarrett, presumably to "Americanise" the series similar to the later DiRT titles. The pacing issue was likely due to Codemasters overlooking the refresh rate differences, e.g. the game renders at 60 Hz but is slower due to the update rate at 50. The American release could have been more or less an afterthought, considering how rallying isn't as popular in the States as it is in Europe^note and neither is Colin McRae himself; relatively few people outside of rallying circles heard of him until the 2006 X-Games.
  • On the Virtual Console service for the Wii and Wii U, the games being released in Europe were running at the slower 50 Hz frame rate the localized games originally used (save for TurboGrafx-16, Arcade and some import titles, such as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels).
    • From F-Zero (1990) onward, Nintendo has made an effort to release the North American versions of Virtual Console games on the Wii U for most games. However, they have tended to opt for the European versions of some games for multilingual access (with the most infamous case being Super Metroid).
• Naruto: Ninja Council 3, while butchered in America (characters such as the Sound Four's stage 2 forms, Kimimaro and Naruto and Sasuke's final transformations were removed, some missions were cut out and replaced with new ones, etc), still had most of the content from the Japanese release. However in Europe, it was butchered even more, as the difficulty was higher (a mission in the American and Japanese had you kill 10 bats, however the European version had you kill 15 bats), EVEN MORE characters were removed (such as the Sound Four, Itachi and Kisame) a lot more missions were cut out, and several techniques (such as Naruto's Rasengan) were removed.
• Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere. The Japanese version had 52 missions, branching to allow you to complete the game from five different perspectives, anime style cutscenes for all those branching mission paths, and more. What gamers outside Japan got was an Excuse Plot campaign with only 36 of those missions, no voice acting except for the aircraft's computer (a step down from the first two games), and a single intro cutscene^note Europeans didn't even get that.
• The German version of Capcom Generations only has three discs instead of the four featured in other European regions. The missing disc is none other than the fourth volume, "Blazing Guns", which featured Commando (Capcom), Gunsmoke, and Mercs. This was likely the result of Bundesprüfstelle, a Germany censorship agency which banned the sales of game depicting warfare to minors.
• Captain Silver on the Sega Master System was reduced from the original 2-Megabit ROM size it was sold as in Japan and Europe, to 1-Megabit in North America. This resulted in two whole stages being removed, as well as the omission of most of the enemy characters, including half of the bosses. Additionally, the visuals in the ending were removed, leaving only a text-only epilogue. Despite this, all of the enemies and stages that were cut from the American version are still listed in the manual.
  • Sega did the same thing with the Master System version of Enduro Racer. The Japanese 2-Megabit cartridge was cut down to half that for American and European release, thus reducing the number of levels from ten to five.
• On the topic of the Master System, the Japanese version of the console has a slot to install a FM synth upgrade (later revisions of the console integrated the FM synth into the console itself). The slot to install the upgrade and the FM synth is completely absent on the North American and European versions of the console.
• The Famicom version of Contra made use of a custom-made mapper chip (the VRC II) that allowed for the addition of cut-scenes and a map display between stages, as well as animated backgrounds (such as moving palm trees in Stage 1 or falling snowflakes in Stage 5). The NES version, which was released on a standard UNROM mapper (since Nintendo produced all the NES cartridges released in America), lacked all these graphical effects.
• The Japanese version of One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP contained both parts 1 and 2 of the Wii version plus the new Marineford mode, adapting an arc the original game didn't include, but the European localization splits the game back into two parts, while still advertising the first part as "Unlimited Cruise SP" with no indication whatsoever that half of the game was entirely missing. Fans weren't happy. And to think the 3DS enforces a Region Lock for the first time on a Nintendo portable.
• The North American version of DanceDanceRevolution Super NOVA lacked the eAmusement feature, preventing access to the secret songs outside of the Extra Stages, which Betson refused to unlock for the North American version.
  • Oh, and the North American and Japanese home versions of Extreme are two different games all together. Three guesses as to which one was better, and remember this is Konami. (Hint: the Japanese version has the option for playing on a dance pad properly.)
  • Dance Dance Revolution X's infamous North American cabinet. While both North American and Japan got new dedicated cabs for DDR X, the North American cabinet is infamous for various cost-cutting measures, which lead to various problems such as display lag and pads not only failing to register hits, but also being very fragile and breakable. Problems with the Japanese DDR X cabinets seem to be far less common. This resulted in X2 only getting a limited release in North America, and all of the games in the series from X3 vs. 2ndMix to 2014 being exclusive to Asia^note While 2014 was tested in North America, it did not get released. As a result, A was the first game in the series since X2 to be released internationally.
  • DDR had these kind of problems from beginning to present (or at least until it started fading in popularity across all regions). North America's first domestic machine was Dance Dance Revolution USA, which sucked. Konami Original songs^note made in-house tend to take years to come to NA after their first release in Japan. While even in Japan there was a problem where the most difficult charts were too much harder than the next-hardest charts, the problem was worse when such difficult charts made it to NA even though by this time there were enough almost-as-difficult charts available from the Japan games that they could have presented a much smoother difficulty curve on their "second go." On the plus side, there are songs that are licensed solely for the NA market, and some games such as the PS2's Extreme 2 show a good deal of localization effort. Meanwhile, Europe's DDR is called Dancing Stage and has wider differences that make it harder to compare.
  • Dance Dance Revolution 3rd MIX is notable for having several versions produced for different markets that all suffer from this to varying degrees. The two Korean versions add some K-pop songs but in exchange lose several songs from the Japanese version. The pan-Asian build is even worse, lacking both the songs cut from the Japanese version and the Korean songs, and you cannot turn off the "Shuffle" modifier directly; you must input either the "Left", "Right" or "Mirror" modifier code, and input the same code again to turn it off.
  • Localized arcade DDR was finally done right with DanceDanceRevolution A, as it keeps a lot of features intact from the Japanese version, including proper eAMUSEMENT support. It is, however, missing multiple songs compared to current Japanese builds. One of the weirdest cases of this has to do with the Touhou Project remix "Night of Nights"; the song appears in all versions of DDR A, but a chart was deliberately left out of non-Asian builds. It was only until DDR A20 that the charts were made playable.
  • All of the DrumMania video games from the original to 10th Mix were released in Asia as PercussionFreaks, presumably because Konami wanted to have a consistent branding with the GuitarFreaks series. The first 7 games in the series were localized into English, but beginning with 8th Mix the menus were left in Japanese.
• The Famicom Platform Game Hao-kun no Fushigi na Tabi had the intro screens and last third of the game removed when it was localized as Mystery Quest.
• The Spanish NES release of Kirby's Adventure contains only German screentext. It took until the GBA remake for other languages to be supported. The NES version was finally released in English in the 3D Classics release.
• The Japanese Game Boy Color game Moomin no Daibouken has many levels and cutscenes not present in the European release, Moomin's Tale. What's ironic here is that Moomin originated from Finland^note Moomin's Tale was going to be released in North America, but the American release was cancelled. The Nintendo DS games The New Adventures of Moomin: The Mysterious Howling and The New Adventures of Moomin: The Great Autumn Party were also going to be released in America, but they were also cancelled.
• Puzzle Bobble was released abroad as Bust-A-Move, while the Enix game Bust a Move altered its title to the awkward sounding Bust a Groove. The questionable box art for Bust-A-Move 2 on the PlayStation and Saturn in North America, Bust-A-Move 4 on the PlayStation, and Super Bust-A-Move on the PlayStation 2 were noted by game websites and magazines. The localized versions of Puzzle Bobble 2, known as Bust-A-Move 2 on consoles, retained the gameplay of Puzzle Bobble 2, despite "Arcade Edition" on the box art, while in the arcade, Puzzle Bobble 2 was localized as Bust-a-Move Again, changing the music and background graphics, and replacing Bub and Bob with a hand turning a crank.^note The original Japanese arcade version of Puzzle Bobble was going to be released in America as "Bubble Buster" without Bub and Bob, a very similar logo to Bust-A-Move, and the soundtrack from Bust-A-Move Again. These changes were also apparently going to made to the non-Japanese Neo Geo version, as if the game is launched in debug mode Bub and Bob will not be in the game, the logo will animate like the Bust-A-Move logo, and the game will play the soundtrack from Bust-A-Move Again. These changes carried over to the PlayStation 2 compilation, Taito Legends 2, which ended up playing the graphically altered version, Bust-a-Move Again, while attempting to play the music from the original version of Puzzle Bobble 2, then cutting off.
• The World version of the Arcade Game Undercover Cops may have been localized from a beta version, since it lacks a lot of moves, graphical details, and even the character-specific endings. This was fixed in Undercover Cops Alpha: Renewal Version, a re-release that was even more unsuccessful than the original version.^note And only 50 units of the original version were sold in North America! The Compilation Re-release Irem Arcade Hits presents the earlier, inferior version^note DotEmu, the publishers of Irem Arcade Hits, announced that they would be including the Alpha Renewal version in an update, but said update never happened.
• Konami completely butchered the North American version of Thunder Cross. All of the weapon upgrades except the Vulcan Cannon were removed and replaced with "Lil Baby" smart bombs, autofire was disabled, the Options were made non-adjustable, and the order of the stages was changed. Not surprisingly, the sequel was only released in Japan and Europe.
• Players hoping for an English version of Phantasy Star Online 2 were gravely disappointed in AsiaSoft's Southeast Asian localization of the game. Among the myriad problems with the game were a botched translation that pays no heed to the source material (referring to Technics as "Magic", to name the most egregious example), Arks Cash (the cash-shop money for the game) depreciating in value almost ten times compared to the original Japanese game, costumes that binded to characters upon equipment, and Sega region-blocking players from the Southeast Asia region (at least until mid-2015, when the region-block was lifted). Players outside of Japan hate it immensely and would have to wait until 2020 for Microsoft to localize the game in North America.
• Working Designs became infamous for making unpopular changes to games they localized. Their tendencies towards dialogue changes aside, they would actually tweak the gameplay as they saw fit, often to make the game more challenging. In practice, this tended to make the game cheaper, more tedious, reliant on Fake Difficulty, or all three. One of the most infamous examples is changing Lunar: Eternal Blue so that saving deducts a certain amount of Magic EXP, with the amount scaling with Hiro's level. This becomes especially troublesome if you didn't have the sort of time or skill to go without saving for large stretches of time. It got so bad that Working Designs eventually admitted it was a mistake, and left this constraint out in the Complete remake.
• The American arcade version of Area 88, U.N. Squadron, cuts out the special "rescue the passenger jet from timed bombs" mission.
• Street Fighter EX: With the exception of EX3, all the text-only endings in the overseas versions were removed completely and replaced with a generic congratulatory message. The PlayStation version of the original game kept the FMV endings, at least.
• The North American version of Bare Knuckle III, Streets of Rage 3, forces you into a bad ending after completing Stage 5 on Easy difficulty. Not only does no such mockery exist in the Japanese version, but the North American version's difficulties were inflated by one level, so JP Normal is NA Easy, JP Hard is NA Normal, etc. And where is the Japanese version's Easy level in the North American version? Nowhere. It doesn't exist.
• Super Aleste's North American version (renamed Space Megaforce) and European version strip out the character art and bonus difficulty-based ending artwork. Additionally, Area 3 loses its unique music track and instead uses the same music used in Areas 6, 9, and 10 for some unknown reason.
• Sega was widely accused of doing this with the online mobile game Sonic Runners when they took the game out of its soft launch (where it was available in Japan and Canada) and officially launched it worldwide. Various pieces of content were altered in price, usefulness, and availability to the point that players could not make any substantial progress without resorting to using the roulette system (which was already notorious for making players gamble with real cash to win a chance of earning or unlocking the aforementioned material, "video revives" were introduced, the game became even more glitchy than it already was, with its worldwide launch inexplicably making the game nearly unplayable despite having no such problems the day before, and starting with the 2.0 update actively started to sabotage player's progress, by introducing walls of spike balls in the game's layouts—the last of which were especially egregious as the game itself was an endless runner. Unsurprisingly, the game's active players —and by extension, its source of income— left in droves, and the game itself barely lasted a year before being shut down.
• Atari wasn't sure how well The Witcher would sell in the United States, being a game by a then-virtually unknown Polish developer based on a fantasy novel series hardly even heard of outside of Poland. The version initially released in North America had weak translation and a lot of censorship. Fortunately, after it proved a Sleeper Hit, the devs prevailed on Atari to redo 90% of the English voice work, releasing it as a free patch to the Enhanced Edition along with a host of other tweaks. A separate, optional patch removes the censorship.
• Sakura Wars franchise is notorious for lacking a true Western release until the fifth game in the series, so when a Russian publisher Akella decided to release the early games in the mid-Oughts, there was much rejoicing, up to several groups announcing their plans for a Fan Translation.^note As there are notably more Russian-to-English translators willing to work for free than Japanese-to-English ones Unfortunately, this was the first release of a major Visual Novel for Akella, so, due to the company having financial difficulties at the time, it devoted the barest minimum of funds and effort to the project, resulting in the first two installments in the series that managed to see the light of the day being rather halfheartedly translated and localized (and quite buggy as well, especially the original one, Sakura Wars (1996)). And to add insult to injury, Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning?, though translated, was lost in a company's bankruptcy several years later. It was later released by an unrelated Chinese company for the local market only.
• While not exactly bad as a result per se, a couple of the Tales games lack the Skits that are a large part of other Tales games, namely Tales of Destiny and Eternia. This is a bit of a problem, since a good deal of the comedy, plot, and characterization depends upon the skits. A lesser extent, the Opening Title music would often be changed to an inferior piece as well. This was one of the causes of ire from the fans when the Game Boy Advance port of Tales of Phantasia was released in North America, the opening theme (Yume Wa Owaranai, which earned the game the distinction of being the first SNES game to have a fully-voiced opening theme) was replaced with a generic piece. Other complaints about the GBA export include the bland and boring dialogue, and the one mistranslation that rendered Ragnarok as Kangaroo. And let's not get started about the International version of the iOS port...
  • Tales of Destiny also suffered from a "Blind Idiot" Translation, making certain puzzles Unwinnable without a guide (as the hints in game are wrong). Good luck finding one back in the 90s...
• While Tales of Eternia had some upcoming voice acting names that were at least trying (Kevin Miller as Reid for instance, later known for voicing the titular character in Sly Cooper), most of the others are clearly just phoning their performances in. Farah is an especially bad offender - Her voice actress sounds bored no matter the circumstance and it ruins several moments that are meant to be emotional.
  • The European version of the PSP version of Tales of Eternia featured a bug in several copies that would crash the game without fail after the party beats Volt.
  • Tales of Legendia also had voice acting of dubious quality. The second half of the game is unvoiced entirely, apparently because of lack of budget given to the localizers, who were told that the second half was optional (it's not).
  • The series has gotten better about this as it gains popularity in the West, but that didn't stop the Vita remake of Tales of Hearts from being full of extremely bizarre localization choices that range from arbitrary renames (many terms of which were already in English) to fundamentally changing characters' personalities.
  • The North American version of Tales of Symphonia is missing the option to rename members of your party, the sound test, and the voice acting from the Z Skits, though renaming party members is possible by directly editing the save file and the sound test can be reached by using an Action Replay.
• The English localization of Project × Zone (which, granted, we were lucky to get in the first place) had quite a few music tracks cut and replaced due to licensing issues. These include "Over my Clouds", "Ring a Bell", "Moshimo Kimi ga Negau no Nara", "Rocks", "World's Love", "High-rise to Hell" ^note from Dynamite Cop, and Mexican Flyer." However, since those last three tracks did not have a track already in the game to replace them, the English version ended up getting some exclusive tracks of its own. They are "Hope", "Poop Deck Pursuit", and "Coco Tapioca: The Huge Dancer" respectively.
  • Averted with the sequel, which has no removed music tracks and is more or less identical contentwise.
• Earnest Evans had a Sega Genesis / Mega Drive release as well as a Sega / Mega CD version. The CD version has voice-acted cutscenes and a prequel plot to El Viento as part of a trilogy series, but remained Japan-only. The version released to the West was the watered-down Genesis version, which removed all the cutscenes besides a brief opening and the credits, obviously downgraded from CD music audio to the system hardware (though it's a Motoi Sakuraba soundtrack nonetheless), and rewrote the manual to claim it was a sequel to El Viento with Earnest being the grandson of that game's Earnest. The gameplay and stages are all entirely intact, so it was likely a case of space limitations.
• Super Valis IV was a slimmed-down port of the original Valis IV, which never made it outside of Japan. The American version only has one playable character as opposed to three and fewer levels, but then again it makes sense with the reduced storage capacity of an SNES cartridge as opposed to the CD format for the TurboGrafx-CD that the original version had.
• The English version of BlazBlue: Chronophantasma infamously removed the Library function from the game entirely without prior warning. The Library Mode allowed players to read up on series lore and learn what various story and fighting game terms mean so they could understand the story better. It was removed from the English version due to Arc System Works US handling the localisation of CP themselves and admitting that it was too hard for them to translate these terms efficiently. This has thus resulted in ire from fans who were looking to make use of it. It turns out they listened, though; CP Extend has the entire library meticulously translated.
• The Rockman Complete Works remakes of the NES Mega Man games were brought overseas thanks to Mega Man Anniversary Collection, but many of its features were removed in the process:
  • There is no unlockable Hard Mode.
  • The PocketStation mode is removed.
  • Mega Man, Mega Man 2, and Mega Man 3 are missing the Database and the Boss Rush mode.
  • Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5, and Mega Man 6 are missing Dr. Light's Laboratory, the Sound Room, Mission Mode, and the ability to play without your helmet.
    • Additionally, the weapon menus in Navi Mode (featuring descriptions of the weapons available) are replaced with the old weapon menus.
  • During Navi Mode, the text of the messages you get from the navigator is displayed immediately rather than one character at a time, meaning you won't get to see the navigator's talking animation. Furthermore, the translation of the text tends to be spotty.
  • The GameCube port removed the music exclusive to Navi Mode. Even in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions, there are still a few missing tracks.
  • And finally, the additional credit sequences for the creators of the remakes (accompanied by gameplay footage) are removed.
• The latter Mega Man Battle Network games ran into space issues with the English script; rather than shell out for more expensive cartridges (at a time when the Game Boy Advance was giving way to the Nintendo DS), Capcom's international branches decided to take the axe to in-game content to make things work. Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan got off relatively light: a couple of scenarios lost one floor of their respective "dungeons", and the homepages of Lan's friends became Palette Swaps of his own — many of these changes were reverted in the game's DS port. Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar and Cybeast Falzar was not so lucky: in addition to condensed scenarios like Battle Network 5, everything from the Boktai crossover except the standard Gun del Sol chips was excised (including numerous BattleChips, a boss fight, and an internet area) and the maps intended to help the player navigate the labyrinthine internet areas were cut.
• In general, M-rated video games tend to end up getting Bowdlerised in Japan due to Moral Guardians taking umbrage at games such as those from the Grand Theft Auto series. Since the CERO ratings were more of a suggestion than a strictly-enforced advisory deterring minors from purchasing and playing games unsuitable for them, said youngsters were able to get their hands on GTA and run amok in a virtual city to their hearts' content. Following the restrictions imposed on the sale of Grand Theft Auto III in the Saitama and Kanagawa prefectures, Rockstar was forced to censor their titles to appease authorities. It gets egregious with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where a number of draconian and awkward changes were made to placate both Sony and the local censors:
  • The wanted system is altered: Shooting or maiming civilians with projectile or incendiary weapons awards CJ with an instant wanted level regardless of police presence. This makes most missions unnecessarily harder, as you would be hounded by law enforcement even if you shot someone in a secluded area. Strangely enough, this does not apply to melee weapons.
  • CJ is no longer able to stomp peds to a pulp or do any foot-based attacks.
  • The bone squishing sound is no longer present.
  • Setting CJ or civilians on fire will no longer result in them screaming in agony.
  • A number of mission strands and plots were awkwardly censored or cut altogether - some of the missions where CJ is tasked with killing certain civilians were subtitled to seem as if those civilians were somehow affiliated or associated with the Ballas.
  • The adult content in the game was also toned down.
  • San Andreas' release was also delayed as a result of said changes.
• The Nintendo Entertainment System, beloved and revolutionary game console though it may be, was noticeably inferior in many ways to its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom. Nintendo chose to redesign the system for its American release to implement Copy Protection and Region Coding. They also opted to radically change the exterior case to make it look like a VCR instead of a video game console, because retailers refused to stock video game consoles in the wake of the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. This redesign, however, introduced many problems not present in the Famicom. The worst of these were reliability issues stemming from both the complex VCR-like cartridge loader and Copy Protection (the source of the infamous blinking light and blue screen errors^note The cartridge loading mechanism would bend the cartridge connection pins on the main board. This prevented the 10NES protection chip from making a solid connection with the cartridge, which would cause the system to endlessly reset since the chip wouldn't detect a valid cartridge). NES controllers lacked the microphone, built in to the Famicom controller, which meant the features like defeating the Pols Voice in The Legend of Zelda by yelling into the mic had to be cut in the international release. Nintendo never released an equivalent to the Famicom Disk System outside of Japan, so the NES lacked support for disk based games on the Famicom Disk System, though many disk system games eventually ended up being released on cartridges, so this wasn't a huge problem. Most egregious of all, however, is that not only the NES' cartridge slot was changed to one that had more pins and the pins previously wired up to support co-processors are now wired up for the Copy Protection chip, the extra pins were left disconnected instead of being wired up to the system's co-processor connectors, meaning that any games that uses an external sound chip (ie Castlevania) are in extension also (minor) bad exports, because they just don't sound as good as the Japanese releases. The only thing the NES does better than the Famicom is that it includes support for composite video instead of just RF, and being able to disconnect the controllers on the NES rather than having them hardwired.
• One of the most enjoyable features of Professor Layton and the Last Specter is the minigame London Life. Unless you're European, in which case you'll never get to play it. The irony has not gone unnoticed.
• The Famicom port of Salamander allows three options per player, but its overseas counterpart, released as Life Force, only allows two. Additionally, the export versions only have one ending, which is a static shot of the Konami logo, not even a credits roll!
• The original European release of Pokémon Trading Card Game had the option of playing the game in 5 different languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Italian). The 3DS Virtual Console release is only in English. Made ever weirder since other Virtual Console releases of games with translations in other languages available in the original release (such as Pokémon Snap or many GBA games) keep them for the rerelease.
  • Certain events received rather poor equivalents in other regions. Japan got the opportunity to get an Arceus, with a small chance for it to be shiny. South East Asia got codes for Arceus too (which could be redeemed on both NA and Japan consoles), but without the chance to be shiny.
  • Japan: Several Olympus Mons, including one that had a chance to be shiny. Europe: Darkrai, a powerful Pokemon with an amazing signature move. North America: Multiscale Dragonite, with nothing else special about it aside from Extreme Speed, which was a commonly bred-on move.
  • The Japanese version of Pokémon Crystal had online features (first in the series) that allowed players to trade, battle, and interact over long distance by connecting the game to real life mobile phones. These were removed from non-Asian versions due to mobile phones not being as prominent outside of Japan back then. The game also had a special event (also a first) that allowed players to catch Celebi. Since it was tied to the mobile phone feature, it was excluded from western releases, rendering Celebi unobtainable in-game (although it was still distributed in official tournaments and events). In the Virtual Console rerelease, Celebi is catchable in all language versions after entering the Hall of Fame.
• Asia got the Steam version of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy in Japanese only. Thing is, not many Asians outside Japan speak Japanese, and Sony even sells the official English version on Blu-Ray for the PS3 (along with a separate Chinese (Mandarin+Cantonese) and Korean version) at Sony Centers throughout the region. One wonders if Square is trying to sabotage the sales of their own games on the platform in the region.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest IV's DS remake had the "party talk" feature removed from the North American version. Before you dismiss this, this constituted enough of the game's dialogue that the North American version's ROM is a full 18 megabytes smaller than the Japanese one. Thankfully, this was restored in the mobile port.
  • The international Nintendo 3DS remakes of Dragon Quest VII and Dragon Quest VIII replace the orchestrated soundtrack from the original Japanese release with MIDI music. It's particularly egregious in the case of VIII since its original international release on the PlayStation 2 added orchestrated music as a Regional Bonus. This is in addition to each export coming out over two years late and only then due to Nintendo playing Network to the Rescue.
• The North American version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on the NES cut out two levels from the Japanese version and replaced them with copies of other stages. Even sadder is that the stages' enemies were not changed to fit, which results in most of them spawning out-of-bounds. This made an already-terrible game even worse.
• Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment. The game was localized for an Asian release, where English is a prominent language, but is still secondary and not top priority. As a result, there are grammar errors everywhere◊, misspellings, and other oddities, not to mention the baffling amount of glitches. This localization has gained some notoriety due to the poor quality, and would be the version of the game that would be released in North America and Europe. Thankfully, the PS4 port of the game would receive a proper translation, in addition to refining the gameplay, and the subsequent PC and Nintendo Switch versions are even better in terms of performance.
• Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter: Joke character Norimaro, based on comedian Noritake Kinashi, is Dummied Out in non-Japanese versions. Though digging around in the ROM, it does show that most of his content was translated into English^note And some of his quotes were even translated into Portuguese, just disabled for the International releases. Apparently, this was due to rights issues and Marvel simply hating him.
• Persona:
  • The original Persona received a rather shoddy localization outside of Japan on the PlayStation: aside from the inexplicable changes of character names and ethnicities (Yuki notwithstanding) and Japanese landmarks retained in what was supposed to be an American setting, the difficulty for the game was ramped down considerably, and the "Snow Queen" questline (several hours worth of gameplay) was cut out entirely, with rumors suggesting its removal being due to there not being enough time to translate it (not that the translation was that good, anyway). The localization of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment undid most of these changes, with the only holdover being the characters' Western names, which are explained as being nicknames instead of their real names. Thankfully, the game received a re-release on the PSP that, when released in the West, remained faithful to the original Japanese version and kept all of the content intact.
• Ristar: Outside of Japan, the Game Gear version is missing an entire level because "American kids wouldn't understand walking across clouds and rainbows" (seriously). The full level is still in the game, but made inaccessible, as the American and European versions were programmed to skip it. What makes it worse is that its absence sticks out like a sore thumb, as its world is the only one to be one stage long (as opposed to two) as a result.
• Rival Schools: The English version does not come with the School Life dating sim.
  • The board game mode in Project Justice was also not included in the English version, though at least the English version got exclusive characters to make up for it.
• Tekken: The English version of Tekken 2 does not have Theater Mode. In Tekken 3, the English version of Anna's ending has Anna walking away, instead of having her top pulled off by Nina.
• Planet Puzzle League Dummied Out Lip's stage from international versions of the game. Even worse is that the rest of the game features a widely criticized "techno" theme that completely excised the mascot characters, story mode, and whimsy that had been staples of the series beforehand, with Lip's level being the only clue as to its more lighthearted origins.
• The European/Australian PS3 and PS4 releases of Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-. Oh Christ...these was botched so hard you'll wonder why they even bothered. Not only were they released 6 months later (in June 2015, compared to the initial console release of December 2014), these versions are PSN exclusives, and did not get patched. At all. Not only does this mean the two DLC characters (Elphelt and Leo) are left inaccessible, but it also means that the online mode is region locked - European/Australian players can only play with other European/Australian players.
  • -REVELATOR- thankfully averts this - Europe and Australia got the game around the same time as everyone else, and their version is being actively patched and given access to the DLC.
• European/Australian versions of PS2 games like Onimusha and Disgaea had their Japanese audio tracks removed to save space on the disc, or to fit it on a CD instead of a DVD^note Most PS2 games come on DVDs instead of CDs to avoid Loads and Loads of Loading, though there is the rare exception such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
• With the American release of Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles, the missing content is as listed:
  • Maestro is only playable in the Japanese version.
  • Ponygon's spells and partner Kafk Sunbeam are only in the Japanese Version.
  • Ponygon's Story is only in the Japanese version.
  • There are fewer cards in the American version.
  • You can watch movies only in the Japanese version.
• RayStorm had several changes made to it for the North American PS1 port. First, this version raises the default difficulty of all stages from 3 (out of 8) to 5. This in itself isn't so bad. What makes this particularly sinister is that this version also introduces "Training Mode", which locks the player out of the second half of the game if any stage's difficulty is set below 5. This means you can't play on Japanese defaults and see the entire game, much like with Streets of Rage 3. These changes were intentional on Working Designs's part; as explained in the manual, they did this in an attempt to curb the mentality of buying a game, creditfeeding it to the end, and then calling the game done and never touching it again. That said, the default starting life stock was raised from 3 to 5 to compensate. All subsequent overseas releases of RayStorm do not have any sort of region-specific alterations besides localizing the text.
• Nazi Zombies had radios in Kino Der Toten that played an audio log when you shot them in the English version. In the French version? Nothing. Not even an untranslated log, just nothing. Then Gorod Krovi had some secret quotes that weren't translated (but some other were), which was fixed in a later patch. Then Revelations had the same problem as Kino. Radios that don't play anything when you activate them.
• While Giga Wing 2 was localized in North America for the Dreamcast, the Japanese voice acting was removed for reasons unknown.
• Expect to pay up to double the North American price for the Nintendo Switch if you live in Asia outside of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, specifically in areas where the device is distributed by a company called M. M. Soft/Maxsoft. Also, the console-only option is not available in said area and people are forced to buy the console with two games which they may not want. This is largely due to the greed of said distributor, who is the sole official distributor of Nintendo products in the region. People have complained directly to Nintendo of Japan, but the complaints had apparently fallen on deaf ears. This is bad as certain Asian countries said distributor is selling the Switch in are going through a very bad recession and a number of people cannot justify paying the price. And to think the Europeans thought they had it bad. Thankfully, the distributor got rid of the game cartridge requirement after two years, but the price is still significantly higher than North America by several hundred bucks.
  • And that's just the tip of the iceberg- once it became clear that many games requires a Nintendo Online subscription to play online (which again, is not available in those regions), making them Bad Export for You due to the prerequisite being No Export for You...
• Groove Coaster 3EX: Dream Party has new Series Mascot Yume come with her own voice, as well as a bunch of other new navigator characters who all share the same voice bank...but only in the Japanese version. In the English-language version, Yume also gets the generic voice, leaving Linka as the only character with a unique voice bank.
• The North American version of Baku Baku Animal on the Sega Saturn removed almost every cutscene from story mode — only the princess's intro and the ending remain. Oddly, the version on Game Gear and Sega Master System just translated them like a normal localisation, leaving players wondering exactly why they were removed from the otherwise-superior Saturn version.
• MMORPGs and other always online games often fall into this as the operation of foreign language versions tends to be contracted to a local service provider, which is usually more concerned about making a quick buck than supporting the game properly. Developers have been moving away from this practice in the past few years but this new trend is not without issues particularly those which arise from running a game service remotely through translators.
• The international versions of Robo Pit 2, for unknown reasons, omitted the entire soundtrack, with no replacement. This means the entire game is played with no audio except for sound effects. Worse yet, the European/Australian version also left out the cutscenes, allegedly because publisher Phoenix Games was unwilling to pay for a translation^note Although at least it isn't as bad as some of the other "games" they've published....
  • This also doubles as Late Export for You, since the game took 6 years to get released outside of Japan for some reason.
• Officially acknowledged by the staff for the English-language version of BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!, who have stated that they won't be able to bring all of the songs over to that particular version due to licensing issues, but will bring in EN-exclusive content to make up for it.
• The Korean versions of SOUND VOLTEX got hit with a bunch of censorship-related changes:
  • The song "Senbonzakura" is not available (a lot of other rhythm games with Korea-specific builds do the same), as the song is heavily themed around Imperial Japan which is a very sensitive topic in several of Japan's neighboring countries, including Korea.
  • In December 2017, a lot of songs had their album jackets changed to a generic one in order to avoid violating new video game content guidelines.
  • On July 24, 2018, an update took an axe to all songs added after November 16, 2017 due to the same guidelines.
• Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 was originally released in Japan in 1995 as an early PlayStation game. Americans would get the game in 2003 instead (a few months after Dragon Ball Z: Budokai was released on the PlayStation 2), and because they couldn't be bothered to make an English dub, the pre-battle cutscenes were removed^note Also cut in the European release, but that was in 1996.
• Due to loot box controversy brought about by Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), the Belgium version of Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle was forced to remove all micro-transactions, which means players in that region are completely unable to purchase both Dragon Stones and anything related to Pilaf's Trove, which forced players to buy into a F2P playstyle.
• Powerful Pro-kun Pocket 11 is the one game in the series to receive any sort of localization, and it was the disaster known as MLB Power Pros 2008. For some reason, 2K Sports decided to use their MLB license on a game where all of the players are depicted as generic chibi puppets. The cost for that? Everything other than the baseball simulator. The character customization system, three story modes, the card battle game, pennant season mode, and three minigames were all thrown in the trash, with nothing added to make up for it.
• Bizarrely, several of the games on the PlayStation Classic use the slower European versions over the faster American ones.
• A unique case of this affected Konami's PlayStation 2 game Operator's Side, which was controlled entirely with a microphone through which players would speak Japanese to direct their character. The game became a best-seller in Japan, enough to get a lower-price "The Best" rerelease^note equivalent to "Greatest Hits" in American English, "Essentials" in European languages and "BigHit Series" in Korean. When it was released in North America as Lifeline, the game was fully translated to English... without adapting the speech recognition system to English pronunciation. Because of this, the player has to affect a Japanese accent for their commands to be reliably understood, down to pronouncing Ls as Rs. Needless to say, Lifeline was panned for its poor speech recognition, and promptly tanked in the marketplace.
• Taiko no Tatsujin:
  • On the arcade platform, some songs are missing in the Asian version of the arcade due to licensing issues.
  • The song "Senbonzakura" wasn't made available in Taiko arcade in South Korea, due to issues with Imperial Japanese imagery. This also extended to the console entries, as Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session and Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum 'n' Fun both had the song removed from the DLC list for those in South Korea.
  • Both Drum Session! for PS4 and Drum 'n' Fun for the Switch are the special cases; For American, both Drum Session! and Drum 'n' Fun were only available as digital-only releases, and on Drum Session!, player will have to buy the DLC songs individually from within the in-game DLC page instead of DLC pack on the PlayStation Store like other regions does. For European, only Drum 'n' Fun has the physical release, and has the bundle with the HORI Taiko drum peripheral. Both Western and Europe version of Drum Session! has the song "Theme of Ryu" removed from the base game.
• Fatal Fury Special: European owners of the SNES version got the short end of the stick, because unlike both the American and Japanese versions, which were done on a 32-meg cartridge, the European version was done on a 24-meg cartridge, meaning that a lot of stuff from within the game had to be cut out, most notably the characters Big Bear, Cheng, Axel, Laurence, and their respective stages, along with some character animations. To make up for it, Ryo (who had served as a hidden final boss in the original arcade version) is immediately selectable without having to use a cheat code, but this added bonus is somewhat negated since Ryo himself is a complete Game-Breaker when it comes to Arcade Mode^note for those who don't know, the A.I. isn't fully programmed to handle any of Ryo's special and super moves, thus a player can just spam any of Ryo's special attacks and win the match with much ease.
• Wonder Boy in Monster World: The Western version tweaked two of the bosses in order to increase the difficulty, resulting in them being rendered incredibly cheap and sticking out like a sore thumb compared with the rest of the bosses, which provided a far more fair challenge.
• The Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2 combined the worst aspects of both the Uncensored and German versions, as it omitted the gore found in the former (which also made the game more difficult, as the Infected couldn't be set on fire, which made incendiary rounds useless) and lacked the Counter-Strike: Source weapons the latter had to compensate for the same censorship. While the PC version got an official de-censor sometime after the R-18+ rating was allowed for video games and Valve made a successful submission for a reclassification, the console versions didn't.
• Demon Sword for the NES was a pale shadow of its Japanese counterpart, Fudou Myouou Den. The number of levels is cut down from 13 to 7, the variety of enemies, bosses, and power-ups is severely reduced, and the challenge is dumbed down for Western audiences.
• sora is infamous for suffering from a particularly bad one in 2012: the publisher ΩTH was in fact an internet Troll who somehow managed to gain the license to localize the game from right under Orange_Juice's noses after their previous publisher Rockin' Android declined to do so themselves and proceeded to drive the entire game to the ground. Incorrect terms, unnecessary name changes, lying about SecuROM DRM being included within the game on its GamersGate page, filling it to the brim with bugs, replacing the soundtrack made by DEKU with other tracks, you name it, they did it. To say that fans of the SUGURI games were unhappy would be an understatement. Even a petition to get a new publisher to save the game went nowhere. Thankfully, things finally changed for the better in 2015 when Fruitbat Factory claimed the rights to the game themselves and released a more faithful localization the next year. Even then, this still remains such a Never Live It Down moment for the game that fans themselves wish that it never happened.
• The original Xbox LIVE Indie Games release of Sword of Rapier, despite being available overseas (up until the service's closure in 2017), was not translated at all outside of the English in-game manuals. The later ports of the game would rectify this by giving the game a full translation to English and other languages, however, the quality of the translation English is very poor due to being translated by a third-party translator who lacks understanding of the English language.
• It took decades for the Princess Maker games to get a proper release in the West, despite the series becoming a Cult Classic from the leaked version of the completed but unpublished translation of Princess Maker 2. The series finally saw a full release across 2016-2018 (except for 4), but while the "Refine" version of 2 was rather well received, 1, 3 and 5 were all criticised for a "Blind Idiot" Translation from Korean publisher CFK Co. and for being riddled with bugs, and the positive reception for 2 was largely rooted in nostalgia for the original version, with the new soundtrack being the most-praised element.
• Monster Hunter XX got a DLC Palico with the Weakness Exploit skill, however the game's non-Japan counterpart, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, never did, as Capcom decided to discontinue updates for GU. The only way to get it in GU now is to either hack the game or receive a Palico with the skill from another player.
• Chameleon Twist had many features lacking from the Japanese release. In addition to many rooms in the American version being easier, the Japanese version had the multiplayer power-ups being usable in the main game, more hidden mini-games including a bowling game, a bonus boss, and two secret unlockable characters.
• Power Quest, which was made by the same company as the aforementioned Chameleon Twist games, actually inverted this. While the Japanese version is an original Game Boy game with Super Game Boy enhancements, the international version is a backwards-compatible Game Boy Color game, keeping the Super Game Boy enhancements and also having an enhanced color palette.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: World Duel Carnival was positively butchered in the worldwide release for uncertain reasons, with the Device and Database modes removed, character profiles being cut, the ending pictures for character storylines being gone, and the roster of playable characters dropping from 40 to 12 (with the rest only serving as opponents).
• As the install base of the SECAM color standard (e.g. France, the Soviet Union, and some countries in Africa and the Middle East) is small enough not to warrant extensive support, Atari made the console output in black and white over System D, and assigned colours to eight luminosity values in the Atari 2600 via a cheap and simple off-the-shelf external signal processor, which meant that games played on French-market Ataris end up looking like a weird cross between a ZX Spectrum and a DOS game in CGA mode.
• The HD Edition of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which was sold by itself on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in Japan, is included in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection everywhere else. On paper, this sounds like an improvement, since it means that Western players gets a third MGS title on the collection in addition to 2 and 3. However, this adds an issue that didn't exists in the Japanese version, at least for the PS3 version of the Collection. Whereas the stand-alone Japanese PS3 version runs the game at 1080p, the Western PS3 version runs at 720p. This is because the collection runs all three titles from the same launcher and the resolution is always fixed to 720p, no matter which title is chosen. This is not an issue with the Xbox 360 version of the HD Collection, which has a separate disc for Peace Walker (due to the 360 using DVD as a game storage media instead of Blu-ray), nor with the stand-alone digital version on the PS Store.
• The German version of Resident Evil 4 is missing "Assignment Ada" and "Mercenaries" due to the youth-protection laws. It's also hideously censored, to the point of practically being unplayable. It was so bad that German players largely opted to import copies from Austria rather than buy it domestically.
• To celebrate the release of the Sega Genesis collection for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, Nintendo released a dedicated Sega Genesis gamepad that is natively compatible with the Switch. Unfortunately, while Japan gets the 6-button variant, Westerners are stuck with the 3-button variant. Fortunately, there are third-party controllers modeled after the 6-button controller that work just as well...as long as you don't play online multiplayer with them in wireless mode, due to online play adding a debilitating amount of input lag for third-party wireless controllers.
• The Neverhood's Japan-exclusive PlayStation port has its fair share of problems. It halved the game's resolution (worsening the audio and video quality), the music doesn't loop properly (one track doesn't even loop at all) and the Hall of Records and "Making Of" video were both removed entirely.
• The Japanese versions of the first two Spyro the Dragon games altered the camera to be spaced far above Spyro (but was nearly uncontrollable), significantly slowed down Spyro's movements, and placed signs (which allow you to read them when you attack them) near enemies. Those changes are largely blamed for the games to be largely disliked and forgotten in Japan, to be point the series didn't have any other entries past the first two games released there until Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure due to how poorly they sold. Ironically, those modifications were meant to offset complaints about motion sickness during the demo period.
• The European/Asian arcade version of Rohga: Armor Force have intermissions between scenes and path selection omitted from the Japanese and American versions.
• The German version of Team Fortress Classic, like Half-Life before it, replaced all humans with robots. The issue is that they only used one model to replace every character, making it impossible to tell what class other players were using.
• The NES port of The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown was released in Japan on a 1-megabyte cartridge. North American publisher FCI decided to skimp on production costs and used a 500-kilobyte cartridge instead, resulting in quite a lot of content being lost or simplified. The entire opening sequence is missing, as are all of the images during the credits. Almost a quarter of the enemy roster went missing, and the number of Palette Swaps shot up drastically.

---