CHAOS;HEAD NOAH: A Note on the Translation
We understand how replacing an entire translation with our own could be seen as disrespectful. To this, we would like to state plainly: that couldn’t even come close to our intention.
Had the official translation been of an acceptable quality, we likely would’ve discarded the work we’d done in its entirety and refocused our efforts toward improving the official product. This is how we’ve operated in the past—by patching glaring issues present in the official translations, rather than outright replacing them. Real people worked on these games, and their work should be respected just as the people themselves should be.
However, with CHAOS;HEAD NOAH, we soon came to realize that this was something we couldn’t do. The more we read, the more problems we came across. Mistranslations, consistency between entries was completely foregone, and, most importantly, characters didn’t sound like their original Japanese counterparts. In order to get the game in a decent state, not only would we have to put in the amount of work we did for ROBOTICS;NOTES ELITE—i.e., several thousand man hours—but we would have to double it.
The translation at its core was unsalvagable. There was no better option than to replace it.
Despite these critiques, we want to absolutely stress—we fully support the translators who worked on the game. Knowing the state of the industry—especially given MAGES.’ track record—it’s highly likely that they were neither given the time, nor the funds they needed to give this game the respect it deserves. The CG editing alone screams this—it’s clear the translators did not want readers to miss out on important content contained inside images, but were forced to make massive sacrifices when it came to presentation.
We are lucky enough to have had all the time we needed to do right by this project. Even all the way through the end of the translation process, there were still things we were discovering about this game and its world. In all likelihood, we might still find that we missed something—the release of ANONYMOUS;CODE, for example, definitely put a bunch of things into perspective.
Thankfully, we have the freedom to continue updating our patch—something the official translators lack, as any and all changes to the official release would need to go directly through MAGES. themselves. This explains why, despite all the issues and bugs that plague the ports, they’ve only fixed one so far!
As long as MAGES. continues to act like this—as long as they continue to show zero care for the quality of their releases—we will continue to operate as we have been. We love this series to death, and we hope that shows.
Thank you.
If you have any questions or concerns, or you just want to talk to us, head on over to our Discord server.