We’ve learned River City Girls Zero offers literal or new translation options, a new feature that has sparked outrage with certain folks within gaming.

While River City Girls Zero offers literal or new translation options, most translated Japanese games offer one translated script, i.e. one that is “localized” and adapts the raw translation to make it more palatable for westerners.

The new feature has sparked the debate once more, generally the one camp prefers a more literal translation so this is a welcome change – the other camp is angry and claim the new feature shows users or even the publisher don’t trust the translators “localized script.”

This has been an ongoing debate with fans of Japanese games as many prefer a literal translation, mostly due to an increasing number of random puns, nonsensical cultural references, and even partisan politics are injected into recent “localized” scripts.

From our initial look at the “new” translated script, it generally removes some of the “meaner” words from the original Japanese, like not-so-nice ways to address females. Colorful language used in prison was also mostly left out to likely avoid the allegory to rape.

River City Girls Zero was just released for Switch, its other versions across Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 versions are coming sometime later this spring. Stay tuned for our thorough review on the game (and its script)!