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The World Ends With You: Final Remix finally released on Switch last week and introduced new features and story content to the game. But as part of this, one fan believes that the port makes use of his own work on an Italian translation of the game from years ago.
The Switch port introduced the ability to play the game in Italian for the first time officially , but after watching a stream of the game, Francesco (aka Mewster online), noticed that the translation started to look familiar. An Italian game developer, Francesco apparently started translating The World Ends with You when he was 16.
According to Kotaku, who spoke with Francesco over Discord:
“It didn’t take him long to recognise what he says are undeniable similarities to his own work. Francesco said that some phrases were cleaned up and translated in a different way, but he recognised the majority of the work as identical to his own translations, right down to where the Switch port version had placed line breaks in the word balloons.”
Based on what he saw of the stream, Francesco believes that Square-Enix used up to 90% of his original transaltion. Square-Enix themselves had not commented on the story at the time of writing.
While it’s hard to say at this stage whether Francesco’s translation was actually used, he apparently isn’t looking for compensation but is “only amused to discover I worked (unknowingly) for the game I loved“.
Source: Kotaku
