Cultic murder mystery visual novel Shuten Order got revisions to parts of its English translation in a new patch released on September 19. Supervised by Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka and developed by Neilo, the title has received much praise for its suspenseful narrative and multi-genre game system, but its reputation has taken a large hit due to poorly handled localization.
As pointed out by reviewers and Steam users, Shuten Order’s English version suffered from overall inaccuracy, typos, punctuation issues, and text bleeding out of its boxes at launch. But most immersion-breaking of all was an inconsistency in pronouns, with personal pronouns like “You” and “I” being seemingly being swapped, and the same characters being referred to with both male and female pronouns in different scenes. The latter issue even caused some players to assume Shuten Order was depicting transphobia, which game director Takumi Nakazawa clarified was a misunderstanding caused by mistakes in translation.
The new Patch 1.0.1 brings translation fixes to several routes, but focuses on the most-heavily criticized Ministry of Health route. In an update on X, Nakazawa commented, “Language settings and specific PC environments have been fixed. Additionally, the English translation—particularly problematic in the Ministry of Health route—has also been revised, including unintended mistranslations that could be read as transphobic.”
On the other hand, the director warns that this patch doesn’t fix all the mistranslations in Shuten Order’s text. Given the game’s enormous volume (over 360,000 words in English), the publishers are going to need more time to address everything, so changes will be implemented gradually through subsequent updates.
Shuten Order is out now for PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch.
