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Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii gets frustrated with localization because English is a "simple" language

Yuji Horii says some of the flavor inevitably gets lost when translating from Japanese to English.

Dragon Quest XI Screenshot — Image credit: Square Enix

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Fri Mar 13 2026

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There is a subsection of video game fans who believe that translating from Japanese to English should be a simple affair, but, just like when manga gets localized, there is a lot of nuance that goes into it. After decades of seeing his games translated into English, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii has grown frustrated over what he sees as a loss of the subtleties of his dialogue when games are played by English-speaking players.

During an interview with Famitsu, Yuji Horii discussed how English struggles to handle the “flavor” of the original Japanese in Dragon Quest games. “When it comes to English, the flavor tends to get lost in many ways. Things inevitably end up sounding simplistic… I’ve come to accept that English is a simple language, so there’s no helping it.”

In the same interview, Takanari Ishiyama, the series director for Paranormasight, gives the example of first-person pronouns in Japanese, which include words like ore, boku, washi, and watashi, all of which have slightly different usage in Japanese but would be translated simply to “I” in English. While this isn’t entirely true, as it ignores words like my, mine, or our, which fill some of the usage gaps that Ishiyama is explaining, there are indeed challenges in localizing any game into another language.

That is why good translators and localizers, who understand how to keep the nuance of the original text while making it accessible to non-Japanese speakers, are so important. Without them, series like Dragon Quest would never have the same global following that they do.

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