As some of you may or may not know and care, the majority of the japanese voicework from Megaman (Rockman) ZX was removed for the US release. As this kind of thing always bugs me (bad localization treatment), I felt it appropriate to send of a quick email to capcom to express my displeasure. Their response is as follows:

"Hello, Thank you for contacting Capcom USA Inc.

Unfortunately the original Japanese voices were removed from of the North American release of MegaMan ZX. The reason for this is unknown.

We apologize for anyinconvenience and always enjoy hearing from great fans such as yourself.

We appreciate your continued support of Capcom products!
Thank you, Capcom Customer Support"

Unknown reason? If this is the case then I believe the matter requires further investigation! Axe whomever was responsible I say!

I'll never understand why a company would simply remove content from a game. Why not have an option to enable the voices, and set it to off by default? That would be a neat easter egg.

Maybe there's an issue with the ESRB not being able to properly rate a title with foreign language content?

Hmm, that's a possibility, that it may even be more expensive to have it rated... or something....

Though if you go and play Trapt on PS2 by Techmo, it has full japanese voicework and subtitles, as do pretty much all Nippon-Ichi (sp?) titles. So it's probably more along the lines of Capcom hoping to make the game more accepted by an ignorant English audience. Fail.

i think the main reason is that for north american releases sometimes they change small things, add more content, and they want to disway the japanese from reimporting the game and buy the japanese version. also i dont know the answer to this but are japanese games more expensive when compared to their northamerican counterparts, or are they the same.

What's really frustrating is that the cutscenes all have the Japanese voices. It's pretty dissapointing playing the game knowing there were voices for the text dialogue but it was needlessly stripped out.

Hey, if this kind of thing bugs you as a fan of original japanese content, you should send an email to:

megamail@capcom.com

You may get a form letter back, but it wouldn't hurt to get a few complaints in so that maybe the next titles won't get this sort of treatment.

...now I really wish I had a blog fanbase to influence... that would really help get the message out :P

the reason for the japanese voice removal is the same as not having left handed controls in alot of games: the people who care about this sort of thing are in the minority. as a left handed gamer i feel handicapped playing the vast majority of games. its like localizing the game and translating the entire thing into russian or something. and i dont think the rating has much to do with it. if its not in english then its not language period as far as ratings are concerned. it might as well be animal noises.