Game is Digimon Story: Time Stranger

I'm not even sure if he's a real person...

That’s it, that’s the post.

I fell for this back in the day. Major props to making a convincing photoshop back in the late 90's with primitive tech.

Context: Toby Fox says there wont be translations for Undertale or Deltarune after Latam fans asked for them

https://bsky.app/profile/tobyfox.undertale.com/post/3mia4smxehk2a

I just opened R*ddit (my mistake, I know) just to be inundated with posts in there about a recent drama about Latin American people asking for game translations, but the fandom thinks it's much more reasonable to just bootlick as hard as they can to justify not having them.

Apparently to them it's fine to say the people asking for translations are a bunch of nationalists, as if global north and global south nationalism can even be compared, this one genuinely smells like racism to me. It's also fine to downvote anyone saying that it is an actual issue since a huge portion of people will never be able to experience Toby Fox's games. And apparently fuck localization teams too, because one or another game had one bad localization that got backlash, fuck that this people literally do this for a living, one big game fucked up, therefore all localization bad. There's also a bunch of Latin American people just doing the classic "sorry for these people making my country/continent look bad", like wtf, have some amount of self-respect at least, bunch of vira-lata behavior.

Toby's excuse is not even bad, dude's a perfectionist, I get it, but working with a localization team is not the end of the world either. But who cares right? It's funnier if the majority of the fandom just pretends Latin American people are just entitled idiots asking him to learn 2 new whole languages instead of doing the obvious.

I get it now, these mfs are just extremely annoying.

It's a 2016 dialog choice and QTE driven game along the same gameplay lines as Telltale games like The Walking Dead. Of the writer-director, wikipedia describes him:

Khonsari was raised in his homeland Iran until 10. He fled Iran as a political refugee to Canada after the 1979 Revolution with his family.

My assumption is that there are two possibilities for this game. It's either just another run-of-the-mill both-sides-bad centrist-brained libfest that paints the revolutionaries as being "well intentioned" but all revolutions (except for bourgeois ones of course) inevitably lead to "authoritarian" dictatorships that are even worse than what existed before and any good-guy revolutionaries presented at the start of the game either turn out bad or are shown to have been naive fools for ever hoping things could be better. That's what the game is painting itself to be, regardless of whatever it is. The other possibility, made more likely given the writer-director's background, is that it's flat out unabashedly pro-imperialist, anti-Iranian unmitigated western propaganda.

I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think you know what I mean, where they kind of represent two ends of a shitty spectrum. (There's also the exceedingly slim possibility its politics are halfway decent, but I'm not really entertaining that thought because the chances are too close to null.) I'm curious enough about where this game lands on that spectrum that I think I'll go ahead and play it. I'm not one to rage quit in the traditional sense, but if it gets bad enough, I probably won't subject myself to it any further. So before going in, has anybody here already experienced whatever this game is pushing? Any thoughts about it one way or another?

Some quotes from the "Political and institutional responses" section of the Natopedia article on it:

When the game started gaining popularity in June 2012, Iranian conservative newspaper Kayhan published pieces naming it "pro-Western propaganda" and accusing Khonsari of espionage; he subsequently felt afraid to reenter the country. Some developers used aliases to protect themselves, and the concept artist fled Iran due to his involvement. Khonsari said that "anytime Iran has something written about them in the west, they feel as if it is propaganda against them." Following the game's release in 2016, the National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) blocked all websites distributing it in Iran and began gathering all illegally distributed copies in the country.

featured in a November 2016 UNESCO report by Paul Darvasi about the impact of games on learning about conflict resolution; Darvasi noted the game "might be studied to determine if [it] can be used to support the production of historical empathy, global empathy, and ethnocultural empathy, all which contribute to the acquisition and development of intercultural understanding".  In 2022, a branch of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education critiqued the game; teacher Alexander Zart found it affected by subjective depictions due to Khonsari's significant personal background, despite its framing as an "interactive documentary".

I bought a bunch of the dlc and I'd forgotten how to play oh my God this game