An error-free (I hope) undub of The Last Story was a huge pain to find and that's one of the most recent Wii games...

Can't find anything besides a long dead torrent of Trauma Team.

Not the remotest forum post on a Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces undub to be found.

Etc...

Why are undubs so much more prevalent on PSP?

 

I find this term incredibly annoying, as it is applied so broadly as to have no meaning beyond being generally insulting.

 

It has a meaning here... you're talking about "undubbing", which in this case means the replacement of english audio in japanese-originated games with the original japanese audio. This means that the people who do this, and the people who enjoy it (yourself included since you're complaining about a lack of it) prefer the japanese audio to the english audio. Preferring japanese to english to the point that you'll take a language you understand and replace it with one you don't? Those are the actions of somebody who has a strong like for the japanese arts, to the point that it's reflected in their personal tastes and actions (even changing retail arts to suit their tastes). The common term for this type of person is a weeabo.

So it certainly does apply to this situation.

Anyways, PSPs have traditionally been easier to hack and play ISOs from than the Wii. I'm not talking now, but over the course of their lives. Pure-ISO loading is relatively new to the Wii, earlier models (well, earlier drives to be precise) would play burnt discs just fine and that was the norm. People didn't feel like burning disc after disc after disc to check the progress of their undubbing or hacking attempts. Compare this to the PSP, which has never played burnt discs, always loading ISOs from the memory stick. It also helps that the PSP's form of ISO loading has almost always been pure-ISO (ISO-9660 extended on a FAT/32 partition) and easily modified. Compare this to WBFS and such that the Wii used to use, where you needed special tools to modify the custom filesystem for loading backups. This means much faster, easier, and cheaper testing, which is conducive to modding games... so overall it's been easier to mod PSP games than Wii games.

In addition, the PSP's had a lot more JRPG and such releases than the Wii from what I see, which means a larger pool to pick from. Even if the ratio of both (percentage of officially-localized games undubbed) was the same, the fact that the PSP has a larger pool means that the number of undubbed games for it will be higher than the Wii.

So that's probably why. More games to pick from and an easier process.

 

Are you talking about undubs floating around in the wild in a ready to download/play state? If so it is because most undubs are terrifically easy to pull off by simply swapping files (in the harder hacks maybe renaming and/or injecting files properly). Given patches or whole uploads involve sharing copyrighted code, and again they are often trivial to do, the will to spread them is not there.

There are the occasional games that do change things but usually localisation involves so much convert all the assets to [insert language] and make any code adjustments necessary (easy enough if you should have source code or a well programmed game).

 

According to people who speak fluent japanese, most japanese dubs suck too.

Don't get me wrong, I'll switch the audio to japanese in games that have the option natively if the english dub is bad enough... I don't understand the language nearly enough to recognize it as being bad, so it doesn't detract from my experience.

 

I know at least two people that are fluent in japanese personally, and there's multiple fluent people here on the forums (one of the mods being a prime example, not to mention the translators).

I'm not saying the level is the same, but I'm saying that a japanese dub is not immediately better than the english dub and many people will simply use an "undub" to get away from the english dub. Since the goal is simple, the simplest undubbing processes are usually the ones that get completed (see my earlier post).

 

I'd assumed he was referring to the "dubbing" process which, I think, just refers to adding the voice track to video (i.e. the original audio would still be a dub)... I too simply prefer the original language.

 

Lookie here: a decent dub (on top of having a Japanese voice option!)

The game looks incredible.

 

I don't get the point, whether you understand the Japanese version or not, you certainly understand the English, so why bother? Yeah, maybe the voice acting leaves something to be desired, but get past it. A fantastic movie with shitty actors can still be a fantastic movie, so long as the overall story is strong enough.