the two japanese characters in overwatch were more "blizzard" than japanese. one of them, before doing some special skill, would shout "taste my blade" in japanese. unsurprisingly, this phrase also appeared in the warcraft series as part of the blademasters voice lines. the other yells something like "dragon devour my enemies".
it's all a bit odd of course, because in typical japanese fighting games (or even chinese wuxia films) the characters normally yell the name of the skill before doing their special skill, like "wave fist" or "dragon subduing 18 palms", rather than yelling something the hero intends to achieve. they'll never say something like "die!" because that's just not heroic.
the game is nice, but those two characters just feel very not-japanese, even with all japanese work for them.
The "shout the name of the move" thing is neither here nor there, I think. Overwatch isn't a fighting game, and voice lines like that aren't common in shooters (Japanese or otherwise).
For the rest, I'd guess it's a simple matter of Blizzard not having anybody in house who can check content. They've never done JP versions for any of their games, and the mistakes they make tend to be of the "copy/pasted from Google translate" variety. Also the 3rd-party localizer in the interview mentioned Blizzard asking him to check their Japanese, even though that would have been pretty late in the process.
(One also suspects that the JP voice lines may largely be the work of the voice actors. That would explain why Genji (voiced by a native speaker) has tons of Japanese voice lines, while Hanzo speaks only English outside of his ult.)
> it's all a bit odd of course, because in typical japanese fighting games (or even chinese wuxia films) the characters normally yell the name of the skill before doing their special skill, like "wave fist" or "dragon subduing 18 palms", rather than yelling something the hero intends to achieve. they'll never say something like "die!" because that's just not heroic.
While, yeah, calling your attacks is common, I've also seen Kurae! ("Eat this!") in anime and toku more times than I can count. Honestly, that would make a good translation for those phrases...
it's all a bit odd of course, because in typical japanese fighting games (or even chinese wuxia films) the characters normally yell the name of the skill before doing their special skill, like "wave fist" or "dragon subduing 18 palms", rather than yelling something the hero intends to achieve. they'll never say something like "die!" because that's just not heroic.
the game is nice, but those two characters just feel very not-japanese, even with all japanese work for them.