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Also, as I think someone else mentioned, the US is much more aggressive with the discounting, whereas on the Japanese stores sales are minimal and games tend to retain their original pricing better.
Side effect of the relatively huge physical second-hand market for games in Japan. Resale value for games is pretty high from the person selling it, but the second-hand price on the shelf is usually not much lower than new.
Steam sales are of course all digital, but there's multiple physical console versions (switch/ps4/xbox) they're competing with so I imagine they're trying to not undercut their console sales, or something.
It's weird that you wouldn't just be grateful that you can play such a game at all and understand it. And I say that because there are so many RPGs going all the way back to the 1980's that I have never been able to play because they are only in Japanese. I wish I had the option of either like you. Seems like a really odd thing to be so offended about.
On Steam publishers can decide if they want to participate in a sale or not. For example Square Enix had plenty of games skip the last Summer sale.
I'm sure a lot of us have puzzled over why these Japanese companies do this. In this day and age where we have the technology to overcome borders and great distances, why can't we have an international digital games platform where you can just play whatever game you want in the language of your choice? As far as I know it is only Japanese companies that really fool around with these region locks of their language.
The confusing part is just the fickleness of it all. Why this game but not that game? It almost seems like there isn't a compete series that you can consistently play through in Japanese. Like the Tomb Raider reboot, 1 needed a Japanese language pack DLC that was region locked. 2 was fine, you could play it in Japanese anywhere, then 3 was region locked again. DQB can be played in Japanese, DQ11 is region locked. FF13 and 13-2 region locked, FF LR, you can play in Japanese. Shenmue 1-2, no Japanese, Shenmue 3 has Japanese, no region lock (though it's not on Steam yet), Valkyria Chronicles no Japanese, VC4 Japanese was added after release. Catherine from Atlus has no Japanese support for Persona 4 does. Why? I could go on and on.
It's just such a disappointment to feel like we are so close to paradise but always fall short. It's not that I'm not grateful that I could understand the game if I played it, I just LOVE playing games in Japanese so much that I won't ever bother with English. For example, I just imported a used copy on Tales of Berseria. I could have gotten it for probably 5 bucks on a sale on Humble or Steam but if it's in English I just don't have any interest. I made sure to buy it used because I don't want to support their business practices.
The Japanese companies weren't the first, and they won't be the last. If you check any big-name-AAA-developer you'll find it used everywhere. The big US-companies started it with region specific codes to lock out people outside of brazil/russia/etc from buying their extremely cheap versions, and even English speakers outside a major market like Australia have had to suffer this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ tactic for decades.
Some of this randomness is due to the management companies of big name voice actors/actors wanting big $$$ for actors big in Japan but no-name outside of it; not realizing that they literally have no value; this happens a lot less nowadays.
Others is because a lot of older games don't really have any decent localisation integrated in the game; so it's easier just to build test an "all english" and "all japanese" version separately. Especially when you've having to deal with lipsyncing data and text, and audio and getting it all in sync.
Games being released by 3rd parties in English, etc, also have different SKUs for that reason as well, since the money for the JP-only version goes to the JP company, and the money for the non-JP version goes to the localiser.
It's all a complete mess.
Examples:
*Mega Man Collection games missing japanese songs even if you change to japanese
*A few Final Fantasy games missing japanese text option.
*Castlevania Collection achievements only working if you play the english version of the games while the japanese game versions can be quite different in content
*Okami missing ending song in japanese
I really hope for a PC FF7 remake with japanese lip sync and text...
Most older games only ever bothered getting Japanese song licences or vocal licenses, and going back to renegotiate them would result in most likely rather significant cost increases since the singers/songs are now famous, or just be time consuming/expensive/'difficult' if there's been conflict in the meantime between artist and companies.
OP/ED songs with singing need rest-of-world licences and often 'famous' singers for them, and often it's too expensive to negotiate world-wide licences for such a relatively niche product. IIRC, XSeed has had issues with this with their animated openings of some of their "Trails of" series of games, but I could be misremembering.
So, yeah, sometimes there's reasons. But honestly with the game we're talking about here it looks more like a marketing thing.
I'm not the original poster and my primary language is not English/Japanese but I think I'm good at *reading* English/Japanese.
The problem of translation is the translated words are always based on the understanding of translator and their is a limitation of translation, for example some wordings may have multiple meanings and sometimes multiple specific wordings in sentence can have multiple meanings like a poem, however when those words got translated into a different language it will became different single meaning thing, most likely your perspective of the storytelling may became somehow different.
(e.g. more likely to be misunderstanding some character's intentions, there's why character got more like/dislike in some countries. Another example is puzzle games using text hint in original language)
I think the original poster and someone like me wanted to play these games at their original language because we wanted the original taste of the game: those wordings and feelings.
P.S. I'm a PC gamer, while also own the original PS4 Japanese version. Just want to try out the voiced version on PC instead of PS4.
I live in Japan and I decided to post this screenshot as proof. I'm not sure why it's in English but it sure is handy.
Please note the price is ￥5,478 (about 51.76 USD).
This doesn't really bother me though because I'm able to buy from the US or Japanese store.
Thanks for the correction on the price. The price I got from the game's webpage was 4,980円, which I now realize was before taxes were added. That accounts for the difference.
It's almost as bad as the Ace Attorney series.
If I purchase the Japanese version, I'll only get one language, so it's like paying more for less content.
It's possible we might be able to mod in the Japanese version text (on the International PC version), but only time (& effort) will tell on that.
But everything you list: Main character names, spell names, monster names, location names, have all been changed and you can play it as is on the OG version.