It's time to talk about the game's dubtitles.

I'll fire the first volley.  The English translation of this game is abhorrent in its consistent and arbitrary inaccuracies, even going so far as to change the personalities of characters through dialogue modifications.  I think I can confidently say that anyone who plays the game in Japanese will quickly catch on to this fact, regardless of whether they understand a single word of Japanese, because of how thoroughly off the English script is.

Fine, whatever.  So the English script is bad.  Even though basically the entire anime industry understands how to provide faithful translations, video game translations have a tradition to uphold.  I get it.

The problem here is that when a person plays a game (or anime) in Japanese with English subtitles, and the English dub is so far removed that it's almost completely incompatible, then the subtitles for that dub aren't going to do that person much good.  We call this phenomenon "dubtitles", and it's exactly as undesirable as the word connotes.

The implementation of support for the Japanese language in the English language version of this game is currently in "afterthought" territory due to this problem, and I consider that to be rather baffling.  After all, the game was funded almost entirely by its Western fans -- fans who have a disproportionate penchant for Japanese culture and whatnot.  Dubtitles are an infamous problem that purveyors of Japanese content now reliably take steps to avoid falling afoul of, so it's upsetting to see that in Bloodstained, we have no choice but to deal with the English language script, which, in this case, by contemporary standards, is disgustingly imprecise.

And if anyone so desires, I can provide a breakdown of an early conversation in Bloodstained to prove my point.  But, again, I feel anyone who has played the game in Japanese is at this point already nodding their head.

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Edit: So in the interest of making the situation perfectly clear to anyone who may feel this concern is blown out of proportion, I offer this analysis of select lines from the first significant conversation to take place in the game. The fact that I found this candidate within minutes of starting the game should say all that needs saying about how pervasive the problem is throughout the script. Ignore the barebones nature of my translations; I avoided adding flair deliberately.

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Japanese: ジーベル！ やっぱりあなたなの？ どうしてこんなこと？
Translation: Gebel! So it was you? Why did you do this?
English script: Gebel! Tell me you didn't do this. It doesn't make any sense!

(Get used to this sort of "restructuring", because it is the literal majority of cases.)

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Japanese: 「どうして」？ 人間達が俺達にしたことを考えるなら分かるだろう？
Translation: "Why"? Considering what humans did to us, you should understand.
English script: How does it not? After all the sins humans wrought upon us?

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Japanese: 十年前の出来事なら、ヨハネスから聞いた。
Translation: If you mean the incident from 10 years ago, Johannes told me about it.
English script: Johannes told me what they did to you.

Okay, fine, sure, leave out half of the dialogue. It was unneeded fluff anyway. I'm sure nobody playing the game in Japanese with subtitles will catch on to the fact that Miriam sure seems to be saying a lot more than what the given translation suggests. (Also: Everyone in the English cast pronounces Johannes with a "J", making them more or less unique among people who use that name. The Japanese cast gets this right.)

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Japanese: 「人間ではない」っか。あなたからその言葉を聞くとは思わなかったわ。
Translation: "Not human." I never thought I'd hear those words from you.
English script: What...? I never thought I'd hear those words from you.

Here the most tangible issue, beyond the routinely arbitrary decision to replace one sentence of dialogue outright, is the fact that Miriam is maintaining her stern expression during this moment, so the interjection "What...?", which is a raised-eyebrows-surprised sort of expression, is absolutely not a match for the given facial expression. And this disconnect in turn subtly redefines Miriam's personality.

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Japanese: 覚えてる？ それは昔、私があなたに言った言葉よ。
Translation: Do you remember the words you spoke to me long ago?
English script: I was the one that came to you broken, convinced I was a monster. And you told me--

Japanese: そんなことは--
Translation: That matters not--
English script: This is nonsense.

Japanese: どうでも良くない！
Translation: It does matter!
English script: You TOLD ME!

Japanese: 生きる希望を失っていた私は、あなたの言葉に勇気付けられたの！
Translation: I had lost the will to live, and your words gave me courage!
English script: Our power doesn't make us good or bad. Our choices do.

Japanese: 「力そのものは善悪はない。力の使い方に善悪があるんだ」って。思い出して、ジーベル！
Translation: You said, "It's not power itself that's good or evil, it's how one uses that power." Please remember, Gebel!
English script: I'd given up on my humanity, but you restored my hope. Don't you remember!?

Let's break this down.

Japanese: Do you remember the words you spoke to me long ago? | That matters not-- | It does matter! I had lost the will to live, and your words gave me courage. You said, "It's not power itself that's good or evil, it's how one uses that power." Please remember, Gebel!

English script: I was the one that came to you broken, convinced I was a monster. And you told me-- | This is nonsense. | You TOLD ME! Our power doesn't make us good or bad. Our choices do. I'd given up on my humanity, but you restored my hope. Don't you remember!?

Here are the problems with this reordering and restructuring, beyond the basic lack of necessity of moving lines of dialogue around like this:

1: Gebel is now the one who interrupts Miriam, instead of the other way around. And Miriam's response to this interruption makes it look like she got snippy at being interrupted. Right off the bat, we've reordered personalities, changing which character is likely to interrupt someone talking in order to make a point.

2: There is nothing in the original dialogue at this moment that provides that Miriam had "given up on her humanity" or that she was "convinced she was a monster". She had "given up on living" -- nothing more elaborate than that. The extra details given in the English script were, at most, intended to be derived conclusions left up to the player to interpret, but here they are spelled out for us, which in turn signals a change in Miriam's personality where she is willing to belabor the specifics of her painful past.

3: The change made to the quoted words spoken by Gebel is an unneeded truncation which drastically steals from the importance of the given sentence.

4: The last line of dialogue has been changed from specifically Gebel's quoted words to the explanation of what those words meant to Miriam. This is an important distinction because the last sentence in this line is a plea for Gebel to remember. So in the Japanese, she's specifically asking Gebel to remember the words he spoke, and in the English, this specificity is thrown out the window and the plea to remember is either generalized or is asking Gebel to remember how his words gave her hope. Further, in the original Japanese, this section of the dialogue specifically begins with Miriam asking if Gebel remembers the words he spoke, but that introductory component is totally gone in the English script.

5: The final plea to remember has been changed to an accusation. Just another personality tweak to add to the pile.