Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason | Daiz.moe With the Fall 2025 anime season, Crunchyroll demonstrates zero respect for anime as a medium as the presentation quality of its subtitles reach an all-time low.

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Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason
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A ton of research and effort went into this one. This is the article to read to get to the bottom of Crunchyroll's subtitle changes!

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And as all active German dub staff agreed to reprise their (main) roles, it seems they are fine with this as well.

Don't know if this will cause changes to the TV dub (that will likely continue) and the paused Blu-ray release of the classic episodes.

If they redub the names in the live action series as well, they'd have the same in everything One Piece related on the plattform (given they also have the simulcast).

But if you'd ask me, I doubt this would be worth several million $ / €, but Netflix is paying, not me, so...

It seems that the new Netflix dubs uses the Japanese names for all characters, whilest the old (and likely still continuing dub) uses Ruffy & Lysop instead of Luffy and Usopp

The German dub currently covers up to episode 1100 (excluding the Toriko crossovers), all "official" movies & most feature-length TV-specials

It had some dialogue censorship in the first 400(?) episodes, but no censorship cuts.

Sadly for me, Netflix will use a cropped 16:9 upscale for the earlier arcs - I don't like that, but I guess an average new fan will think differently.
Also it's a bit questionable how many old fans will actually rewatch the series from the beginning, given the length.

The new German dub will feature the same voice actors as the previous dub, at least for the main cast - which is kinda increadible. But it will use a new script that avoids mistranslations and wrong names.

So over the next likely 5 years or so they'll dub over 1000 episodes of One Piece in multiple languages, which is likely well beyond 10 million $ in dubbing fees alone...

Enough to dub roughly 100 other anime series

It seems that Netflix decided to produce brand new dubs of One Piece in multiple(!) languages...

Not just Latin American Spanish, which was kinda obvious given the fact that they only got the 4kids edits before, but also German, French and likely others as well

Sentai & some German anime companies even decided to produce new dubs to avoid these fees, despite the Netflix dubs were fine.

Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro is up to pre-order!

The steelbook has a brand new English dub w/ the much-loved cast of Tony Oliver, Richard Epcar, Michelle Ruff, Lex Lang, & Doug Erholtz and plenty of extras!

Exclusive to the Crunchyroll Store.

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Exclusive BD SteelBooks

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That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime S1 store.crunchyroll.com/products/tha...
S2 store.crunchyroll.com/products/tha...

Lupin the 3rd Castle of Cagliostro store.crunchyroll.com/products/lup...

Please tell me that at least they didn't screw up the aspect ratio on the discs, as all images on the back are 16:9

Crunchyroll started fixing the subtitles for their new simulcasts :)

Left: fixed (German)
Right: prior (English)

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Hardball Films proves once again that it's not impossible to re-release older Aniplex shows: Coming soon in November is Sekirei, with season 2 to follow later

JPN + GER audio + subtitles

Cost saving for encoding / distribution would be only possible, if the changes allowed to reduce the number of video encodes - which we don't know if it was achieved or not.
And even then it wouldn't be a problem to stil use full ass on plattforms that support it.

Crunchyroll manages to bring the videos even with Aegisub to Roku or potato CPU smart TVs - yes, they used burned in encodes, which sometimes causes delays.

And even if that wasn't possible, that's not a good excuse for plattforms that support good subtitles natively.

The end user doesn't care if they are bitmaps (Industry Standard), styled text (Crunchyroll) or even burned in - the end result counts.

There is no good excuse for not even matching the quality levels introduced 20 or even more years ago.

I was fully aware that vobsubs & PGS are technically just timed & partly transparent bitmaps - but nevertheless they offered a far better viewing experience even on hardware that is outdated or ancient by today's standard than Amazon's & Netflix approach.

...
So did Crunchyroll just go back to some 1970s "industry standard" because their largest competitors (& partners) Amazon, Youtube & Netflix didn't support any actually modern industry standards or at least something that offers a similar quality level?

Not to mention that most mayor players in the industry discontinued that standard in the early 00s, because, better alternatives existed already? With the exception for some broadcasters, but only due to mandatory backwards compatibility issues.

Not to mention the improved successor PGS from ~2006, also supported by Sony, Fox and many others...

It looks like they went back to some kind of CC standard from the 70s? That anime companies only used for a very short period in the 90s because there was nothing better at that time?

Some said the "new" Crunchyroll subtitling style was some kind of "industry standard" - but which?

Even the vobsubs standard from ~1997, supported by companies like Sony, Disney, NBCUniversal was far more flexible than the current Crunchyroll style...

...and some think that just more money, more ressources or else can solve those problems - without any decent estimate on how much would be needed.

Honestly there are quite some situation / tasks etc in which AI actually works or at least. But there are also many, in which AI is just used as a way to get some sub-par results with almost zero efforts...
The problem is: Some really think those sub-par results should be used "as it"

Bocchi the Rock is an Aniplex show and as such it's quite likely that Aniplex is in control of dubbing - or not - these shows in English.
You might have noticed that the show got several foreign language dubs already.

It gets even better! There are already TWO SEASONS of this, despite it being dated to just a week ago (9/27/2025), and the episode synopsis for all six episodes are literally just the full Lorem ipsum text.

I'm almost crying from how utterly dumb & hilarious this is.

actually translate the show. That could be even still Aegisub...

Closed Caption Converter is mentioned in the first lines of the actual subtitle files that the Crunchyroll website uses to display the subtitles.
However as the software has the ability to import subtitles from various other softwares, it's kinda impossible to tell which software was used to

really is starting to seem like crunchyroll fired the people who made the company work, and now everything is breaking down