Plagiarism Report - Marendarade's Persona 5 Royal Guide

I've spent the past year or so doing a Let's Play of Persona 5 Royal, and used this person's guide as part of that in order to see all of the possible events in the game (some of which get locked out if you're too far along). A few months ago, I noticed that a couple of the answers for some of the optional confidant events were off. At the time, I didn't think much of it.

Then it happened again. The numbered choices were correct, but the actual text of the choices was not. This would be IMMEDIATELY obvious to anyone who had actually played the game. Let me show their choices and wording compared to actual screenshots I took when recording for my LP.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/4/AABftxAAB8uQ.png

That's their wording. Let's look at what the choices on that date actually are. Unfortunately, my screenshots are too big to post here, but that's okay because it's on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3IXZiJBPbk

You might ask if this discrepancy could've come from the guide author using the base game's version of this event, and I simply don't believe that's possible. Most of the localization did not change between games. There's also no recording that I can find of the base game's version of this event.

So then, where did the guide author get it from?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/6/5/AABftxAAB8uR.png

This is a machine translation of a Japanese Persona 5 Royal guide (https://wikiwiki.jp/persona5r/). Note that it contains which choice is the correct one by number - so you would know that the third choice in the menu is correct, even if you don't know what the text is saying. You'll also notice that a lot of the key words from the guide appear in that machine translation - namely the last sentence having the word "understand" in it.

Now, there's the remote possibility that the guide author speaks Japanese, did a run of the game in Japanese, translated the choices themself, and then rushed through the game in English on release day skipping any of the optional scenes. However, I don't believe that to be true.

My belief is that either the guide author speaks Japanese, plagiarized off that Japanese guide, and then rushed through the game in English to try and fix the text so it wasn't obvious by the discrepancies that would naturally exist between the Japanese original and the English localization that they did so. It's obvious that the author knew about the Japanese guide because they linked it in theirs, but did not credit it for the information provided.

The other reason I believe the guide to be plagiarized is that the Japanese guide has a complete calendar of which events are possible on each day of the game's calendar. The only other place I've ever seen that calendar? Marendarade's guide. I'd know because I was looking for one as I no longer trusted their guide to be accurate. The thing is, you wouldn't even need to speak Japanese to plagiarize that, because it's arranged by tarot arcana. I was easily able to figure it out without knowing a single word of what it actually said.

I think that even if this isn't directly plagiarized, there's a lot of questions about what this guide author did that need to be answered.

This guide was published on GameFAQs before the game came out in English, meaning the author must have played the Japanese release. Whether they can speak it or not I can't say. Having said that, and having written guides for games only out in Japanese myself, I've certainly used online translators when I can't accurately translate phrases myself, so I wouldn't be too worried about that. I've also used Japanese wiki guides as references, which I've always made sure to credit in my guides. I see that this author has credited the aforementioned wiki as well in their guide: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/260936-persona-5-royal/faqs/78212/additional-resources

The important distinction for plagiarism is that you can't copyright information. So unless something is copied verbatim it's a hard call to make. It doesn't seem to be in this case, just an author using information from another source that was credited in the guide.