You can easily do the same in English by using ALL CAPS, AND SILLY PHRASING WITH LOTS OF PUNCTUATION!!! In my opinion (native English, but not alive in the NES era), that would work great. But they didn't: they instead replaced all his dialog with various lines from the classic "all your base" meme/translation. It's a departure from the original - still works well, still funny, though in a different way.
Different translators think differently. I love seeing how that impacts things. (Also shoutouts to Square Enix's localisation team, they are usually INCREDIBLE. I have even more love for Crisis Core after playing it in Japanese.)
This is especially noticeable when you have an English idiom translated word by word to Swedish in a Chinese or Japanese movie.
This "alternate story" included:
- introducing a new character called "Pointsave" (the translation for some reason refered to saving spots as people by using proper names)
- a deep drama surrounding Tifa and Barret's experiences as transgender people (since the translation arbitrarily referred to them with male and female adjectives, switching mid-sentence)
- characters continuously getting drunk in fiestas (since the common references to "your party" were translated to mean "your party events" rather than "your group of people").
I "fondly" remember getting to the first village outside, and being told "Tu fiesta te espera arriba" (Your fiesta/party is waiting for you upstairs). And there were the characters, all moody and sad, and I was thinking that it was a really shitty party. Until I mentally translated it back to English and understood.
tl;dr I don't know what your friend is on, but I disgaree
This article was great for helping me understand the motivations for localizing stories and characters (instead of simply translating them). I certainly don't blame the author (and other translators) for trying to provide the American audience with what they think is the best possible experience. But for anybody who isn't American, the localization might be entirely wasted - there's a good chance that they're just as familiar with Japanese culture and history as they are with American culture and history.
What's worse, in cases where the localization is wildly different from the original, the audience probably doesn't have any way of knowing it. It would be fair to tell the audience when the localization is inspired by or based on the original, instead of a direct translation of it. Otherwise, consumers can be misled to thinking they like or dislike a certain writer, while in reality their opinion is based entirely on a translator.
Slightly related: in Final Fantasy XIV, a character in the main story was COMPLETELY changed for the English version of the game. Playing in Japanese, I grew quite fond of the character, so when the character eventually died in the story, it had an actual impact for me. A friend of mine plays the same game exclusively in English, and when I discussed the death with him, he told me that this character was completely forgettable for him and he didn't even really remember the circumstances of the death. I'm fairly certain that the lack of impact for him was entirely because of the localization.