League of Legends Locale Switching

Why would you want to do that?

I had a special case with my ex. She taught English abroad in Asia while I lived in the States. To get the best latency, we played on the Japanese servers as a intermediate: she got poor latency attempting to play on US Servers 250 ms. We tried Oceania, oddly enough, I got 250 ms on Oceania while she got about 150 ms. Japan happens to be the best intermediate: I get about 140-170 ms on Japan’s servers and she gets about 80 ms. The best scenario would be to play something less latency sensitive, unfortunately she’s unwilling to play anything else–and she’s not very familiar with the UI. This resulted in me looking into how to play League of Legends in English on the Japanese servers (on both Windows and Mac cause she plays on a Mac)

Setting Locale in Windows

This was tested on Windows 10 on 4/18/2020 with League installed to a separate SSD for Games
I'm starting off with this highlight because things change and methods stop working. If you're looking at this post years in the future: before wasting your time, this probably doesn't work anymore.

• Riot recently removed the server selection (it’s driven by your account now) so my assumption is that you have tried to login to the Japanese servers with a Japanese account at minimum to find a fully Japanese UI
• Update 8/17/2020: I originally had an intricate solution to do this via shortcuts, however it had some drawbacks, it much easier to create a batch file.
  
• First Step: Open up a notepad and enter the following: start H:\"Riot Games"\"League of Legends"\LeagueClient.exe --locale=en_US
• Note: You need to change the directory to point to where YOUR LeagueClient.exe file is located at! Mine is on my H drive, in the folder structure above, you will have to adjust yours.
• Second Step: Save the file as a .bat file. For example “jp league.bat”. Make sure to NOT save it as a text file like (e.g. “jp league.txt.bat”). You can make sure by unhiding file extensions.
• Third Step: Login using the launcher than runs by executing the batch file. It may not be in the correct locale you desire. Proceed to login and patch.
• Fourth Step: Close the client and open it again with the bat, if done correctly it should be in the correct locale you desire.

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Setting Locale in Mac

This was tested on Catalina 10.15.3 and Mojave 10.14 on 4/18/2020 with League installed to the *default directory* on a late 2019 Macbook Air and a 2017 Macbook Pro 15
I'm starting off with this highlight because things change and methods stop working. If you're looking at this post years in the future: before wasting your time, this probably doesn't work anymore.

• Switching Locale on Mac can only be done through a command in the terminal. You are effectively doing the same thing as the Windows method: just passing parameters to the executable to switch locale
• Same assumption as the Windows method, I’m assuming you already logged in before
  
• First Step: Open Terminal on finder (or launchpad, or if you’re cool, its always opened)
• Second Step: Enter the command: open /Applications/League\ of\ Legends.app --args --locale="en_US"
• Final Step: The game should load right up after some downloading. Note that you do not need to use the command again, using the shortcut on Launchpad or Finder should continue using en_US locale until you manually switch it (I don’t know if client updates reverts the locale settings).

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Commentary

• Switching locale to en_US in Japan makes the game UI in English, however in-game usernames with Kanji, Katakana or Hiragana will show up as boxes. They render fine outside of the game.
• It’s a bit of a blunder to restrict language by server when your client clearly supports multiple locales. Rito pls.