Yeah, it really bugs me when developers take an existing game and localize it, but change a bunch of things for the localized version. It can end up good, but a lot of the time, the features they pull out of the game or change around end up being critical to other game systems, and things fall apart pretty quickly when they're gone.
Tera was an MMO that came out earlier this year with the same problem; a lot of features got changed when they brought it to the US, and a few of those features were pretty much necessary to end-game stuff...