Is Crowley’s first name actually “Dear”?
This gets into katakana, one of the three written alphabets in Japanese, used for foreign loan words.
As an example: the Japanese word for “cat” is 猫 in kanji and ねこ in hiragana (both pronounced “neko”), but if you wanted to use the English word you could write, キャット (“kyatto“) in katakana.
There are some limitations in adapting words from English into Japanese: separate “R” and “L” sounds, for example, do not really exist, which is why Silver’s name can sound like it ends in “ah” instead of “R” in the audio.
In this way Crowley’s name, “Dire”, should actually be written as ダイア(“daiah”) in katakana.
But Yana has retconned the word “dire” to be pronounced as ディア (“dee–ah”), the exact same pronunciation as the English-language word “dear.”
(left: a collage of JP-server players discovering for the first time that Crowley’s name is not actually “Dear”)
We do not really see “Dire” written in English on JP, so as far as the average JP-server player knows, Crowley’s first name is “Dear.”
From a JP-server perspective this means that Crowley’s name is being pronounced as something like “beloved” while secretly meaning “disastrous,” which follows one of the game’s many themes: things are not always what they seem.
This might just be impossible to portray in English (unless maybe EN players are able to deduce how the characters are pronouncing their own names?), so it was not so much changed for EN as it was never acknowledged/localized.
