Mato was searching for something in our vast stack of Japanese gaming magazines today. He found a map, probably drawn by a kid back in 1992, stuffed inside one of them:
I wonder what other secrets our magazines might be hiding!
I was working on getting screenshots from an old Japanese text adventure game for an upcoming article. All the text is in English, so I thought I’d have a decent chance of knowing what I was doing. Hah, I was wrong. Even the age-old trick of drawing a map didn’t help:
Some of the rooms didn’t connect properly at all. Like, if I went West from the Tem Rei room, I’d end up two screens north. And if I go East from that same room, I’m suddenly three screens north. And then some rooms repeat if you keep going the same direction. The game doesn’t tell you that you can’t go West from “road”, it keeps reloading the screen so you think you’re on a road that stretches on forever.
Also, don’t ever hit a ZAK. It’s instant death.
Congratulations, weird bootleg game, you’re officially the dirtiest cartridge I’ve ever cleaned. I went through about 15 Q-tips and I still don’t want to put you in my Famicom to find out what game is loaded onto your circuits. YUCK
I’ve been looking into really old Japanese PCs games recently. A game for the X1 called Cosmo Traveler has some really cute English text:
PLAY THIS GAME & ENJOY A HAPPY TIME !!
We’re developing a new non-book product for Legends of Localization! We aren’t going with any of these tote bags, though. Half of them feel rough and scratchy and the other half are too weak to carry heavy books.
The search continues!
For a big ol’ upcoming article, I’ve been researching which games and anime feature 四天王, the Four Heavenly Kings. The Elite Four in Pokemon count, as do the original four bad guys in Sailor Moon (the English dub called them the Negacommanders). Oddly enough, the Four Kings from Dark Souls are not called 四天王 in Japanese.
The funniest 四天王 I’ve found today are from Cromartie High School. There’s five members and four of them look like KISS:
And the most perplexing one is a group from Dragon Ball Z that’s called the Four Heavenly Kings of the Demon Clan in Japanese. They got their name changed to… the Spice Boys in English.
The three Mysterious Stars game for DSiWare are full of bad English. Here’s one from the Samurai game:
What’s worse is that they got it correct just one screen before: a piece of cloth.
Been spending time trying to document all the weird and wonky text in Twinkle Star Sprites. I can’t believe how many mistakes there are!
Waku Waku Sweets: Happy Sweets Making was released in the 3DS e-shop last month. Last week, someone on twitter shared this amazing mistake with us:
I’m supposed to butter the bread, not the pan. But “pan” (パン) is the Japanese word for “bread”, so there was an understandable mixup here. What happened is a lack of context. It makes perfect sense to butter a frying pan in a cooking game. It also makes sense for a cooking game to ask you to butter some bread. So the translators must have been translating from a script and didn’t have access to any other parts of the game. And then the QA team didn’t catch the mistake.
There are so many other mistakes in this game that I don’t think they had a QA team at all. Lots of grammar issues, stilted dialogue, unlocalized jokes, and incorrect pronouns. On the flip side, they use colloquialisms like “wanna”, “gonna”, “my bad”, and “you go girl”, which is pretty impressive. They also don’t try to turn the Japanese sweets into anything weird – they keep them as-is, which I think is great.
Expect to see more examples of translation errors from Waku Waku Sweets in future articles and books!
