3DS Archive

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!

Work on our Funky Fantasy IV book is starting to wrap up and hopefully it’ll be sent off to the printers early next week. I spent some time recently getting some last-minute images, one of which was an example of tiny kanji in a Japanese video game. My hunt led me to Dragon Quest X for the 3DS, which had some text size issues from day 1.

Luckily I have a Japanese 3DS and a capture card installed, so I just had to find where to get this tiny text to appear… and hope that updates since the last few years didn’t fix the problem. After many surprises and frustrations, I managed to get exactly what I wanted: a screen full of teeny tiny kanji!

On an actual, normal 3DS it’s quite a bit harder to read than these photos make it seem. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s because these pics are so hi-resolution. In any case, as soon as I got my screenshots I stopped playing the game even though I was like 10 hours in and spent a chunk of money buying the time to play that far. It was a neat little game but I would never ever recommend playing it on 3DS! The streaming graphics look horrible a lot of the time, and it sounds like they’re gonna drop 3DS support in a few months anyway.