Nintendo Archive

Localization Issues Pervade the Ys VIII Switch Port

Whoops, YS VIII is goofin’ again. The Switch port releases next week and GameXplain did a really excellent review on it: watch it here! Their review is almost glowing, but then they point out the lack of localization polish…

Dang, what the heck happened? After all the fuss made over the PS4 version’s subpar localization (the president of NISA even issued a public apology) and the huge effort to rewrite the script and re-record all the voice acting, how did this happen?

Wacky Words in Waku Waku Sweets

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!

The Wii’s Weird Descriptive Icons

Just about wrapped up with getting all the Japanese Wii VC and Wii Ware games we might ever need in the next 10 years. Some of the game descriptions come with icons as warnings of the game’s contents. The icons for the scary school stories game is loaded with dreadful things:

I do like the ghost icon they use for horror games :3

Moving on to the American Wii pretty soon…

Assaulted by Nintendo’s Archaic Online Store

Nintendo’s Wii Shop is leaving us soon. Next Monday is the last day you can buy Wii Shop points, and the Shop closes entirely in January 2019. Time is running out to preserve all those Wii-exclusive digital games before they disappear (possibly forever), so here I go!

Except Nintendo doesn’t make it easy to buy games on the Wii Shop. I’ve run into lots of little problems along the way:

  • You have to buy “points” first, you can’t use money to directly buy a game.
  • You can only buy up to 3,000 (about $28) points at a time.
  • You can’t buy more than 10,000 points. You gotta spend your points before buying more.
  • None of the games are priced at round numbers. It’s always something like 512 points so you’ll inevitably waste money.
  • You can only buy one game at a time, and then download one game at a time. There’s no download queue.
  • You have to scroll through the game list every time. They don’t save your place.
  • If you buy a lot of points, your credit card will get flagged for suspicious activity (yeah, this happened to me).

I’ve bought games through Nintendo’s eShop on the Switch and it’s a big improvement, though it could still be better. I don’t think anyone will really miss the Wii Shop once it’s gone. Well, except for video game historians.

Hot Nintendo Action!!!

Aw yeah, baby. We finally got this hot issue of Nintendo Comics System! Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for pointing us to a reputable seller~

I wasn’t lucky enough to grow up with these little comic books. Do y’all have any cool childhood memories of these?