Neat Junk Archive

The Episode that Put Pokemon Fans in the Hospital

Here’s a little blast from the past. In this February 1998 issue of UK magazine Computer and Video Games, I found an article about that Porygon episode of Pokemon that caused some kids in Japan to have seizures. We know now that it was caused by rapid flashes of red and blue lights from one of Pikachu’s attacks (read more here), but this article was written before they knew what sent so many kids to the hospital.

It’s interesting because Japanese TV networks started banning the show in response, and Tokyo TV threatened to cancel it outright if the cause wasn’t determined. Imagine a world where the Pokemon anime ended in the middle of its first season and never came back!

A Puzzle’s Difficulty Changes in Localization

So, Breath of the Wild is a great frickin’ game. I’ve been playing the English version, and Mato recently beat the Japanese version. The writing is superb, but I ran into a shrine puzzle at the beginning of the game that stumped me big time:

I found the shrine on Dueling Peaks. Since I was at the beginning of the game, I thought, “Cool, there must be another tall mountain on the other side of the world that looks like this one’s twin. I guess I’ll find it later.” Then I took a picture of the puzzle and left. It didn’t occur to me to check the other peak of Dueling Peaks. I had the shrine locator turned off, so I never got any beeping hints that one was nearby.

After Mato beat the game, I asked if he solved this shrine, and he said, “Yeah, it was easy. The other shrine is on the other peak.” “On Dueling Peaks?” I asked. Mato was confused. “Is that what they call it in English? It’s called Twin Peaks in Japanese.”

Twin Memories. Twin Peaks. Ohhhhhhhhh…..! Oh. It makes sense now! Perhaps I’m just a dum-dum, but I have a feeling that if they’d kept the Twin Peaks name, I would have made the Twin Memories connection a lot sooner (or at all!).

Did you run into trouble with any hints while you were playing the game?

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sukky

We received some weird snacks from Japan this week. These Pocky boxes were a special Valentine’s Day promotion. The names are really weird:

I see what they were going for with “Papa” and “Mama” in there, but what is “Sukky” ?? Maybe 好き (suki)?

Here’s a candy with an unusual name:

I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks delicious!

And we found some funny English on a bag of garlic butter-flavored Cheetos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh no, Japan discovered comic sans…

 

Japanese Splatoon 2 Ad

Splatoon 2 released worldwide recently. I’ve been digging through new Japanese gaming magazines for an upcoming project, and I found this cool ad for the game. It also highlights a 320-page art book.