Working on a new article for this week, Mato needed to verify something between the original SNES and SNES mini versions of Kirby Super Star. Not being very knowledgeable of Kirby games, Mato hooked things up so he could play both games side-by-side at the same time…
While in the shower last Thursday I suddenly decided that hey, maybe I should make a dedicated page for the bad translation galleries we have on the main site. So I moved things around and added a Zero Wing gallery at the start of the series, then tweeted out the new page link. I thought it’d be a popular series, but it seems I underestimated the power of bad translations:
I guess it makes a lot of sense though – we made our bad translation book largely to be an introduction to LoL as a whole, and the book immediately got super popular as soon as it was announced. In a way, this is the same deal, the bad translation galleries will hopefully entertain enough to introduce the LoL site to readers who never would’ve noticed it otherwise.
I accidentally skipped over gallery #6 so I’ll probably go back and fill it in with Breath of Fire 2 highlights. After that, there’s a lot of games that we could add to the bad translation series. Hopefully it’ll be a new, strong pillar for the site in the long run.
With the surprising immediate success of our new Bad Translation Series yesterday, I wanted to quickly find more games we could throw up there. I remembered Alice in the Heart, an otome game (romance games aimed at girls) with one of the worst translations ever released. Unfortunately, that was a mobile game, and it’s no longer available to purchase anywhere, so in a sense it’s gone forever (one reason I dislike mobile games). So I went on a search to find other poorly-translated mobile otome games.
So far, my search has turned up nothing that comes remotely close to Alice in the Heart. At most, the games I found just need better editing. Here are some examples of my favorite mess-ups:
February 1 marked the start of “Content Month” at Legends of Localization (although now we realize it’ll have to be 2 months or however long it ends up taking). That means we’re spending all our time researching and writing articles, putting together galleries, and compiling and organizing all the screenshots that our GameCats (game catalogers) have been taking. Getting this all done now will free up time and resources when it comes time to work on our next book later this year, because we can release the finished content little by little throughout the year.
Right now we’re making good process compiling ideas for everything, and we’re getting pretty excited with a lot of the stuff we’re digging up. I hope you enjoy what we have in store for you! Lots of neat things from games I’ve never heard of, even.
Well, this was a nice weekend surprise! Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound was chosen by Tofugu as the Best Japanese Learning Book of 2017 :O That’s really weird because we never meant to teach anyone Japanese with this book, haha. But Tofugu’s reason makes a lot of sense:
As we talked it out on the podcast, we realized that everything in this side-by-side analysis of the Japanese game Mother 2 and its English iteration, Earthbound, just had too much information on language, translation decisions, Japanese history and culture, as well as fantastic design. We couldn’t help it… it just wins. There’s something incredibly powerful about being able to see and understand the translation decisions that went into an entire game. And the game is focused more on conversations and puns than fighting, so it will really help your Japanese skills shoot into the stratosphere.
It’s a honor, thank you Tofugu! They wrote a big article on other Japanese learning resources like shows, websites, games, and more. Read the whole thing here!
One of the LoL game cataloging dudes is starting on Lufia 1 and found some infinite HP/MP cheat codes for the English game. He needed the same codes but for the Japanese version, so I did some quick ROM debugging and figured out the equivalent cheat codes. So, if you’re playing Lufia or Estpolis Denki and want infinite HP & MP, here are the codes:
Lufia 1
8236-0F34 – infinite HP
823A-0FC4 – infinite MP
Estpolis Denki (エストポリス伝記 ＊独自の改造チートコード)
08E90FBD – infinite hp (HP減らない)
08E94EBD – infinite mp (MP減らない)
It’s times like this that I’m glad I know technical stuff on top of translator stuff!
Been organizing localization pics again. I renamed a folder today:
I swear I didn’t do that on purpose and I’m not changing it. Haha, it’s too perfect.
Yesterday I was looking through server logs and realized I should probably prevent image hotlinking on all the stuff in the LoL research section – with something like 50,000+ images on there it was really bogging stuff down. I decided at the last minute to provide a replacement pic, so I spent 15 seconds finding something. That something is this:
Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the LoL 404 page you might enjoy it too: link
Thanks to the Ninja Gaiden Super Bowl, the House of Poemato can finally get excited about Super Bowl Sunday! Mato was doing all sorts of programming and testing the other day. Little Zuuly was disturbed by the sounds my phone was making.
My custom emulator sidebar hacky stuff (aka Wanderbar) that I developed about 8 months ago isn’t ready for public release yet, but I’ve recently picked it back up and started to incorporate it into an NES emulator. It’s not at the same level as the SNES Wanderbar but it’s pretty close.
To test everything out, I used Ninja Gaiden II and tried to re-create my old Ninja Gaiden II memory-watching-XNA-program that barely worked and wasn’t fully reliable. It was surprisingly easier to put together using my Wanderbar setup than before, which is a good sign.
(This stream screenshot is with the NES Wanderbar in action)
Speaking of which, our yearly Ninja Gaiden Super Bowl is this weekend! I’m gonna try to get further in Ninja Gaiden II than last year. I better practice up before then. You can catch the stream live here sometime on Sunday.