Standard disclaimers:

I assume the OE couldn’t include the word castle for character limitations. In Japanese this whole word can be represented with one character: 城 (shiro)

Because more info can be fit in fewer characters on average, for many video games, the Japanese version will be marginally faster than the US version. Illusion of Gaia is a big exception.

More text is shown at once in Japanese—there are fewer text boxes. And bosses are much easier in the JP version. They’re pushovers. Despite these advantages, the JP version speedrun is about 20 minutes slower (iirc) just because of text scrolling. In the US version, most text appears instantly and can be mashed through very quickly. Occasionally dialogue boxes will scroll character by character, but there aren’t many of those. In the JP version, all dialogue boxes scroll that way.

So… 20 minutes of text scrolling in the speedrun, where you only see essential dialogue. I wonder how much of my time is spent just on text scrolling, to get all of these screenshots? Over an hour, probably? At least it’s only in one of the two versions.

You can examine a few things in Tim’s cell. The iron ball:

The door:

And of course, the moss:

My translation is overly literal. I like the OE.

You have to stand around a while before the story will progress. Eventually, there’s an event:

It’s not clear whether the soldier has a deep voice, or if he’s whispering. 低い声 (hikui koe) means low voice and it can mean either low in pitch or low in volume. I think it’s more likely a deep voice than a whisper. A whisper would be hard to hear from a hole above. Possibly they meant to say that the voice was faint, since it’s far away.

I’ve long found this a memorable mistranslation. Such a bizarre thing to say.

What I’ll often find in translation is that the original is totally valid in some way. In another context, Even moss drinks water could make sense.

水は (mizu wa) means as for water. コケ (koke) is moss. でも (demo) has many meanings. One is even. It can also mean but, still, yet, or also. If you scroll through dictionaries, you’ll also find a use that’s …or something. すする (susuru) means to slurp or sip loudly. It is not specified whether it is Tim or the moss that is doing the slurping. んだ (nda) in most instances is explanatory, with a sense of because of [previous thing]. It can also be used as a command. Even moss drinks water is a valid translation of each of these words together. But it’s not what’s intended here. This should be some more natural variation of As for water, slurp moss or something.

I’m not the only person who found this line memorable. Toby Fox incorporated it into Deltarune Chapter 1.

I’m not sure how many people who played Deltarune understood the reference, but I was delighted. There’s a brief mention of this reference on page 264 of Legends of Localization Book 3: UNDERTALE, a great book about the difficulties encountered when translating Undertale into Japanese. It was nice to see an actually good translator confirm my interpretation of this line.

This line hits way harder in the original JP, which has consistently made out Laura’s cooking to be unbearably bad. This bread is somehow even worse!

More time passes…

Honestly not confident in my translation here. やり場 (yariba) means an outlet (for one’s anger, for example), and やり場のない 気持ち (yariba no nai kimochi) I believe means feeling of no outlet. Whatever it is exactly, Tim is being made aware of it 痛いほど (itai hodo) - to the degree that it’s painful.

なつかしい (natsukashii) means beloved, fondly-remembered, missed, nostalgic. There’s nothing wrong with the OE’s word choice.

It’s invented, but I like the addition of uh, sure.

The dialogue proceeds the same way no matter which option you choose.

This is exactly what I was talking about previously with は (wa). これは (korewa) literally means as for this. JP speakers say this alllllll the time. But saying this? alone in English is uncommon. This is probably the last time I’ll mention this issue, but almost every time you see a JP→Eng script say this? on its own, it’s probably これは. Modern translation standards are to replace this with something more natural to English.

Here’s something else that’s common in Japanese scripts but sounds weird in English: repeating whatever the previous person just said in an inquisitory tone. The stone’s secret? Scary situations? Metal Gear? I’ve heard that it’s a way Japanese people show that they’re listening. I’ve left them translated literally just to show what’s going on. In a romhack I wouldn’t leave them like this, because in English it makes characters sound dumb.

How the OE translated this last one is so funny, though. You can just imagine Will whining. Awwwww, do I HAVE to encounter a terrible thing? I don’t wanna!

The terrible thing translation comes from the word こと (koto) which often means thing or matter. But it can also mean circumstances or events. It can also act as a nominalizing suffix, which in this case means it would change scary into scariness. It’s a versatile word that you have to be careful with.

I’m not sure how comet became crystal. Comet is すい星 (suisei). The word for crystal that has been used in crystal ring is 水しょう (suishou). Something odd about these is that the game leaves 水 as kana when referring to the comet, but uses kanji for crystal. For the second half of the word, the game uses kanji for comet but kana for crystal. Both words can be represented entirely with kanji: 水星 and 水晶. If they were written like that in game, it would explain the mistranslation, but they’re not. Idunno how this happened.

Here’s a fun example of something I brought up in one of this blog’s first posts. Japanese can turn nouns into verbs by appending する (suru). Here it says 味方する (mikata suru) which would be like to do allyship or to ally you. Much as I love verbing words, it should be avoided in translation unless the meaning is super clear. OE handled it well.

The comet/crystal mistranslation makes the OE practically gibberish here. In the JP, it is unambiguously the comet that is getting closer, not Tim getting closer to the comet. But since they used the word crystal, and crystals don’t normally get close on their own volition, I assume that’s how the rest of the sentence got turned around.

I do like that they changed Mystery Doll to Mystic Statue though. Mystery Doll sounds silly to me. Still, I’m going to use the JP word in my translation. It is actually the English words Mystery Doll, by the way. ミステリードール (misuterii dooru). But it does also use the Japanese word for doll: 人形 (ningyou). I translated it as statue. I think doll in English tends to carry the connotation of a toy.

Ya think, Tim? Are there any other pigs around? Also, how did this pig get past all the monsters? Headcanon is that it came through one of the holes in the ceiling that guards toss bread through. Maybe it’s a very small pig.

An unfortunate translation erases Karen’s work. She’s been trying behind the scenes to rescue you. This time I think it’s a mistranslation, not an intentional change.

お父様に　くってかかった (otousama ni kuttekakatta) means lashed out at father. The subject (Karen) is unspecified, so I wonder if the translator missed the に (ni - at/in/on/during) and took the king as the subject instead. Then they transformed what they thought was father lashed out as It’s terrible what my father’s done. After that it says ちっとも 聞いてくれない (chitto kiite kurenai - does not listen at all) and I imagine the translator didn’t know what to do with this given the previous mistranslation. So it became an exhortation for Will to hear Kara out, rather than a lament that her father would not hear her out.

On the other hand, this prison of silk and gold stuff is not a mistranslation. It’s made up, and I always thought it made her sound self-absorbed. A prison of silk and gold sounds like she’s saying her whole life is a metaphorical prison. But besides the fact that she doesn’t talk about being a prisoner at all in her letter, she is being treated as a prisoner literally. She’s confined to her room. It’s nicer than a cell, and I’m sure she gets better food to eat, but she still has no freedom—and not just in a metaphorical sense, like, “oh, being wealthy is so draining, nobody speaks to the real you!”

This letter isn’t as bad as the what do I care if you lose your head stuff, but a mistranslation + stuff invented whole cloth leads to another mischaracterization of Karen.

You can also use the key to let someone out of the neighboring cell:

The person in the neighboring cell, it turns out, is very dumb. There’s also a save point nearby, and Gaia has some new text.

Pretty soon we’ll run into a little dandelion seed flying around. It gets mad at you if you hit it.

Japanese not specifying plural strikes again. As a kid, this line made me think that there was supposed to be one big demon on my tail. She’s talking about all of the monsters in the area.

じゃない (janai) is usually used for negation: is not. But here it’s used to similar effect as ね (ne), seeking the listener’s agreement. じゃない at sentence end, without か (ka) or ですか (desuka), is associated with feminine speech, so JP players get the hint that the dandelion seed is a girl. It’s not worth trying to awkwardly shoehorn that into English, so we lose that nuance.

Heh. Forgot to grab a screenshot of DEF Up in English. Thankfully there was another one later in the dungeon.

I’ll be skipping contents of treasure chests unless they’re unique. This area only has an herb and red jewels.

A spirit inside a hidden room gives some advice. Tim is utterly unperturbed to be talking to a spirit.

A small flower exhorts you to play your flute. Tim is utterly unperturbed to be talking to a flower.

I’m trying to capture all dialogue, so you know what we have to do right away.

She then repeats the previous instructions. Let’s do it right this time.

Did the translator mistake やった (yatta - yay) for やめって (yamette - stop)?

The next dialogue comes from a Dark Place, where there’s a statue of a warrior on the left side. First, Gaia will give us some advice again:

His name could also be spelled Friedan. Maybe it should, since that’s an actual name. But I don’t think he has much in common with Betty Friedan.

With Freedan we make short work of the rest of the dungeon. When we leave…

We’re finally introduced to Lily. Properly, not when she’s not a dandelion seed.

It’s definitely the tribe, not Lily specifically, who is protected by flower spirits. Not clear whether there’s one or many flower spirits, but I imagine more than one.

Ohhhh, this one is tricky! The first sentence is easy. As for the second, 本当に (hontouni) means really or truly. 困った (komatta) is unmanageable, hopeless, inconvenient, disturbing - a host of negative adjectives. ときに (toki ni) here means during a time. So far we have during a truly difficult time. Then we have ふけって (fukette) being a wily little bugger.

Japanese verbs have a dictionary form which always ends in an u sound. u, ru, ku, etc. They can be inflected into a te form, which will incorporate て (te) or で (de). At first glance, you’d guess that ふけって is the te form of a verb, most likely ふける (fukeru). ふける has a ton of definitions. To age, to advance, to run away, to become ready to eat after steaming, to be engrossed in, to indulge in. Of all of these, only one has a te form of ふけって, and that’s to indulge in / to be engrossed/lost in. So the translator thought it was saying that Laura was lost in thought during troubled times, and turned that into humming because how else could Tim have heard it?

But that makes no sense. Laura taught us this melody just a little while ago! The game explicitly said that Tim hadn’t heard it before! He didn’t pick it up from her humming randomly.

In this case ふけって is not a te form at all. If you want to say that someone says or said X, you can say [X] という (to iu). But JP speakers like to shorten this down to just って (tte). And if this isn’t a te form of a verb, it must be an inflected form of a shorter verb, ふく (fuku). From context, you can figure out that it’s 吹く which means to play a wind instrument or to whistle. So the final ふけって really means said to play.

Kanji are a pain for JSL speakers to learn, but they can save some headaches. If this had said 吹けって instead of ふけって, it would have been obvious.

Here’s a prime example of how Karen speaks more respectfully than Lily. To Karen, Tim’s grandmother is ローラおばあ様 (Laura obaasama), about as respectful as can be. To Lily, she’s ローラおばあちゃん (Laura obaachan) which is the same thing Tim calls her. Pretty dang familiar for someone she just met! I think it’s kinda rude, but not rude enough for anyone to call her out on it.

We can finally leave the dungeon. At night, almost every NPC in the castle has different dialogue. The only ones who don’t are the shy soldier and the woman he’s confessing his feelings for.

Multiple soldiers asleep at their posts. Tsk tsk.

If you try to leave, Tim says this:

Here’s the soldier on the far left:

I love this expression: 悪いことは　言わん (warui koto wa iwan). It equates to take my advice, but literally means I don’t say a bad thing.

The maid on the second floor of the right tower:

鼻ちょうちん (hanachouchin): Snot bubble. Let it never be said that this blog is not educational.

A minor note is that the JP is not in past tense. It’s in te form. That’s why OE isn’t past. Why would I choose past tense, then? 1) That’s how you’d say it in English. 2) Japanese takes the tense of the final verb in the sentence, and Tim trails off at the end with a verb ending in te, both implying an unfinished thought. If he had finished the thought, it would probably have been past tense. But there’s no way to know for sure.

Piggy’s sex is not specified. OE chose to make it a boy. Also to rename it, which is no surprise. Its name is the English word piggy. ペギー (pegii). It would sound like an ok name in Japanese because it’s from a different language. In English it’s the least creative name ever.

It definitely does not say pig power in JP, but I don’t mind at all. Three cheers for pig power!

When you try to leave, Karen hits you with:

Whoops! They left her name as Karen in English instead of Kara. I’d guess most players didn’t notice.

I wonder why they chose yak for the OE? Because it’s a short word and helps with the character limitations?

Karen once again strikes me as a thoughtful person. Her first priority is Tim’s grandparents! This is not someone who would say what do I care if you lose your head?, damn it! (Will I ever stop harping on this? Time will tell!)

Goodbye, Edward Castle! That was a long post, but I wanted to get the castle out of the way. Next, we return to South Cape, then move on to Itory Village.