Lost In Translation / Video Games

• Final Fantasy

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• Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War has this with the player character's eventual nickname, "Demon Lord of the Round Table". In Japanese, it was a pun that worked with the game's heavy Arthurian motifs, what with "knight" and "demon lord" being pronounced very similarly ("kishi" and "kishin", respectively); in other languages it simply doesn't work that way.
• Armored Core: Last Raven had a plot point made less apparent due the difficulties of romanization. Its story predecessor, Armored Core: Nexus, had a key character named Zinovie and Last Raven introduces a character who is implied to share a connection with Zinovie due to her interest in Mollycoodle (who pilots a copy of Zinovie's Armored Core) and her name, Zinaida. However, the English translation of Nexus renders Zinovie's name as "Genobee", making the link much less obvious.
• Bloodborne:
  • The game has fairly few and minor hiccups, but the effect of the distorted language is made exponentially worse due to the Story Breadcrumbs style narrative and deliberately obtuse backstory making every word count for a lot. Ironically the biggest lost reference by far is one that isn't concretely written or spoken. "Kegare" is a Shinto concept that describes spiritual uncleanliness that is derived from earthly filth and bodily waste, particularly bloodshed and childbirth, which adds implications to Blood Ministration and the Great One surrogate pregnancies that fly over the heads of non-Japanese audiences. Now among the lost lore due directly to bad translating:
  • The Flavor Text of the Old Hunter Bone obfuscates the gender of the Hunter it was harvested from in Japanese. The English calls them male, which hits a snag when The Old Hunters DLC was released and heavily implied the Bone came from Lady Maria.
  • During the flashback cutscene showing how Laurence left the Byrgenwerth scholars, Provost Willem brings up another former student who also left the school, who is implied to be the one who provided Cainhurst with their "corrupt" blood. The English translation leaves out the mention of the previous rogue student and the lore connections it was attached too, which actually caused considerable confusion among some lorefans as to whether Laurence was the founder/leader of the Healing Church, Cainhurst, or both.
  • The handwritten note you find in Iosefka's Clinic at the start of the game is explicitly stated to be in your handwriting in the Japanese version, showing that your PC anticipated becoming an Amnesiac Hero and that they entered Yharnham already knowing something deeper about the Hunt.
  • It's a minor example, but the Winter Lanterns were originally called Hozuki, the name of a Japanese flower which does bear a slight resemblance to their heads when withered (and the kanji can also mean 'Demon Lantern'). The English translation has to split the difference between two names for the flower (neither all that intimidating), Winter Cherry and Chinese Lantern, and came up with Winter Lantern.
• Borderlands: While the French dub for Handsome Jack is very well-received in France, the translation has him a lot more prone to cursing than in English, despite his distaste for swear words being brought up in the original dub. Some felt that this undermined the point of the character being a well-intentioned villain with Skewed Priorities.
• Dark Souls also gets hit with this.
  • While in the English translation of the first game, the Witch of Izalith's name is unknown, in Japanese she is explicitly called "Mother Izalith", making it all but explicit that Izalith is her name, and the realm of Izalith was named after her. Quelana also says in her Japanese dialogue that her sisters and mother became a "seedbed of grotesque life", supporting the theory that the Chaos Insects on each side of the Bed of Chaos are Izalith's other daughters.
  • The English translation calls the Demon Firesage the first demon, which is contradicted by the existence of Ceaseless Discharge, who was also born from the Chaos Flame but "while it was still unstable", causing his grotesque form. The Demon Firesage is perfectly stable, so it couldn't have been created before Ceaseless. The Japanese text is more vague about the Demon Firesage's origin, implying that it was actually one of many early demons.
  • Amusingly, while it's common for Western lore hunters to look up the original Japanese text for hidden lore, Japanese lore hunters have taken to look up English translations for their hidden lore.
  • A big concept that got partially lost in translation is the one of "stagnation", the idea that as the Fire fades, time starts to get distorted; while this idea is introduced in the English translation, it's mainly for the multiplayer, but the concept of stagnation explains a LOT more than that, especially in the third game in which the world's stagnation has advanced to the point that the world's geography has begun to shift and become distorted. All of this is much clearer in the Japanese version of the game than in the localizations, which lead to a lot of confusion in the Western part of the fanbase in figuring out the lore.
  • This is a common problem with the message system, which allows all players connected to the servers to read the message. Dark Souls and its sequels/successors are popular and have servers all over the world, which can cause problems when players use homophones to create messages that weren't in the limited system. This means you can get English players confused about messages warning them about a lack of horses (left by Chinese players using a homophone to say that people who leave misleading messages have no mothers), non English-speakers being confused about how to try a "but, hole" or driving themselves nuts looking for that amazing chest (i.e. in Spanish, the word is cofre, which specifically means a container and not a body part) in Gwynevere's room.
• At one point in Blue Dragon, the party must fight a robot ally who's being controlled by some kind of sweeper. In Japanese, the word for "sweeping" and "brainwashing" is the same, making it a pun that doesn't really work in English.
• Castlevania II: Simon's Quest has a notoriously weird translation, due in part to the dialogue already being somewhat indistinct and outright deceptive, but some lines just straight-up lost their original meaning. A line that was meant to be about how some merchants do business in hiding (which is a clue that you can find these merchants by hitting certain walls to find a secret passage) became "A CROOKED TRADER IS OFFERING BUM DEALS IN THIS TOWN." A message telling the player to stock up on laurels before entering the cursed swamp became "THE CURSE HAS KILLED THE LAUREL TREE." This even applied to lines originally intended to be nonsense. A reference to Fist of the North Star (where the Star of Death, a star in the Big Dipper that serves as an omen of death, is a plot point) became "DON'T LOOK INTO THE DEATH STAR, OR YOU'LL DIE", effectively turning it into a completely different and significantly more random reference. The clue that was supposed to indicate the infamous tornado that whisks Simon past Deborah Cliff? It was translated as "WAIT FOR A SOUL WITH A RED CRYSTAL ON DEBORAH CLIFF," which not only confuses "Wind" with "Soul," but also misses the part where you have to kneel.
  • A minor one from Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: the Ordinary Rock relic that allows Shanoa to double jump is supposed to be the Leap Stone from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that allows Alucard to do the same.
• In the Japanese dubs of Halo games, there's no term for "Sir" or "Ma'am", and officers are addressed, directly by rank, by their subordinates. Therefore, "Commander" and "Ma'am" (for Miranda Keyes) are both translated as "中佐" ("Commander"), when Lord Hood (her superior), or Johnson and her Marines (her subordinates) address her respectively.
• The Italian translation of Hollow Knight couldn't really use the literal translation for Hollow (Vuoto), because it is specific to being physically hollow instead of being ambiguous like the original, so they had to settle for mentally hollow, Vacuo (Vacuous), while the original name meant both, though the objective might have been to hide the second meaning of mental hollowness, while the Italian translation was forced to choose the most important meaning. Vessel had the opposite problem, where a word equivalent to vessel doesn't exist, so the word used was Ricettacolo (Receptacle), which is what you'd use for a container for a liquid, which is why it's the same word used for your Soul (mana) container. The only thing that might have worked would be Host but that would imply something akin to demonic possession. So it makes the vessel sound like a basin-like object, making the connection with the Hollow Knight harder to make because of his only being described as mindless while the vessel is described as not even alive. Other than that there is no word for Wyrm (only dragons and wiverns), so they ended up making up a new word, Uroverme (Ouroworm), which might actually be a good Woolseyism because it does look like a big worm and the Ouroboros part gets across the draconic aspect.
• The Kingdom Hearts series (and first game in particular) suffers from some of this, perversely not due to bad or uncreative translation—indeed, the translation from Japanese to English is said to be very good—but due to Woolseyism.
  • The translation team worked to preserve tone and meaning in a lot of dialogue, rather than translating everything literally. But unbeknownst to the localization team, the Japanese text contained Arc Words and very subtle bits and pieces from Chekhov's Armoury that wouldn't come to full fruition until later games. As a result, some of the Foreshadowing was gone, and the Kingdom Hearts series growing a massively intertwined and complex plot came much more unexpectedly to Anglophones. It's an excellent translation for a stand-alone game, but unfortunately for them, this wasn't a stand-alone game. A lot of this revolves around the word "hearts". The word in Japanese translates to the effect of "what makes you, you." Which an English speaker might translate as "soul". However, "heart" is valid enough translation, and with the game already containing various heart-shaped symbols, it was kept. All well and good... until the Nobodies came in Kingdom Hearts II, since they lacked hearts. But were not the Heartless, who lacked bodies. And there is consistent questions in the English fanbase if Nobodies had cardiological hearts (the kind that pump blood), a question that is unlikely to come up in Japanese.
  • Sora's Awakening in the beginning of the first game is guided by a mysterious voice. In Japanese, it was obvious that this voice belonged to Mickey Mouse — nobody else talks the way the voice talks. In English, there's a lot less room for identifying features in a speaking pattern, and the English-speaking side of the fanbase was left wondering when it'd get explained until Ultimania confirmed what Japanese fans had known all along.
  • The symbolism of Xion's name in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days was unfortunately lost in translation. In Japanese, "shion" (the Japanese pronunciation of Xion) is also the name of a plant that is commonly associated with memories.
  • The Kingdom Hearts translation team is usually rather good at catching Arc Words, but in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] they seemed to have missed the Big Bad saying "We'll go together", translating it as "Come with me" instead. "We'll go together" was also seemingly mistranslated in Kingdom Hearts χ as "We'll make those dreams come true, Belle", in a scene very clearly paralleling Belle and the Beast (now the Prince) with Sora and Riku.^note This isn't the first time the parallel has appeared, by the way.
  • The first game created a What Happened to the Mouse? situation due to an awkward translation. When Donald is leaving on his mission to find Sora and King Mickey, he says to Daisy "Can you take care of the-?" and she replies "Of course". Whatever he wanted Daisy to "take care of", it's never mentioned or brought up again. This is because in Japanese, he starts to say "We'll find the king", which in Japanese word order would be "The king, we will find". Donald starts "The king-" and Daisy cuts him off with "Of course (you will)". However, this would be impossible to translate into English while preserving the meaning, since the only way you could preserve the word order would be to have it as "The king will be found by us", which sounds nothing like the way Donald usually talks, and having him start with "We'll find-" wouldn't make it obvious that he was talking about finding the king, so the line had to be changed.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, there's very heavy subtext in the original dialogue, thanks to specific pronoun use, that the person most special to Sora that Naminé is replacing in his memories isn't in fact Kairi, but Riku. When Sora meets the other kids in his memory of the Destiny Islands, the pronoun they use for his 'special person' is aitsu (アイツ). The pronoun is casual and gender neutral but more masculine leaning (think of referring to someone as 'guy', regardless of gender), and it's generally considered rude/insulting to use the pronoun towards a girl. When Sora realizes Naminé has been tampering with his memories, she uses neutral pronouns to describe the person most special to him. However, in both Japanese and English, Sora assumes she means Kairi. But the full extent of Sora's misunderstanding is all but lost in the English translation, as it translates aitsu to feminine pronouns. In fact, the last time Sora sees the Riku Replica, he refers to him by aitsu in Japanese, but in English, just calls out his name instead. There is an attempt in the English translation of the Chain of Memories novel to rectify this at least, as the subtext from the game is mostly preserved, while also going further and implying that the memory of the meteor shower promise Naminé tampers with was actually between Sora and Riku. You can read about it in more detail here. In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora also uses aitsu to refer to Riku, when he sees him at the top of the mountain in The Land of Dragons. This time, it's translated more accurately to "That guy..."
  • Kingdom Hearts III:
    • In the original Japanese dialogue, when Riku and Mickey are in the Dark World for the first time, Mickey says Riku has found the strength to protect his 'precious person' (taisetsu na hito), very obviously implied to be Sora. This scene comes directly after one with Hercules saying Megara is his own precious person. After a flashback of receiving the Keyblade from Terra, Riku then says to himself, "(Is this) the strength to protect the person most precious to me...?" However, in the English dub, Mickey and Riku both say the 'things that matter' instead, while Hercules says 'the person I love most' about Megara, so the parallel and implication are completely lost (even if we as the audience can still deciper that Sora is the reason for Riku's growth and character development). To top it off, the KH3 Ultimania entry about Riku also uses precious 'person' instead of 'things'. It seems Riku's wish has deliberately evolved from when he was a child, but that important bit of character development got no homoed out of several different official KHIII English translations.
      Image Text: A young Riku stated his wish: “I want to become strong enough to protect the things that matter.” Roughly 10 years later, after many twists and turns, he has finally obtained the strength to protect the person who matters.
    • Taisetsu (precious/cherished) is once again used during a scene with Sora and Riku. In Japanese, Sora says, "You really cherish Elsa...", when speaking with Anna in Arendelle, while in English he says, "I'm sure she knows how much you love her." Sora then thinks to himself in Japanese, "It's the same as when Riku disappeared before. It's surely because he cherishes me that he wouldn't let us be together." In English, it's translated as "It's just like when Riku disappeared. He thought he had to push me away, to protect me." This means taisetsu has been translated twice to 'love' in English... except for when it comes to how Riku feels about Sora.
    • When visiting the video game store at Galaxy Toys, Sora sees Yozora (the character Rex thinks he's a toy of) for the first time and says, "Well, I never looked this good." And... Yozora looks exactly like Riku. Which Sora acknowledges himself in a social media post.◊ As it turns out, in Japanese, Donald actually says "Very good-looking, huh." after Goofy says Yozora looks like Riku. Given the context, he's teasing Sora about saying someone who looks like Riku is good-looking. But, once again, it seems to have been mistranslated that the subject is Sora in English. Also, in the original Japanese text of the aforementioned social media post, Sora says he feels a connection to Yozora because he looks like Riku.
  • In the very first Kingdom Hearts game, Riku's final words to Sora before being lost in the Realm of Darkness are "Take care of her," referring to Kairi, the girl they both fought to protect throughout the game. In Kingdom Hearts III, Riku comes across the lingering spirit of the replica that was made of himself in Chain of Memories, who was similarly focused on protecting the main girl of that particular game, Namine. The spirit of Repliku remains with Riku throughout the game, and near the end sacrifices his chance at starting a new life in order to give Namine one instead. In Japanese, he tells Riku to look after her with the exact same phrasing Riku used in the first game, bringing his character development full circle (as someone worthy of protecting others, bestowed on him by his own younger self who had failed at protecting others before), but this was apparently missed by the translators, who merely had Repliku tell Riku "Good luck" before fading.
  • Kingdom Hearts III has many scenes between Sora and Kairi affected by this:
    • Near the end of the game Kairi manages to help keep Sora from fading away when his and their companions' lives are endangered. In Japanese, Sora recognizes how strong Kairi really is for doing this (as no one else had managed to maintain themselves, let alone themself and another person), and says, "Yappari tsuyoi na, Kairi wa!" (You're strong, Kairi, just as I thought!) In English, either as a mistake or as a misguided attempt to provide some more Ship Tease between the two, Sora tells Kairi that he feels strong when he's with her. Unfortunately, this only serves to downplay a rare moment of Kairi showing off her capabilities, and denies Sora a chance to acknowledge them. It's also possible this was done due to Kairi being a more divisive character in the West and the Western views of strength being more... "masculine". As a result, a rather vocal portion of the fanbase tends to view Kairi as a Damsel Scrappy. The translators may have assumed the original line was going to stoke up some ire from Western players and went with a line that still managed to fit the situation.
    • Another scene that is translated to be more romantic is them sharing paopu fruit. In Japanese, Kairi says, "This charm will make sure we won’t be separated (again)." And in English, she says, "I want to be a part of your life no matter what. That’s all." The latter has clear romantic connotations, while the former could very well be read as simply platonic, in the same vein of Kairi giving Sora her Wayfinder back in the original Kingdom Hearts.
    • Yet another scene is translated to be more romantic, this time at the end of the game when Sora gives his speech about getting Kairi back. In Japanese, he says, "This time for sure I expected we could go home together… but Kairi wasn’t in this place (realm)." Meanwhile, in English, he says, "I thought we’d finally be together. But she’s out there, alone." And clearly there's a very big difference between coming home together and being together.
    • The original Japanese dialogue of Sora's conversation with the Nameless Star more or less confirms that while Kairi is the reason Sora retains his body, Riku is the reason his heart survived. Meanwhile, in English, Riku's role in saving Sora is somewhat... downplayed.
  • The famous Utada Hikaru song used as the first game's theme song (which became the de facto theme song of the series after it was reused in multiple future games) was originally much more obviously connected to the themes and motifs of the series. When it was translated into English, the lyrics were changed significantly to preserve the melody, resulting in the title becoming "Simple and Clean". But the original Japanese title was "Hikari" ("光"), Japanese for "light", which fit with the series' central focus on the battle between light and darkness. Some of the Japanese lyrics make the connection even more explicit.
    突然の光の中 目が覚める 真夜中に (And suddenly, I awaken in a stream of light In the middle of the night)
    静かに 出口に立って (Stand quietly at the exit)
    暗闇に光を撃て (And shoot a ray of light into the darkness).
• The PS2 game Ape Escape 3 features an unlockable parody of Metal Gear Solid, named Mesal Gear Solid. In Japanese, this is a pun- Metal Gear is transliterated as Metaru Gia, so Mesal becomes Mesaru- Saru being the Japanese word for monkey (the series is called Saru Getchu! there). In English, it's just confusing gibberish. This was actually the result of a collaboration between Sony and Konami which also resulted in the "Snake vs. Monkey" minigame in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. For what it's worth, a parody of the actual Metal Gear appeared in its final stage, also called "Mesal Gear" (complete with a monkey wearing Big Boss' trademark eyepatch).
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The character who calls himself "Error" in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is often thought to be named that way as a result of "Blind Idiot" Translation. Not only was that his actual name in the Japanese version, there's another character named "Bagu" who is actually supposed to be "Bug" ("Bagu" being a transliteration of the word "Bug" from English to Japanese kana and back to romaji). "Error" and "Bug" are common terms for computer glitches, but the joke was lost on many western players.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the last words of Link's uncle in the original were "Y-you are the princess's..." Considering the context, it's pretty clear that the next few words were going to be something like "last hope" or "savior." For some reason, the English translation wrote it as "Zelda is your...", which makes it sound like he's going to tell something important about Link's relationship to Zelda. This left many players very confused, since it never gets followed up on, and led to a very common rumor that he was going to say "sister." The Game Boy Advance port changed this line.
  • Oracle of Ages: The object that preserves the balance of Symmetry Village is called Minomu no Mi in Japanese, or the Tuni Nut in English. While the English translation manages to preserve the palindrome, other European languages simply use a direct translation of the English name, ruining the joke.
  • The name of King Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is a pun on the Japanese words for "ship" (fune) and "sailboat" (hansen). It is easier to see the connection in the Japanese localization of the game (Dafunesu Nohansen Hairaru). What makes the translation even unluckier is that Daphne, from which Daphnes derives, is a feminine name.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass contains an island called Dee Ess Island, which as the name suggests, looks exactly like a Nintendo DS. However, the European French name for the island translate to "Island of Ess(es)". This is because in French, the word "de" means "of", and apparently, "Dee" was translated as "de", resulting in the island's name's pun getting lost in the European French translation. The name is correctly translated in the French-Canadian version, perhaps because Nintendo of America handles translations for all of North America. Italian belongs to the same language family as French, but the name was translated properly in that language, making a clever pun ("Diesse" sounds both like "DS" and "di Esse", "of Ess" in Italian).
  • The Final Boss fight of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in the English version ends with Demon King Demise making a Dying Curse towards those who carry the blood of the Goddess and spirit of the hero, stating that he will "rise again" and that he will send an "incarnation of hatred" to forever torment their kind. This is significantly altered from the Japanese original which states that the "curse" is actually the Demon Tribe being cursed to hate the gods and their creations; here, Demise states that he won't necessarily rise again, but the war between the monsters and the gods' creations will repeat. As explained here, the concepts used by Demise are specifically rooted in Japanese syncretic Buddhist beliefs, contributing to the difficulty of creating a comprehensible translation for international players, leading to the implications being lost, and several new implications being made (most notably, the idea that Ganon was this "incarnation of hatred").
  • Breath of the Wild:
    • In Gerudo Town, there's a Running Gag that visitors have trouble speaking the Gerudo language, which has lots of "v"s in it. This is because Japanese has no such sound, and Japanese speakers emulate it with "b"s generally. English and many other languages have both sounds, so the joke fails to translate.
    • During Link's first memory, two parts of Zelda's speech contain references to previous games where the Master Sword has appeared: "Whether skyward bound, adrift in time, or steeped in the glowing embers of twilight…", and "Over the seas of time and distance, when we need the golden power of the Goddess…" the references to Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, and Wind Waker are pretty obvious to catch. The last part gets lost on Western players, since while it's a reference to A Link to the Past, it does so by way of invoking the Japanese title of the game (Triforce of the Gods). As such, most fans just assume it's her referencing just the main 3D entries and closing with a prayer to Hyrule's deities. The German version managed to keep the reference intact by changing the sentence to "Ob der Held die Meere überquert oder eine Verbindung mit der Vergangenheit eingeht, du mögest stets an seiner Seite sein."^Translation"Whether the hero crosses the sea, or creates a link to the past, may you always be at his side."
    • At the start of the final battle against Dark Beast Ganon, Zelda states that Ganon "Has given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure, enraged form." In the original Japanese, this line is better translated as "This form is born from Ganon's obsessive refusal to give up on reincarnation." This might be a deliberate choice: in English, with a Western cultural background, refusing to give up on trying again has a heroic Determinator air, whereas the original line was written in a Buddhist country where it's tantamount to giving in to sin.
  • The English dub of Tears of the Kingdom significantly downplays and simplifies Ganondorf's motivations from the original Japanese, to the point that some English-speaking fans have complained of his lack of character in the game. While the English dub still retains his full Blood Knight characterization and his thoughts on Hyrule being ruled by "weak, peace loving cowards", the Japanese version (as explained by this video) is much more detailed about his motives and end goal, believing that Rauru "looked down on him" as a god-like king, and that the past ruled by demons bred people who had "more fighting spirit". Ganondorf's end goal in the Japanese version isn't just to Take Over the World, but to return it to a state of chaos where everyone has no choice but to fight to survive.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Fusion: In the original Japanese script, the Galactic Federation is stated to be a complex network consisting of multiple branches. This was not carried over into the localization, making the Federation feel like a singular monolithic political entity — which would be the Federation's characterization in the English version of titles going forward. This has the effect of making the Federation as a whole appear much more villainous in the English version as the secret project to weaponize the Metroids and X is attributed to the entire Federation rather than a singular branch that may have not been operating with the knowledge of the rest of the Federation, and leading much confusion from English-speaking fans when Metroid Dread depicted Samus as still working for the organization she supposedly betrayed in the previous chronological game.
  • Metroid: Other M: Series producer Yoshio Sakamoto, despite barely speaking English, insisted on overseeing the English localization of the script. So in addition to the English version being littered with badly-rewritten artifacts of the original Japanese, several ideas were lost in translation due to oversimplification, exaggeration, and outright mistranslation of character motivations and behavior. One example is Adam calling Samus "Lady" back during her military days. In Japanese, Samus goes into detail about how she hated the nickname, even after she grew to respect Adam's leadership, since it felt like it was a veiled insult concerning her womanhood. Meanwhile, the English translation goes in the opposite direction, with her loving the nickname precisely because it meant Adam acknowledged her as a woman. In fact, the English script as a whole seems to portray Samus as a schoolgirl with a crush, muddling a character arc centered on her going through a quarter-life crisis following the events of Super Metroid, all of which only worsened perception of what would have already been a divisive game in the West.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: On a less serious and more amusing case, there's her status as a "Bounty Hunter" despite very rarely acting like one (rather than acting as an independent mercenary for hire, she seems to exclusively take orders from the Galactic Federation). According to Retro Studios, during the time they were pitching concepts for Corruption to Nintendo, they presented ideas of her doing more actual bounty hunting — namely tracking down criminals for upgrades — à la Boba Fett. This reportedly mortified the Japan-based officials, who were under the assumption that Samus was more of an altruistic, "motherly" hero who fought out of the goodness of her heart, not murdering for hire. It was then established that Nintendo had actually spent years interpreting Samus as a general "space adventurer with a heart of gold" (had it been localized more accurately, she would likely be instead called a "space hunter" or "space ranger"), and that despite calling her one for years, they didn't actually know what a "bounty hunter" was, or at least the specific connotations of the title in the west.
• Elden Ring generally has accurate translation, but the game is so big that several errors found their way in anyway:
  • Ranni's Age of the Stars sounds highly creepy in English, with her saying it's a "thousand-year voyage into fear, doubt, and loneliness" and that she wants to remove "certainty of the senses." In Japanese, her meaning is clearer: She wants to take the Elden Ring and its order far away from the Lands Between, allowing people to choose their own fate without outside interference. The "fear, doubt, and loneliness" are necessary side effects, not what she's going for.
  • A common misconception among the English-speaking community is the existence of the "greattree" which supposedly preceded the Erdtree. The only problem is that "greattree roots", mentioned in the descriptions of Deathroot, Root Resin, and the Deeproot Depths map, is a mistranslation of "great roots", which actually refers to the Erdtree's roots- or occasionally those of Minor Erdtrees.
  • The English depiction of the Veteran's Prosthesis states that Niall traded it to Godrick in exchange for some of his knights that Godrick had taken prisoner. This seems to make no sense, given that it's one of Niall's drops, so he obviously still has it. The Japanese version instead says that Niall traded his leg to Godrick, which is why he has a prosthetic leg in the first place. This also plays in to Godrick's habit of grafting peoples' limbs to himself and explains how he can use Stormcaller skills; he's channeling Niall's power through his grafted leg.
  • The Cleanrot Knights are more accurately the Noblerot Knights, referencing Noble Rot, which is a kind of fungus that infects wine grapes; growers will sometimes deliberately infect their grapes with this fungus because, if managed correctly, it results in particularly concentrated and sweet wines.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:
  • A special case occurs in the German version of the Bloodmoon expansion - in one dialogue, the translator forgot to add the text link leading to a quest start, which resulted in a (small, but quite helpful) subquest being completely lost.
  • In the Polish translation of Morrowind it was pretty hard to rest in some taverns due to similar reasons... the option, when available, was listed last in handy dialogue sidebar, due to Morrowind's ordering system not recognizing letters of the Polish alphabet.
• Disgaea:
  • Recurring character Axel/Akutare always refers to himself with the words "ore-sama" in the Japanese audio, "ore" being an equivalent of "I", and "sama" being a honorific one would use when referring to someone viewed as a superior, which stresses just how highly he thinks of himself, on top of his already often conceited dialogue.
  • In Disgaea 4, this is actually something of some importance, as beginning to use "ore-sama" in their speech is the first obvious sign that someone is being affected by the A-Virus of Chapter 6.
• The French-language manual for Earthworm Jim on the Mega Drive translated "butt" (as in Evil Queen Overly Long Name Slug-for-a) as postérieur, which whilst technically accurate doesn't quite capture the idiom.
• In the French version of Mass Effect, the "Renegade" alignment is translated as "Pragmatique", which means, well... Pragmatic. Problem is, consistently taking Renegade actions throughout the trilogy tends to make the situation worse and, in several cases, the pragmatic thing to do involves picking the Paragon option. It would have been way more fitting to translate "Renegade" as "Renégat", which is the actual French translation of the term.
• In The Secret of Monkey Island:
  • You need a navigator's head being held by cannibals, who are unwilling to trade it to you because they are unable to find another one. You succeed by trading it for a leaflet titled "How to get ahead in navigating". The spanish translation of the game had the leaflet translated literally ("Como avanzar en la navegación"), losing the double meaning, and making this part a big Guide Dang It!.
  • The translator of the German version was smarter at this and titles the book "Klarer Kopf beim Navigieren", which means re-translated "get a clear head during navigation", which actually gives enough hints at the puzzle solution, as the cannibals will now say it's an instruction to get a "clear head", meaning they can make a better head.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man is named "Rock Man" in Japanese. The joke about a boy named "Rock" being siblings with a girl named "Roll" is somewhat lost in translations. It also breaks the Theme Naming that would be established later on of many other characters getting music names (Blues, Bass, Treble, Beat, Rush, etc). Mega Man's civilian name is still "Rock" though, but it's not mentioned nearly as often. In fact, Mega Man Powered Up and, implicitly, Mega Man 11 retcon his original name to be "Mega" instead, which many fans weren't keen on since it completely ruins the musical theme.
  • In Mega Man 3, once they learn a certain character's name is Doc Robot (or Doc Man), players are sure to be scratching their heads, wondering what this robot skeleton has to do with doctors (okay, sure, it's built by Doctor Wily, but surely "Wily Robot" would make more sense). The name comes from a pun on the Japanese word for skull—dokuro—that for whatever reason, Capcom didn't see fit to change. What makes this especially baffling is that Skull Man was not introduced until the next installment.
  • Vile is named "Vava" in the original Japanese version. Come Mega Man Zero's third installment, we're introduced to the character Dr. Vile, named Dr. Weil overseas to prevent confusion. As a result, the name of the Biometal that takes after him is also changed to a rather un-frightening "Model W" instead of the original "Model V".
  • In Mega Man Battle Network 6, there's a sequence where a classmate goes on about calling the 11 year old protagonist "Mr. Hikari" instead of "Lan." The end result is that Tab comes off as a little crazy with a unique and incomprehensible way of expressing himself and you spend the rest of the game waiting for a repeat performance.
• Pathologic was originally titled Мор. Утопия (Mor. Utopiya) in its native Russia. In addition to being a darkly humorous nod to the game's extremely bleak dystopian setting, the title is also a pun in Russian: Thomas More is the author of Utopia (the source of the word "utopia"), while mор (pronounced "more") is a Russian word meaning "plague" or "pestilence".
• Super Mario:
  • Waluigi's name (ワルイージ, Waruiiji in Japanese) comes from an anagram of the word ijiwarui (いじわるい), which means mean-spirited, and is a combination of Luigi and warui, meaning bad.
  • It's been stated more than once (dating back to her original manual synopsis in Super Mario Bros. 2) that Birdo prefers going by "Birdetta", yet the game's continuously call her "Birdo". This comes back to this trope: in Japanese, it's stated that she's named "Catherine" but prefers being called "Cathy". It's just about nicknames, not preferred names. As a result, Nintendo usually ignores the old artifact of Birdo preferring being called "Birdetta".
  • The games have a recurring antagonist named Kamek who's a Wizard Classic who's also a turtle. His name might seem random to many non-Japanese people, because his name is actually a Punny Name of 'Kame' meaning turtle, and 'majikku' meaning magic. That pun was lost in all other languages. Though in many translations, his species is named 'Magikoopa', a more accurate translation of the pun.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door:
    • Some times after finding Koopok for his Trouble Center sidequest, he will send an e-mail saying he's hiding in a cold location. In the original Japanese and most translations, the location in question is the Crystal Palace from the original Paper Mario. The English localization, however, renders as the completely made-up "Goomstar Temple", losing the Continuity Nod.
    • The reason Beldam's text turns red when insulting Vivian by calling her "plug-ugly" is because that's supposed to be the reveal that Vivian is transgender by Beldam calling her a boy which, given Vivian's extremely feminine appearance, is meant to come as a surprise, hence the red text to draw attention to it. While this has the intended effect in most localizations of the game, the English and German translations remove all reference to this while neglecting to remove the red text.
    • After completing Pine T. Jr.'s trouble, you'll receive an email from him in which he tells you his dad has found a new job tending to the Li'l Oinks in Toad Town. It's supposed to say that, anyway, but like what happened with Koopook's email, the localization team missed the connection to the original Paper Mario and translated the name literally as "Bubu." What’s more, due to Japanese lacking a clear grammatical plural, it's written as though this Bubu is a single entity rather than the name of a species.
    • The final RDM email in the original Japanese script and most translations of the games has a special hidden section found by scrolling down for a long time, which mentions Chuck Quizmo from the first game as well as a recipe. For whatever reason, the English translation removed this section entirely but left in the statement alluding to its existence ("May we meet again...perhaps sooner than you think! (Wink, wink...)"), confusing many players.
    • The Chestnut King mentioned in Luigi's tale is meant to be the Goomba King/Goomboss. This is due to the fact that the Japanese name of Goombas is "Kuribo" ("chestnut people", owning to their original sprite in Super Mario Bros. looking more like the edible nut than a mushroom). As such, the joke that Luigi went into an epic quest to defeat the Warm-Up Boss from the previous game was lost.
• Street Fighter:
  • The first Updated Re-release of Street Fighter II is officially titled Street Fighter II Dash: Champion Edition in Japanese. Champion Edition was actually the game's subtitle, much like how The World Warrior was the subtitle to the original Street Fighter II and The New Challengers was to Super Street Fighter II. However, the word "Dash" is not spelled on the game's title but represented by an apostrophe-like symbol (′) known as a "prime" or a "dash", which is often used as a notation to denote the derivative of a mathematical function (i.e: f′ or f dash). Hence the title Street Fighter II Dash, as in a derivative of the original Street Fighter II. Instead of retitling the game Street Fighter II Prime for its American release, Capcom USA simply ignored the prime mark on the title screen and marketed the game as Street Fighter II: Champion Edition on the marquee. The same was true to the subsequent game in the series, Street Fighter II Dash Turbo: Hyper Fighting, which was shortened to simply Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting (although the American marquee carries the awkward title of Street Fighter II: Turbo Champion Edition: Hyper Fighting).
  • Balrog's Super Combo in Super Street Fighter II Turbo is called the "Crazy Buffalo", a reference to his Japanese name of M. Bison. Many of his other moves in later games continued with this buffalo theme.
• Metal Gear:
  • In the first two games, Revolver Ocelot is known among his Russian comrades as "Shalashaska", which he claims to be a Russian slang word for "prison". The name "Shalashaska" is actually a mistranslation of the actual word "Sharashka" from Russian (Sharashka) to Japanese (シャラシャーシカ, Sharashaashika) and then from Japanese to English (Shalashaska). In addition, "Sharashka" is actually a slang word for a very specific type of prison — secret research and development labs where incarcerated scientists and engineers worked on scientific and technological projects for the state. They were in effect Gulag labour camps with intellectual labour instead of physical labour. All of them were closed after Stalin's death. This makes it an odd nickname for a guy who is into torturing POWs and started his military career under Khrushchev.
  • Metal Gear Solid:
    • Hideo Kojima has compared Solid Snake's personality to the classic manga character Lupin III, a hero defined largely by how funny and playful he is despite his hypercompetence. Snake certainly still does and says funny things, but generally his English dub performance plays him a lot more seriously, with his sense of humour coming across as very dry. His Japanese dub performance is more goofy and bathetic, and also shows him being overwhelmed by the hotness of the gorgeous women he meets (much like Lupin is), while the English performance comes across more like Snake's just hitting on them.
    • Snake remarks that the terrorists are armed with "five-five-sixers and pineapples". Seeing as 5.56mmx45 is one of the most common ammunition types in the world, it just comes off as a garbled attempt at tough-talk. In the Japanese version, Snake instead describes the guns as "trumpets", delivered in an incredulous tone. The point of the scene is supposed to be that the terrorists, mostly being inexperienced VR soldiers on a grotesquely inflated budget, are using obscure and flashily expensive rare guns (like the Hind-D helicopter that features earlier in the scene), and so Snake is making fun of how silly the soldiers look with their tacticool loadouts.
    • When spying on Johnny on the toilet, he dreamily describes Meryl as "kakko-ii", a word meaning something like "cool" or "handsome" which would normally be used to describe men (or occasionally manly things, like cars). In English, he just says "that woman is built, alright", which makes it ambiguous as to whether he means her muscles or her butt is what interests him, and also makes it ambiguous whether Johnny is into her or just commenting on how weird she is. For this reason, Japanese fans were significantly less surprised by the romance between Meryl and Johnny in MGS4, and particularly the revelation that he'd been nursing a crush on her since the first time he saw her.
    • Ocelot's personality and voice delivery is supposed to be a parody of a recognisable "gun fanatic" archetype in Japanese, with rude, nerdy speech patterns and pitiful fixations. In the English version, he's given a much cooler, sleazier dub which makes him sound more like a real Spaghetti Western villain rather than a wannabe.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • This game introduces the shadowy group known as The Patriots, AKA the "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo." In English, this just sounds like a string of alliterative but gibberish syllables. However, the name has a far greater significance in Japanese. Due to the Japanese language's lack of distinction between "R" and "L", it is impossible for anyone to vocalise or write down "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo" in Japanese. To quote /u/FlashMedallion from Reddit:
      The Patriots, as a secretive organization, are hiding in the very blind spots of language itself.
      The Patriots are practicing a form of "memetic stealth"; they are an idea that has assumed a form that cannot be expressed, communicated, or reproduced.\\

  This ties in very well with the themes of information control explored in the game, but are totally lost on the English speaking audience.

  • Emma's parrot frequently says the phrase "Venus in cancer", which makes Emma seem like an astrology nut. In the Japanese version, what the parrot was actually referring was the Venusian from the 1956 B-movie It Conquered the World. That's because the creature in question is called the "Venusian crab", or Kinsei Gani (金星ガニ) in the Japanese version, which is supposed to reflect Emma's interest in sci-fi B-movies.
  • Rose's confusion about which building King Kong climbed up makes more sense in the Japanese version, where she's convinced he climbed the Twin Towers — climbed by the ape in the King Kong (1976). (The joke is that they're both actually right, and Raiden, who's convinced the ape climbed the Empire State as he did in King Kong (1933), ignorantly accuses her of mixing it up with The Towering Inferno.) This obviously had to be changed for the English version, in which Rose inexplicably thinks the ape climbed the Chrysler Building, and Raiden accuses her of mixing it up with the Roland Emmerich version of Godzilla (1998).

  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Volgin uses the phrase "Kuwabara, Kuwabara" several times. It's a Japanese expression equivalent to the English "knock on wood" that is believed to ward off lightning. At the end of the game, he refuses to say the phrase, instead mocking the storm, and is promptly struck by lightning.
  • A good Actor Allusion joke in Metal Gear Solid 3 is lost in English. If the player decides to kill the unconscious Ocelot in Rassvet, you get a Non-Standard Game Over where Colonel Campbell from the original Metal Gear Solid yells at Snake for causing a Time Paradox. In the English version, it's a non-sequitur. In the Japanese version, it's because Campbell's voiced by Takeshi Aono, the same actor who dubbed Doc Brown in Back to the Future.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots:
    • Sunny calls Otacon "big brother", which adds an allusion to Otacon's dead sister Emma. In the English she calls him "Uncle Hal", which has the right literal connotation (something a child might call a guardian they're not actually related to) but which loses the subtext.
    • One of the funniest gags in the game is where Ocelot feigns a death via FOX-DIE to freak Snake out, before suddenly getting up and revealing he was kidding. In Japanese, it goes: "FOX..." "DIE..." "...ja nai!" ("FOXDIE... not!"), which rhymes, and is additionally the established Japanese format for the old, puerile "...not!" joke. In English, to go with Lip Lock, it becomes; "FOX..." "DIE..." "...think again!", which isn't as funny.
  • In Metal Gear Solid V, "Punished" Snake comes off as a cooler codename if it's in Japanese, where it rhymes with older Snake codenames like Solid, Liquid and Naked. In English, it just sounds like '90s Anti-Hero gibberish. This is, however, downplayed in that MGSV's incarnation of Big Boss (who is, in fact, a Body Double for the real Big Boss) is officially known as Venom Snake, which can be interpreted as thematically closer to the other Snake codenames.
  • Numerous Internal Homage Casting Gag things that reinforce Metal Gear's extremely repetitive structure are lost in the English version, between No Export for You and generally different voice casting decisions. For just some of these:
    • Most of the Japanese voice cast are returning members of the Production Posse on Policenauts, particularly Meryl Silverburgh's voice actress reappearing as a similar character called Meryl Silverburgh, and Jonathan's voice actor appearing as Otacon, a character who has Policenauts merchandise.
    • In the Japanese version of MGS4, Big Boss is played by an actor who is the father of Solid Snake's voice actor, paralleling the characters' real relationship.
    • Sunny, Rosemary and The Boss all share the same voice actress in Japanese, which is intended to hint at the symbolic connection between these characters. (The English dub ran into casting issues because of this, and ended up with the voice actress for The Boss, Lori Alan, playing Rosemary in the joke "Snake Eraser" short.)
    • The Japanese voice for Richard Ames is the same as the voice of the DARPA Chief, and James Johnson shares a voice actor with Kenneth Baker, reinforcing the repetitive nature of their deaths.
• Metal Storm: After beating the game once, you unlock a New Game Plus in the form of a second loop. While playing this second loop, the ones digit of your score will curiously always be a 4. It may seem like some sort of glitch to western players, but to Japanese players, it's a warning in the form of a Visual Pun: since the Japanese words for "four" and "death" are both pronounced similarly, the number four is commonly associated with death and misfortune in Japan, and the second loop is much more difficult than the first, ergo, you probably will be dying a lot.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II:
    • Lorasia is changed to Midenhall, losing the association with Princess Lora, the original name for Princess Gwaelin.
    • A literal case where the character is accidentally directed to the wrong town in a translation error.
  • Dragon Quest III: The Temple of Dharma and Book of Satori reference Buddhism, but this is not as apparent in games with the Dub Name Change of Alltrades Abbey and Words of Wisdom.
  • Dragon Quest IV DS and onward have a huge number of Dub Name Changes. Most are pointless, but harmless, but there are also several that ruin Mythology Gags and Continuity Nods to other games in the series, by using a completely different name from the previous releases that are being referenced.
• In Tales of Vesperia, Flynn's first name is rendered in the Japanese version as フレン (furen), which is a play on the word 'friend'. Since this is a pun born out of the Japanese pronunciation of English words/names which do not sound alike in English, there is really no way of preserving it in localisation. The name sounds perfectly normal, but ceases to be meaningful in the English version.
• Myself ; Yourself — In Japanese, this would be Jibun Jibun, which is why its title in Japanese is Maiserufu Yuaserufu.
• In Xenosaga Episode One, after KOS-MOS ignores one of Shion's orders, Shion remarks that she doesn't recall programming her that way. This is actually a spin on a Japanese idiomatic phrase (Originally: I don't recall raising a daughter like that!) often uttered by mothers to stubborn daughters. This serves as an interesting piece of evidence towards the fact that Shion views KOS-MOS not as a weapon, but as her child. This is sadly lost in the English dub track, where it comes off as just another example of KOS-MOS' mysterious nature.
• At the end of Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Shulk asks Alvis what he is, and he responds by saying he's "The Monado". While this just seems to be him claiming that he's the Monado (the name of the sword you've been using) in the English version, in the Japanese version it's a play on words with "Monad", which makes his explanation (and the ending) make a lot more sense if you know your way around Gnosticism.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X:
  • Black Tar's lyrics include, "Standing as long as we can until we get all Dolls up", which would make more sense if you understand that Skells are called Dolls in the Japanese game. At least it's not in the Skell combat part.
  • In-universe, Professor B's native language contains words that don't translate into English, so he does the best he can to describe it when asked. The words just appear as jumbled garbage text.
• Happened with several Meaningful Names in Wild ARMs and its remake. For instance, "Zakk Vam Brace" was translated as "Jack Van Burace," completely losing all meaning of the scene where Garrett Stampede receives the title of "Vambrace," indicating that he can protect his Love Interest who has the title of "Sword Arm". Also happened with the "Fenril" Knights, "Alhazad," and "Zeikfried." It's made worse in the remake where they translated his title as Gauntlet, showing that the translators missed the point of Jack's name the second time around.
• In many Japanese-developed fighting games and beat-'em-ups, it is not uncommon to have a character whose fighting style is listed as "martial arts". Examples includes Terry Bogard from Fatal Fury, Cody from Final Fight, Joe and Guile from Street Fighter, Ralf and Clark from The King of Fighters, Axel Stone from Streets of Rage, and Sarah Bryant from Virtua Fighter series. This is because at one time the Japanese believed that the English term "martial arts" referred to a specific fighting style and not a general term for combative sports.^note This is not unlike how many English speakers view "kung fu" as referring to Chinese martial arts, when the actual term (gongfu in modern Pinyin) means time spent dedicated to hard work or discipline. When martial artist Benny Urquidez was asked what kind of fighting style he used, he stated that he was a "full-contact martial artist", which led the Japanese public to believe that "martial arts" was the name of his fighting style (in reality, Urquidez's main fighting style is full-contact karate). In the martial arts manga Shikakui Jungle (Squared Jungle), the term "martial arts" is defined as a "fighting style used by the American military" and many video game designers based their definition of "martial arts" on the manga's description. However, to anyone outside Japan, the term "martial arts" is meaningless as far as specific styles are concerned. How can a character have "martial arts" as his "martial arts"?
  
  By the mid-nineties, Japanese developers seemed to have figure out the redundancy of the "martial arts" style, so there's a couple of examples where they played with it: In Tekken, Marshall Law and his son Forest Law have their their fighting style listed as "Marshall Arts", while their Moveset Clone Lee Chaolan aka Violet uses "Martial Arts" — both are written exactly the same in Japanese. Likewise, Sodom from Final Fight also plays with the translation error in his Street Fighter Alpha appearances: his style is "Japanese-style Martial Arts", which is utter nonsense, but in tone for the character. ^note Since "Martial Arts" are supposed to be interpreted as a Fantastic Fighting Style, Sodom's is supposed to have combined it with other Japanese martial arts, although the word "Japanese" is written as "ジャパニーズ" (Japanese) and not the more correct "日本語" (Nihongo), which makes it sound as a localised version of the fighting style instead of a combination... However, according to The Other Wiki, the term "martial art" has become associated with the fighting arts of East Asia, so in English it's an even more extreme case of redundancy. The right term in Japanese to use for martial arts would be "budō" (武道). However, in-universe, Sodom's grasp of Japanese language is at best lousy.
• In the Monster Rancher game and anime, a particularly evil Dragon is named "Muu", which means darkness or emptiness. In English, he's named "Moo." Yes, after the sound a cow makes. (Which, to be fair, is how mu phonetically sounds to an English speaker.) The German translation instead went with Moe, calling forth weird associations with The Simpsons.
• In Wild AR Ms 3 the wandering mercenary/treasure-hunter characters are known as "migratory-birds" (watari-dori) in the original Japanese. The translator realized that in English this sounds a little silly, rather than poetic, so he changed the title to "drifters". However, most of the dialog was translated fairly directly, leading to some rather out of place metaphors. (The "drifters" are constantly referring to "flapping their wings" and "flying to a new place".) In one egregious example near the beginning of the game, Virginia is warned by her uncle that "Unlike land, the open sky has no roads for you to follow," in response to her deciding to become a drifter.
• In Civilization IV units speak their acknowledgements in the language corresponding to their nation. Unfortunately the idiom "we're on it" was translated literally into Dutch, where it means nothing more than a confirmation of positioning. In Russian, the unit says something meaning either "We are on the spot", or "We have arrived at the location already".
• In BlazBlue, Hakumen's Badass Creed includes "Ware wa Jin" ("I am the steel") which turns out to be a Stealth Pun because he is later revealed to be the future version of Jin Kisaragi.
• Pokémon:
  • Some Pokémon get translated names that don't quite match up with the original intention of what animals or things they are based on their Japanese names.
    • The Japanese Pokémon name Togechick was translated overseas as "Togetic" despite being the name of a creature loosely based on a young bird (a.k.a. a chick). This would appear to be a case of someone using a popular but less precise romanization system and then not bothering to pay attention to what they were doing; トゲチック can be written in romaji either as "togetikku" or "togechikku", with "togechikku" being phonetically correct and "togetikku" matching the syllable group the 'chi' kana actually belongs to.
    • The Japanese name of Krookodile, Waruvial (a combination of the Japanese word warui, meaning bad, and gavial), properly described what animal the Pokémon was actually based on, as it has the long, narrow snout that's typical of a gavial. While it is based on a type of crocodilian, the name "Krookodile" is less precise.
    • The Japanese name of Sneasel, Nyula, serves as a triple pun - one of sennyū (sneaking in) and yū (an alternate reading of itachi) to reflect its kamaitachi origin, one of new and nora (stray, as in a stray cat) to reflect it being a cat with a spiteful disposition, and one of Nyu being a combination of nya (the Japanese equivalent for meow) and yū to reflect it being a cross between a kamaitachi and a cat. However, the English and other western localizations would completely drop the feline connotations from its name, causing arguments within the western fandom on if Sneasel is a cat or a weasel, and causing bewilderment from some western fans when official sources group Sneasel with other cat-like Pokémon and when Pokémon media depicts the Sneasel line with cat-like behaviors. This localization snafu was likely the result of the Generation 2 localization being finished early while Sneasel was one of the last finalized Pokémon with several design revisions, with it notably looking like a plain old weasel for much of its development, only gaining its cat-like characteristics at the last minute and likely after its localized name was already decided.
    • This issue gets muddled farther in the French localization, where its name got localized as "Farfuret", dropping both the feline and weasel connotations, while Sneasel clearly has no ferret inspiration whatsoever.
    • The Pokémon Politoed is based on a pun that they did not even attempt to translate. It's based on what is known as the "lord-frog" in Japanese. Its Japanese name includes the word "lord" (Nyorotono) and its Pokédex entries talk about it ruling over its pre-evos. Something like "Froaking" would have been an obvious way to preserve the pun, and would have even been a good portmanteau, but for some reason they didn't do that; possibly because they may have wanted to preserve the "Poli" name all the members of its evolutionary line have (especially considering that Politoed's appearance is a radical deviation from the rest of the Poliwag family). This makes the fact that it evolves from Poliwhirl when traded while holding a King's Rock seem quite random. Similar to Sneasel, its beta design had a much clearer Adipose Rex theming and wore the King's Rock as a crown.
    • Glalie's entire existence is a pun: its Japanese name is Onigohri, a portmanteau of "oni" (a mythical monster) and "kohri" (ice), but which sounds a lot like "onigiri" (rice ball). It's an ice monster that looks like a rice ball. This was nearly impossible to translate, so they went with a rather clumsy portmanteau ("glacier/goalie") that most people didn't really catch, as there's not much of a hockey theme in the design aside from its face vaguely looking like a hockey mask, and its relatives are clearly unrelated to hockey. This also made the line as a whole seem pretty random, as its members are based on and named after Japanese snow creatures (the zashiki-warashi, the oni, and the yuki-onna), but received the names Snorunt, Glalie, and Froslass in English.
    • Wobbuffet's Japanese name is a pun on so nan su, which means "that's the way it is". In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team a Wobbuffet speaks in Pokémon Speak (unlike the others, who use Animal Talk) and is paired with Wynaut. In the Japanese version this makes sense, but in translations it's just a random sounding Catchphrase. For extra points, Wynaut's translated name does retain a conversational pun value (why not?); the original, Sonano, is a pun on sō na no? = "is that right?". In the sequel, the localization does pick up on this and peppers their dialogue with "Is it not?" and "That's right!"
    • Galarian Darmanitan's entire existence (as an Ice-type snowman-looking variant of the Unovan daruma-baboon) only makes sense if you know that snowmen are called "snow daruma" in Japanese. Its Hidden Ability Zen Mode is an even bigger example: it's an appropriate Woolseyism for the Unovan variant, as its Zen Mode becomes part Psychic type and adopts a calmer Monkey Morality Pose... but the Galarian variant's alternate form is an angry snowman on fire. In Japanese, the ability is named Daruma Mode, which can apply to both the daruma-doll-like Unovan form and the Galarian form's snowman.
  • Several moves and abilities have effects that make more sense if you check out their Japanese names:
    • Several moves have a "hidden" property in addition to their type, power and effect, such as being a sound-based move, a ball/bomb move, a slashing move etc. Occasionally there are types and abilities that specifically interact with these hidden properties, such as Bulletproof nullifying ball/bomb moves, Sharpness boosting slashing moves etc. However, while the list of moves that interact with these abilities have a certain pattern in Japanese (for example, moves blocked by Bulletproof have either Bomb, Ball or Cannon in their Japanese names), their translated names sometimes miss this cue, resulting in moves whose names suggest they should be affected by certain ability but aren't or vice versa. Arguably the worst offender is Maushold's Secret Art, Population Bomb: It is boosted by the ability Sharpness, which normally boosts slashing moves, because its Japanese name, "Nezumizan", is a pun that can be read as either "to multiply like mice" or "Mouse Cut", while at the same being completely unaffected by Bulletproof despite having "bomb" in its name.
    • The move Splash was called haneru (hop) in Japanese, explaining why it is Normal type, can be learned by Hoppip and is affected by gravity.
    • The move Aerial Ace is called Tsubame Gaeshi ("Swallow Counter") in Japanese, which is the name of a sword technique developed by Sasaki Kojiro, hence why virtually any Pokémon with claws or other parts to slash with can use the move, whether they're Flying-type or not. The move being Flying-type stems solely from the fact that the word "tsubame" means swallow, as in the bird. This is further confusing for English-speaking audiences because Ace is a term referring to fighter pilots with a certain number of confirmed kills. Hence, Aerial Ace takes on a whole different meaning.
    • In Japanese, the name of a certain move is "Noroi", which can be read as "Slow". Hence, for most Pokémon, it drops their Speed and increases their Attack and Defense. However, for Ghosts, it cuts the user's HP in half in exchange for causing the opponent's to rapidly drain over the following turns. This is because an alternative reading of the word is "Curse"—the gag is that most look at the name and think "slow," but the morbid and malicious Ghosts look and think "curse." The entire concept was completely untranslatable, so the team just went with "Curse" for its name, causing players worldwide to be very confused as to why Curse for everyone except Ghosts is a self-buffing move.
    • When Dracovish with Strong Jaw uses Fishious Rend, it gets the damage boost from Strong Jaw. This is because Fishious Rend's Japanese name translates roughly as "Gill Bite," so it would be obvious to a Japanese player. However, the English name and description make no mention of biting.
    • Although some Pokémon with Iron Fist can learn Sucker Punch, that move is not counted as a punching move and thus won't get the damage bonus from Iron Fist, as its original Japanese name translates as "Ambush" or "Surprise Attack," with punching having nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, Meteor Mash gets that damage boost because its Japanese name is literally "Comet Punch," which had to be changed to something else in English because, by coincidence, that name was taken two generations prior.
    • The ability Huge Power, which doubles the user's Attack stat, is associated with rabbit-like Pokémon (the Marill and Bunnelby lines, with Mega Mawile gaining two jaws resembling rabbit ears). This is because its Japanese name is a pun that can be read as "super-strength" or "powerful mochi", mochi being a rice cake associated with the Moon Rabbit.
    • Dancer copies every move with the word "dance" in its name, such as Quiver Dance, Teeter Dance, Petal Dance, Dragon Dance, etc., except for Rain Dance, as the Japanese name means "Prayer for Rain."
    • The moves "Lovely Kiss" and "Sweet Kiss", are, respectively in Japanese, Demon's Kiss (Akuma no Kissu / あくまのキッス), and Angel's Kiss, (Tenshi no Kissu / てんしのキッス). Knowing this, their animations make a lot more sense.
  • The Dark type is called the Evil type in Japanese. This translation actually makes more sense in some ways; Pokémon belonging to that type are more often than not good, but it left many people wondering why there is no Light type to complement it. Also, the majority of moves that involve literal darkness are actually given to the Ghost type, rather than Dark, which tends toward Combat Pragmatism.
  • Red's rival in Pokémon Red and Blue is named "Ookido Green" in Japanese. Due to countries outside of Japan getting Pokémon Blue instead of Pokémon Green for complicated reasons^note the Japanese Blue had several improvements over Red and Green - including, apparently, coding and programming that allowed for the game to even be localized into other languages - which the localizations also have; they became Red and Blue in reference to this, he is called "Blue Oak" internationally. Red and green are opposite colors on the Color Wheel but people often think of blue as red's opposite, so this change worked fine originally. The problem comes in future games: in the remakes to Pokémon Gold and Silver, his bedroom is completely green; renaming him "Blue" messes with the Family Theme Naming (his grandfather is Professor Oak and his sister is Daisy Oak) as well; and in Pokémon Sun and Moon, Red wears a red shirt and hat, while Blue wears... green shorts and shoes. Oddly, the remakes for Red and Blue were known internationally as FireRed and LeafGreen, giving the translators an opportunity to rename Blue to "Green", however his original name was still kept.
  • The Blue/Green Version oddity led to some oddities with the eighth Gym Badge. It's called the Green Badge in Japanese, because it's the badge of Viridian City, which, in Japanese, had a name that translated as "Evergreen City." In the English translation, this was changed to the Earth Badge, since it's Giovanni's badge, and he's a Ground-type specialist. Makes sense. But then Blue took over in Gold and Silver, and he has only one Ground-type on his team—but he still gives out the Earth Badge. ("Green Badge" doesn't fit his team all that well either, but it at least fits his name.)
  • In Pokémon Gold and Silver, the Gym Leader Clair was called "Ibuki" in the Japanese release, which can mean "breath." So when she gives the player the TM that teaches Dragon Breath, she mutters in the Japanese version, "...That's not a pun or anything." The English release changes this to "No, it has nothing to do with my breath," making a different joke. In the remake, as Clair now gives out a different TM that has nothing to do with breath of any kind (Dragon Pulse), she no longer makes the joke in either version.
  • At one point in Pokémon Sun and Moon, the protagonist is asked to pick between red, green, blue, and yellow. This is a clear reference to the original Generation I games. The NPC tells you a line based on your choice. When you pick blue, though, it's mentioned that it was an unpopular choice. While that might have made sense in Japan, as Blue was the third game and thus not as popular as the first two, players outside of Japan instead received modified versions of Red and Green which had some improvements taken from Blue, and as such had been renamed Red and Blue, with Blue being a primary version (and thus very popular) and Green not being present — this title issue causes that line to make no sense internationally, because independent of context, https://today.yougov.com/international/articles/12335-why-blue-worlds-favorite blue is generally the most popular colour.
  • Green in Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! has blue on her clothes. This is because her Japanese name is "Blue". The English version already has a character named that, so her name was changed to Blue's Japanese name.
• Cave Story had a password that the player is given towards the end of the game. In the original Japanese, this was the characters for the game's original title (Doukutsu Monogatari) written backwards. The translator has admitted to being half-asleep when working on this section of the game, as he didn't notice and the backwards kana came out as "Litagano Motscoud," though one has to admit it makes it harder to guess without it being told to you (which does happens in the game). Nicalis's official translation fixes this by using "Yrots Evac".
• Devil May Cry:
  • The "R to L and vice-versa" problem when translating between Japanese and English is evident in at least two cases:
    • Nelo Angelo is the single greatest cause of fan argument for the entire series starting from the first game. Among the reasons that aren't spoilerriffic, his name is mistranslated: it is supposed to mean "Black Angel" in Italian, but thanks to the problem the Japanese have with R's and L's, the letter got switched up, thus his name would accurately be Nero Angelo (for once the R is actually supposed to be there). The kicker of it all regarding Nelo Angelo? In the game's Japanese manual, it's spelled — IN ENGLISH — "Nero Angelo". The whole deal with the "Nelo Angelo vs. Nero Angelo" translation also seeped in when Devil May Cry 4 was still in development and announced to have a protagonist named Nero.
    • In the more usual fashion with Berial from Devil May Cry 4. As always, his name is (almost certainly) supposed to be "Belial" because the series uses Religious and Mythological Theme Naming for its major demons and Devil Arms, while his Katakana, ベリアル, translates to "Belial" but is misspelled as "Berial", and as such, his English voice actor pronounced it like the word "burial". Either the Japanese are apparently incapable of getting that right, or the English translation team never catches it.
  • In Devil May Cry 5, this trope caused some plot holes for the English dub. For example, Dante taunts Vergil about his abusive parenting by calling him out for ripping off his own son's arm. Vergil's response is "My son...means nothing to me!" which sounds cold-hearted even for Vergil. Apparently, the actual dialogue in Japanese was supposed to be Vergil simply being clueless and not understanding what Dante is talking about, but the way it comes across in the English script gives the sequence its funny outcome.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
    • The game features several moments with its main villain Nergal that were almost completely garbled by the translation. Nergal's goal, as it turns out, is a badly Motive Decayed attempt to meet his wife Aenir again, but as a result of meddling with the substance known as aegir to reach her, he no longer remembers this. In his final moments, he starts musing on what he was fighting for, and mutters something along the lines of of "Ae...ir?", which is meant to show how he has conflated "using aegir to find my wife" and "using aegir as an end unto itself", and no longer remembers the difference. As it turns out, the translators mostly missed that, because the one scene in the story where Aenir's name is mentioned talks about Aenir as if it's the name of a place rather than a person, and aegir got a name change to "quintessence," so his last words are instead him simply saying "Quintessence?" for no apparent reason. Particularly annoying, given that the whole subplot can only be found through Guide Dang It! methods.
  • : One map features all enemy pirates inexplicably having their class renamed to "corsair." In Japanese, the pirate class was known as "ocean thief." However, as this map took place surrounding a lake, they were renamed to "lake thief" as a joke. Lake thief was then translated to English as corsair, ruining the joke and leaving only an odd mystery.
  • In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, a few subtle implications about Stefan were lost in the transition from Japanese to English. Firstly he had a Dub Name Change, his Japanese name was Soanvalke. Secondly, his title in the epilogue was "Lion's Descendant." With the reveal that one of the Three Heroes in the backstory was a Lion Laguz named Soan, this implied Stefan was a distant descendant of his. The English version not only missed the reference in his name, but translated his title as "Lion-Blooded", making it sound metaphorical when it was supposed to be literal.
  • The English localization of Fire Emblem Fates replaced all the dialogue in one of the Saizo and Beruka support conversations with awkward Visible Silence.
• In La-Mulana, the name of Duracuets is supposed to be an abbreviation of Dragon Quest II. Fixed somewhat in the remake, where it's translated as "Dracuet".
• The English localizations of the X-Universe games give conflicting reports on the structure of the Argon Federation government. The games' internal Encyclopedia Exposita describes it as a modified American-style democracy with a president and a unicameral senate, while the X-Encyclopedia calls it a parliamentary democracy led by a prime minister. Factor in that the dev team is German, which makes the X-Encyclopedia's version more likely.
• The little-known platformer The Adventure of Little Ralph received an English translation of its title by the game's publishers, even though it was never released outside of Japan. Since an English title translation had been conveniently provided for English speakers, the game is known as The Adventure of Little Ralph in that language. However, translating the game's Japanese title reveals that the title was supposed to contain a juxtaposition of Ralph's size and the size of his adventure (the literal translation is Little Ralph's Big Adventure.)
• In The Night of the Rabbit, DJ Ludwig the mole's radio ident in the original German is "Welle Sumpf 103 Punkt Funf ... fünf!" — intentionally mispronouncing the word fünf ("five") to sort of rhyme with Sumpf ("swamp"). In English, this is changed to "Swamp Radio 103 Point Six...er...five", transforming the radio presenter from one who's fond of bad puns to one who can't remember the number of his own station.
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge gets hit with this in probably the worst possible way — one of the puzzle solutions is based around a pun. Specifically, you use a monkey to tamper with a waterfall pump, a play on the term "monkey wrench". The problem is, this is a very American term. People in other countries, even other English-speaking countries, were unlikely to be familiar with this phrasing.^note it's a Stillson Wrench in the UK, for example Translators had a field day attempting to work this puzzle into other languages, with results ranging from "inelegant" to "didn't even bother, so hope you have a walkthrough." The German translation has Guybrush say "He's so stiff, you could unscrew a nut with him" if you look at the frozen monkey, while the Spanish version put a "101 uses for monkeys" book in the library outright stating that monkeys could be used as "English wrenches". Ron Gilbert learned very quickly after this to try to avoid using wordplay as a solution to a puzzle again.
• The Witcher features a character named Thaler. It is a Meaningful Name, he is a fence having the name of an old European money. In the French translation, he is named Talar, which is how he and thalers are called in original Polish, but has no meaning in french.
• Trio the Punch: "WEEBLES FALL DOWN!" is the translation of "Daruma-san ga koronda." ^Translation"The Daruma doll fell over!" The game briefly pauses when the phrase finishes writing out in full; this is a reference to a children's game^note similar to "Red Light, Green Light", but there also happens to be a Daruma doll jumping around in the stage. Replacing "Daruma" with "Weeble" seems to have been a localization attempt, since a Weeble was a roly-poly toy that behaves somewhat like a Daruma doll does("Weebles wobble but they don't fall down!" their commerical slogan went)
• Persona:
  • Persona 4:
    • Kuma's (Japanese for "bear") name was localized as "Teddie", which is fine in itself. However, the name change unfortunately removed a double pun that appears later in the game: when he grows a human body and starts leaving the TV World to visit the real one, Kuma uses the alias "Kumada": besides being an actual, common Japanese surname, "Kumada" can be interpreted as meaning "It's kuma." The joke was obviously lost with the localized name, and Teddie simply doesn't use an alias; the only reference to it is one female Junes employee being confused about his name.
    • Lecherous Teddie constantly refers to "scoring" with ladies, but it's not entirely clear he's aware of what the word even means and most of the party seems bemused or baffled by his word choice. In the original Japanese version, he uses the term "gyakunan", something he picked up from Shadow Yukiko, who is a woman. It's used specifically to refer to a woman hitting on a man, explaining the group's reactions. Obviously, there was no real way to translate that into English, so the joke was lost.
    • Yosuke's Shadow takes the shape of a cross between a ninja and a large frog. Not only does it tie in with how his Persona is the legendary Jiraiya, a ninja who transforms into a toad, In Japanese, "frog" and "return" are pronounced the same way, tying into Yosuke's desire to leave the boonies of Inaba behind and return to his hometown in the big city. In English, the significance is lost.
    • The Personas used to fuse Izanagi-no-Okami lost some meaning in the English version. In Japanese, the first kana of each of the Personas used in the fusion ^note Izanagi, Sandman, Nata Tashi, Girimehkala, Norn, Okuninushi, Orthrus, Kartikeya, Mithra, Tzitzimitl, Cu Cuhlainn and Legion spell out "Izanagi-no-ookami-tsukure", literally meaning "create Izanagi-no-Okami." This almost barely works in English: the first one or two letters of the first few Personas spell out Isanaginoookami, but the names of the last few Personas simply don't translate, and the meaning is lost, making it harder to see why it's made from Personas with little in common in their level, arcana or origins.
    • The game itself references this In-Universe with the translation job that can be taken: the protagonist gets tripped up on translating a joke, and the player has to decide between rendering it literally or coming up with a new joke. The latter is one of several "risk" choices that can lead to a greater monetary reward, or backfire and result in a lesser yield.
  • Persona 5:
    • An oral double meaning is lost with the name of the protagonist's high school, Shujin Academy: in Japanese, "Shujin" is written with the characters that spell out "people." However, "Shujin" is a homophone that can also translate into "prisoner", tying into the game's themes of being held down by the chains of society. There was, obviously, no way to translate this into English. (Notably, Caroline and Justine, the wardens of the Velvet Room, exclusively refer to Joker as "Shujin" in the Japanese version, which was rendered as "Inmate" for the localization.)
    • When trying to come up with a Code Name for Yusuke, whose phantom thief outfit has fox motifs, Ryuji suggests "Abura-age", which comes off as a complete Non Sequitur to English speakers, although Yusuke's acceptance of such a strange name does fit his Cloudcuckoolander personality. In Japanese, abura-age (fried tofu) is considered the Trademark Favourite Food of foxes.
    • On June 12, Akechi happens to run into Makoto at what looks like a school, even though it's clear from their uniforms that they go to different high schools. Various untranslated signs reveal that the two of them, both in their final year of high school, are taking a mock examination to prepare for college entrance exams, so a player who doesn't know Japanese will likely not get why they encountered each other or why Akechi had to leave (his test was apparently starting).
    • The Teddie/Kuma problem also applies to this game. One of the decorations Joker can obtain is the Kumade, which features Teddie on it. The pun is obviously lost in English.
  • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth:
    • The title is meant to be a play on Sekaiju no Meikyuu ("Q" and "kyuu" are homophones), another Atlus series. Unfortunately, most international fans won't get that, because SnM is known as Etrian Odyssey internationally, so the "Q" can come off as pointless to English-speaking players.
    • While most of Junpei's quirks in the original Persona 3 were Woolsey-ized consistently, one of them wasn't: the pose where he holds his hands up in the air originally had a catch-phrase associated with it. Q references this catch-phrase often, and most of these moments are lost on English speakers.
• The quest boss "The Black Bishop" in World of Warcraft is a reference to chess, and his quotes are references to the bishop chess piece. This comes as a puzzlement to players of the Russian version of the game, who see no connection between his church title (yepiskop, bishop) and the Russian name for the bishop chess piece that he uses in his quotes (slon, elephant).
• Splatoon:
  • One of the two signals in the first Splatoon ended up being this. In American English, it is translated as "C'mon!", but in British English, it is translated as "To me!" The signal is meant to be used when you want other teammates to come to the same spot as you. While "C'mon!" is a direct translation of the Japanese version, Americans are just as often to use it as a phrase to express frustration and anger at an unfavorable situation, which resulted in many American players spamming "C'mon!" when a match is going poorly... which probably confused many a European player, who saw it as spamming "To me!" Splatoon 2 onwards fixes this by changing the wording to "This way!", while giving players an alternative way to express frustration by having "Booyah!" become "Ouch..." after one gets splatted.
  • In-series, this serves as the punny explanation for why Inklings worship a fax machine. The Japanese words for "god" and "paper" are homophones.
  • If it sounds like Pearl and Marina are saying "tentacle" when they say "Stay off the hook!", that's because they are. In most languages, Off the Hook is named "Tentacles", or some other similar "tentacle" pun. Due to the characters speaking in little more than gibberish, the English translation went with a different pun. However, their catchphrase still sounds a bit too close to actual English.
• In Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, after Phoenix and Maya introduce themselves to Layton, he says that their names aren't exactly what he would expect in Labyrinthia. This makes much more sense in the Japanese version, where Phoenix and Maya are from Japan, and have distinctly Japanese names.
• In Resident Evil 4, Leon talks to Hunnigan about the cult he faced, to which Hunnigan tells him that their name is the Los Illuminados and Leon replies that it's "quite a mouthful." Saying the name in English isn't exactly a tongue twister, but it's more difficult to say in Japanese, which makes Leon's quip about the name in the English script seem strange.
• Since there are many puns and cultural jokes in the Mother games, it should be no surprise that several of them simply can't be properly translated. The most pervasive one would be the joke about the alien species known as Mr. Saturn, and how the entire species has the same name. This is because the word for Saturn is also (albeit with different kanji) the same word for "same name." Thus, in Japanese, you can read their name, "Dousei-san," as either "Mr. Saturn" or "Mr. Samename."
  • EarthBound has one strange example regarding the Apple of Enlightenment. In the original Japanese version, it's revealed late in the game to be a machine which tells the future that the bad guys are using - in the English translation, the line explaining this was simply cut for no particular reason, leading English-speaking fans to speculate for years as to what the Apple actually was.
• Story of Seasons:
  • In Harvest Moon Nina has a really odd way of speaking and speaks like a Third-Person Person. This is because the translators had difficulty translating her cutesy Japanese dialogue into English. When she was reintroduced in Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, her dialogue was smoothed out by the new translators.
  • In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life two sets of Punny Names were translated without referencing said puns. The fireworks twins Kesaran and Pasaran have a name that combines to be the name "Keseran pasaran", a white thistledown puffball creature resembling a firework; they were translated to Kassey and Patrick. Meanwhile the large talking plant Takakura has in his cabin that allows hybrids was called Tsurutan; Tsuru means "vine" while -tan is a cutesy diminutive of the Japanese honorific -chan. This was turned into Tartan, which has no relation to the pun. The remake Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life has them now called Charlie, Cole^note charcoal and Vinnie, which more closely preserves the puns.
  • Harvest Moon DS (and its Distaff Counterpart, DS Cute) made it clear that the characters were decendants of their A Wonderful Life counterparts, even though they all looked nearly exact the same and lived in the same places with the same relationships (and in some cases, the same backstories) by giving them different names, since the game was set 100 years in the future. Natsume, for the US and European games, used the exact same names for everyone that they'd been named in A Wonderful Life (or Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town) and only partially removed the decendant subplot in favor of making it more like an Alternate Universe, making it unclear on the surface if it's a remake of the game for the DS or not unless it's played. So you have, say, Gustafa whose ancestor Gustafa lived in the same yurt he does now and was also a musician—and he has the same feelings for Nami, a drifter in town who is Nami's decendant and lives at the same inn.
• As a rule of thumb, many fighting games translated to Spanish using the term "Ranked Match" struggles with this, since there's no valid translation for the term. In Japanese beat'em ups like Street Fighter and The King of Fighters, the term is translated to Partida Igualada/Juego Igualado, translated literally to "Equated Match." The problem here is the fact, especially with SNK games, while playing online, your game will rarely, if ever, will be with a player with the same rank as you, causing lots of frustations for players expecting a truly "equated" match. A better translation would be Partida Clasificada/Juego Clasificado.
• Another recurrent translation hiccup in Spanish, especially in First-Person Shooters, is the translation of the term "Killed" when you kill or are killed by a player. In many games, the term is translated as "Asesinado" (Murdered) and, while the term is technically correct, in Spanish it normally means you murdered a person in Real Life, and is very narmy by itself. A better translation would be "muerto" or "eliminado", depending on the context of the game.
• One of the promotional posters for Tatsujin Ou (lit. "Expert King") has the Tagline "Be a King rather than Expert!" The joke being that the previous game is called simply Tatsujin (lit. "Expert"). The slogan was kept for non-Japanese markets, where the games are called Truxton and Truxton II, thus causing the tagline to not make sense.
• Princess Maker: For Refine, if the audio track is any indication... Where the English says "Sir" or something of that nature to refer to the father, the audio uses "Yuusha", a.k.a "(Brave) Hero", since the father is a national hero, having fought back the Demon King as related in the Opening Narration.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Heroes English manual infamously refers to Doctor Eggman as a "feminist". The English loanword in Japanese means less "advocate for women's rights" and more "womanizer." The translation kept the term, which led to English-speaking gamers finding it rather funny—Eggman may want to Take Over the World, but he draws the line at sexism!
  • Shadow the Hedgehog: As parodied by some fans, in one cutscene, the Commander will say Maria was like a sister to him and the only family he knew, but in a later cutscene, he will yell that because of Shadow, Maria and his family were killed. In the original text, the Commander just says Maria was like a sister to him as he didn't have any siblings.
  • Difficult-to-translate wordplay in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) made many fans think that Blaze remembers Sonic when that wasn't the intention. Silver and Blaze make mention of a "blue hedgehog" more than once. In Japanese, "blue" can refer to color but also be slang for being naive or inexperienced (similar to how "green" has that connotation in English). Silver first uses the term after seeing Sonic's image in Mephiles' Emerald. Blaze, not having looked at it, interprets Silver's words as the second meaning. This is why she exclaims that she needs to find Silver after they get separated — she fears that "naive hedgehog" refers to Silver himself.
  • Sonic Forces: When Tails meets up with Classic Sonic again, he refers to him as "the Hedgehog from another world", using the more figurative meaning of the original Japanese word (sekai). When it was translated into english, it was interpreted literally to become "the Hegehog from another dimension", which lead many to think that Classic Sonic's backstory had been retconned.
• Wizardry features a joke weapon called the "Cuisinart Blade", consisting of the blades portion of a food processor mounted to a handle. When it was released in Japan, where the Cuisinart brand was unfamiliar at the time, supplemental material interpreted it as a powerful sword created by an Ultimate Blacksmith named "Casinatto". Casinatto was also sometimes claimed to be the creator of the Infinity +1 Sword "Murasama" (a misspelling of "Muramasa" in early versions of the game).
• The title of Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky lost its pun in the localization. The Japanese word for "and" is "to", so "Escha and Logy" becomes "Escha to Logy", a play on eschatology, the study of the end of the world, which is a pretty fitting with the game's Post Apocalyptic setting as well as certain plot elements. Players who don't know that much Japanese might notice that the two main characters' names almost form "eschatology" when put together, and wonder where the missing "to" went.
• Cyberpunk 2077:
  • An odd example: If the player romanced Kerry Eurodyne and chooses to call him before the Point of No Return, they can ask him about a new song he's working on. In the original Polish version, he says the title will be "Seamurai Goes Down", referencing the events of the last mission with him, where him and V have sex on a yach they stole from his manager and then promptly sank it (Kerry used to be a member of the band called Samurai, and "Seamurai" was the name of the boat), making the title a Double Entendre. In the English translation, the song's title is instead "Seamurai in Smoke", which loses the dirty pun. It's unclear as to why the title was changed, since it was already in English to begin with.
  • Two last missions in Kerry's questline are called "Czarna Materia" ("Dark Matter") and "Teoria Wielkiego Wybuchu" ("The Big Bang Theory") in Polish. It also ties the first one with a song called "Dark Matter" on Kerry's computer, which foreshadows the events of said mission. In the English version, due to all missions being Titled After the Song, "Czarna Materia" was titled "Off the Leash" (an In-Universe song), and "Teoria (...)" was changed to "Boat Drinks". While an attentive English-language player might connect the dots with the song and "Off the Leash" (it's briefly mentioned that the club this mission takes place in is called Dark Matter), the theme is completely lost with "Boat Drinks".
• The Trails Series' English name is a direct translation of "軌跡" (Kiseki). However, the original Japanese term is a pun on "奇跡," meaning "Miracle," making the English translation technically correct, but missing much of the original connotation. The first game in the series does faintly allude to the double meaning when one of the characters inserts a Title Drop into his song: "Brightly shooting stars, leaving trails in the skies," but English players would miss out on how the characters' talk about miracles is connected to the title. Many fans prefer to call it the "Kiseki" series for this reason.
• Like a Dragon: The series' notorious tendency to claim Kiryu has never killed anybody despite him regularly doing things to enemies that would undoubtedly be fatal is a fair bit less inexplicable in the original Japanese, where the choice of verbage is more along the lines of "I have never committed murder". It's more important a distinction than it sounds, as the original phrasing leaves open the possibility of him being willing to kill in self defense or in defense of others, something that is supported by the gameplay, whereas the phrasing in the English subtitles suggest he has a Thou Shalt Not Kill policy. In Yakuza 5, when he was told that he heard rumors about how he never kills, Kiryu refutes this claim on the spot.
• Takeshi's Challenge has an unofficial English localization (popularized by internet personalities like JonTron) which rather infamously includes a restaurant inexplicably named "Grilled Mormons". This is actually a perfectly accurate, but very literal translation of an otherwise simple joke — in Japanese, "horumon" is a type of cuisine made out of beef or pork offal, with the original Japanese version of the game changing the "h" to an "m" to read "morumon", or "Mormon". It's effectively the same play on words as naming a hot dog stand a rot dog stand, and no actual ill intent towards Mormons were intended (that we know of).
• Large portions of the original SNES release of Breath of Fire II were mistranslated, with bizarre and confusing results. Characters apparently growl in their sleep instead of snoring. A uvula is misidentified as an Adam's apple, and boars are referred to as bears. An important hint near the end of the game incorrectly directs the player to the town of HomeTown rather than the town south of HomeTown. The game even manages to get "yes" and "no" backwards due to slight nuance differences between those English words and the Japanese "hai" and "iie" which the localizers didn't factor in. One puzzle is based on the colors of the buttons on the Super Famicom controller, but those buttons have different colors on the American SNES. The GBA remake is less infamous, but not much better.
• The Bonk franchise is notable for this: in Japanese, Bonk is known as PC Genjin, being a pun on his console of origin, the PC Engine^note Hudson Soft assisted NEC with its development, and the first Bonk was its Killer App, and the Japanese word for "caveman" (genjin). As the console was known as the TurboGrafx-16 internationally, a name change was necessary, which made preserving the original joke impossible. Air Zonk is a similar case, where Zonk, Bonk's robot equivalent, is known as PC Denjin in Japanese (denjin meaning "electric man").
• Being a franchise that relies heavely on Hurricane of Puns, Plants vs. Zombies suffers greatly from this, as several Punny Names don't work in several languages and require severe Woolseyism which sometimes removes those puns. Sure, some puns can still work in other languages like Sunflower, Coffee Bean or Hot Potato, but others like Wall-nut, Squash, Imitater, Cattail, Toadstool or Thyme Warp don't.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
  • During the World of Light campaign, you eventually come across the spirit of Andross, who is represented by Ganondorf in battle. The connection makes more sense in Japanese, where the former is named "Andorf".
  • Players familiar with the English versions of the game might be confused as to why Banjo and Kazooie's home stage, Spiral Mountain, rotates the way it does. As it turns out, this is because the area's Japanese name is クルクル山 (Kurukuru Yama), which can translate as either "Coiling Mountain" or "Spinning Mountain" depending on the context.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV:
  • While Flynn, Walter, and Jonathan are all valid names, they're also callbacks to the Hero, Chaos Hero, and Law Hero of Shin Megami Tensei I, who in some versions were given the names Futsuo (Ordinary Man), Waruo (Bad Man), and Yoshio (Good Man). The callback is only visible in Japanese, where the protagonists are Furin, Waruta, and Yonatan.
• In the Crash Bandicoot franchise, anytime there is a pun on Crash's name and the verb "crash" (e.g. Crash Bandicoot 2 levels like "Air Crash" or "Cold Hard Crash") will have this effect in other languages.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • The living eggplant Nasu Grave's Character Catchphrase is "otankonasu," which essentially means "fool" but also incorporates nasu, the Japanese word for "eggplant." The English version of the first arcade game simply translates it as "moron," losing the double meaning.
  • Most of Arle's spells are taken from Madou Monogatari, the series Puyo Puyo spun off from. One of them, "Diacute," originally doubled attacks' damage, with its name implicitly combining "di-" (as in double) and "acute." Puyo Pop Fever doesn't get this meaning across, instead translating it as "Diamond Cutie."
  • The final spells for both Sig and Possessed Klug are named "Hydrangea." This has some minor plot significance, subtly hinting that the two characters are connected.^SpoilersPuyo Puyo Fever 2 indicates that the demon possessing Klug had part of his soul sealed away long ago, with the other half becoming Sig's ancestor. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2's English translation muddles the connection: the former's last spell was changed to "Cobalt" while the latter's stays the same.

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