15 Embarrassing Translation Fails in Video Games
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Published 4 years ago in Funny
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“Victoly!” (Samurai Showdown) Sometimes a mistranslation is funny because they screwed up something simple, other times it's just because it gets repeated. Samurai Showdown does both by frequently spelling “Victory” as “Victoly.” Unless of course the font designer just forgot to make an 'R,' in which case someone still probably got fired.
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“Your fists of evil are about to meet my steel wall of niceness.” (Fatal Fury Special) The fighting game genre is a treasure trove of weird and hilarious mistranslations (and weird in jokes like Mortal Kombat's "toasty!"). We’re particularly fond of this garbled set of metaphors from Fatal Fury Special, which sound like a bad fortune cookie.
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“A year has passed since Bimmy and Jimmy defeated the Shadow Warriors.” (Double Dragon III) If we’re being honest, later Double Dragon games didn’t have much to offer the franchise. Double Dragon III, however, had hilarious mistranslations, including one that gave the protagonist Billy a different name. According to U.S. census data, one in five kids in the '90s were actually named Bimmy, if you can believe that.
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“And proved the justice of our culture.” (Ghostbusters) Believe it or not, some people actually beat that terrible Ghostbusters video game on the NES. I don’t know what’s worse: the quality of this translation or the audacity to charge people money to play something that was written by a drunk guy.
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Resident Evil: "Revelaitons" It may seem mean spirited to cherry pick a funny mistranslation or two from games with so many lines of dialogue. But what if a mistranslation is the first thing a gamer sees? Whoever was in charge of quality control at Nintendo when they released this for the DS can't be working there anymore.
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“Congraturation! This story is Happy End! Thank You.” (Ghosts ‘N Goblins) There are people who beat Ghosts ‘N Goblins, and we can only assume they had either infinite patience or infinite quarters. But even winners feel like losers when they see a translation like this one here. This story is NOT happy end.
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“Shine Get” (Super Mario Sunshine) Thanks to its Nintendo Switch re-release, a new generation of gamers get to enjoy this mistranslation from Super Mario Sunshine. I like to think this is how Mario really talks and his other lines must be like “mushroom get," “princess get," and "your pipes I fix."
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“Welcome to die!” (X-Men) The only thing that can make a mistranslation funnier is hearing it out loud. That's what happened with the X-Men arcade game, which proudly blurted out insane lines such as “welcome to die.” It's not worse than a lot of comic book dialogue, and when you think about it, it sounds a little badass.