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Strange Video Game Translations: Rygar — 8 Comments

  1. I really enjoyed this article and the previous VGTTs, especially since you’ve covered some of my all time favorite games! (In my opinion the best game of all time being Metroid. A very close 2nd would be Perfect Dark.)
    I’ve probably grown to liking Rygar more as time passes, no doubt because I’m not trying to beat it anymore… It is freakin’ hard but got some of the best video game music ever, behold all ye’ non believers:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gmxEGmA_3A
    Me and my brother used to have fun by trying to identify what some of the in game graphics were actually supposed to resemble. He’s throwing a big snail? And don’t get me started on the bird’s eye perspective stages.
    What did they call his weapon in Japanese? 炎の丸?

      • Thanks for the link! I found out, thanks to wiki and some searching, that the main weapon is
        ディスカーマ (Disk-armour)

        主人公が使用する武器。ヨーヨーのような動作をする。 (Hehe I knew it was a yo-yo all along.)
        I’ll definitely buy it the next time I’m in Japan. The game that is..

  2. Nice one! Never played this game before.

    “The” vs. “This”, although they indeed could’ve gone for “This”, since the actual object it refers to appears on screen, in the end it’s the same. It’s frequent to do things like that when translating a game. It can be for consistency or just preferential.

    The “tone” and other mistranslations are pretty bad! Not sure what they were going for here…
    However, just look at the available space they had to fit the translation! 4 characters, that’s all you’ll get, mate. This is sadly very frequent. The developer doesn’t think (or care) about the other languages the game will be localised into, and they can’t give more space without re-writing the code, so most of the time they won’t.
    So in this sense, I think “MIND” is not that bad, although “WILL” would have also fit.

    Those are excuses if it had been done by a good translator, but clearly that’s not the case here :)

    • That is true. I guess I was being picky on “this” vs. “the” because it is inconsistent throughout some of the other screens I didn’t show in this post.

      Very interesting point about the spacing. I never considered that spacing restrictions limited what words translators could use.

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