/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9450459
Bad translation

>>9450459
Does he really cut your magic by half? It never felt like it effected anything when I was a kid.

It's a joke. He's saying he's going to halve your magic capacity but accidentally halves your magic requirement, effectively doubling your magic capacity. He's incompetent at being evil.

>>9450470
are you really this retarded? they even repeated the same joke in Link's Awakening

>>9450463
What's the good translation then?

>>9450478
I haven't played the game since I was 10 so I don't remember. Also yes I am retarded.

>>9450459
He's mad and a bat, a Mad Batter.

>>9450472

Thank you for reassuring me that I remembered it correctly. I haven't played this game since childhood and those retarded anons above were making me feel as if I myself may have been the real retard

I don't think that image is wide enough is it? That might even be the problem behind this character's behavior. A lot of old games become glitchy if you play them on displays that are not extremely wide. You should probably stretch the screen image horizontally at least 50% more than that, the dialogue will most likely change

>>9450489
The entire joke in the original is that the phrasings he uses are ones that, if read incredibly literally, have the opposite meaning of what they actually have... except that he DOES actually use them in the literal sense. It doesn't really translate very well.

>>9450459
Paper mario had the same "joke" but it was better executed. Why does Nintendo like this trope so much? Is it a Japanese thing?

>>9450937
I'm pretty sure "Villianous charcter accidentally/unknowingly helps out the hero" is a well known trope world-wide.

>>9450472
He's not evil, he's supposed to just kinda sound like he's evil if you misinterpret his words and don't take him literally. The translation fucks up and ACTUALLY makes him evil, which is the problem.

>>9450956
The translation has him asking politely if you're ready to be cursed. Seems less "evil" and more "insane".

>>9450960
It's still wrong. In the original he just says a bunch of phrases like "serves you right" and "you dare to..." that SOUND threatening, even though there's nothing in them that LITERALLY makes them threatening.

You dared to wake him up, and he appreciates that, so he rewards you. Now your magic power will drop by one half. Serves you right for doing what you did to him.

The above sounds like a mix of sarcasm and mentions of punishment, even though it doesn't literally say so. THAT's the actual joke.

>>9450956
If so, I'd have probably localized him to sounding as shady as possible. Like "Oh, so you were brave enough to try waking me from my slumber, were you? Then you better be ready to accept your 'reward'... heh heh heh!" or something along those line.

>>9450459
You just woke him up.
I would certainly do something out of anger if someone woke me up from a good sleep.

>>9450986
Yeah, that's much better. Probably drop the quotation marks from "reward" too.

>>9450976
I'm having trouble thinking of a way to phrase dropping your magic power by half that would be suitably ambiguous. The end result is certainly not half your magic "power." Its half the magic cost.

>>9450986
Yeah like a card shark who has all the trappings of a cheat but turns out to be completely legitimate.

>>9450992
That line is actually translated pretty well. In nip it's "kore de ima made no nibunnoichi shika mahou wa heran zo!"

>>9450991
>Probably drop the quotation marks from "reward" too
"Ready to get what's coming to you" might work better.

>>9450992
"Magic power" is just the content of your magic meter, the ambiguity is in the word "now".

It sounds like he's saying "right now, at this instant, your magic power will drop by one half", but he's actually saying "from here on, your magic power will drop by one half of what it used to every time you cast a spell".

>>9450937
>>9450950
Villianous charcter men that are incompetent like this are very cute and should be cuddled.

>>9450992
"Heh heh heh! Let's see how easy your life is now that you've got half magic!"

>>9451016
According to this thread, at least the Zelda 3 guy isn't actually villainous, he's just so bad with his words he comes across that way.

>>9451024
Well that too

>>9451024
I think the Paper Mario ones are also supposed to be heroic characters, they've been cursed to deliver curses onto others, but they really don't want to and find creative ways to curse Mario with curses that seem like curses but are actually super helpful to him.

>>9451447
This. By the time you meet the last one, he's bummed out because Mario already knows his "curse" is going to be anything but, but Mario lets him put on his big-and-scary act so he can feel better.

>>9450916
Post the original japanese text, I will translate it.

>>9450470
It cuts magic consumption in half. Finding him essentially doubles the amount of magic you can use. It's an upgrade.

>>9451000
Ah there it is. And this line before it.
The joke is that he's speaking honestly but his manner of speech makes it sound like he's being aggressive/sarcastic.

>>9450960
>asking politely if you're ready to be cursed

>autist nitpicking a fine translation because they're N5
Every time

>>9451751
It actually isn't though. The original Japanese leaves the clue embedded in the message. It tells you exactly what you're getting-- as long as you don't skim it and blind yourself with the tone of the text. It reveals the key in the character's first line of dialogue, seen here >>9451513
It's like a little puzzle presented and concluded entirely through a few lines of text, packaged in a nice bow for the player to unwrap.

The English translation stumbles with this and simply ends up with what seems like a mistake, at best incompetence on the part of the character, at worst a bug by the programmers. The description of what's about to happen to you doesn't match the results, to a degree that notably left many players scratching their heads and wondering, "Huh?"

>>9451501
If you still need it:

Nip text followed by the official English translation, which misses the mark pretty badly:

>やい、よくも長いネムリからめざめさせてくれたなっ! …どうもありがとう。
Hey! Blast you for waking me from my deep, dark sleep! ...I mean, thanks a lot, sir!
>やい、こうなったらおれいをしてやるからカクゴしろ。 …よろしいですか?
But now I will get my revenge on you. Get ready for it! ...Err, is that OK with you, sir?
>ククク、ざまあみろ! これで今までの2ぶんの1しか魔法はへらんぞ…、よかったですね。
Heh heh heh! I laugh at your misfortune! Now your magic power will drop by one half!
>では、せいぜいがんばりやがれ ごきげんようさようなら〜
Congratulations! Now, do your best, even though I'm sure it won't be enough! Have a nice day! See you!

>>9451751
The fact that this thread exists at all is kinda evidence it wasn't a fine translation.

>>9452082

Hmm okay yeah that's kind of messed up in English. It veers around but ultimately presents the creature as a hostile yet whimsical minor villain with limited confidence who does want to harm you but isn't competent enough to do it right. I don't think it's very ambiguous about that though. "Blast you" and "I will get my revenge" and "I laugh at your misfortune" are too negative to be taken positively; they pin the speech down as a hostile one, even if there are other bits of it that sound potentially friendly.

Still, it should be clearer. Also, although I like the (apparently semi-accidental??) joke of the character being so clumsy that its curse actually helps you, I don't think it fits with the rest of the game. It implies that Link only benefited because he was lucky enough to disturb a weak, incompetent curse-monster instead of a strong, skillful one - it suggests that there might be other perils around that could destroy Link at random and thereby doom Hyrule, and that only random chance is protecting you from them. That's depressing. It would fit into a horror story or a dark comedy, but it doesn't fit a Zelda story. Link is the fated hero and he isn't supposed to be capable of failing so easily because of random hidden horrors.

ALSO also, it always bothered me that this overpowered "curse" would make the game even easier at a time when I was already finding it to be much too easy. But that's a separate type of problem.