Resolving a Translation Mystery - Castlevania II : Simon’s Quest
If you got the chance to read our previous article, you already know that game localization used to be a pretty amateurish business, back to the NES days.
Most of developers/editors had to face translation problems, including the likes of Nintendo and Konami.
Let’s see how an “awkward” translation made Castlevania II : Simon’s Quest an even harder game than its Japanese version (released only on FDS - Dracula II: Noroi no Fūin).
This episode of Castlevania is probably the hardest one and the most controversial in the whole series. Without going too much into detail, the game was widely criticized for its lack of explanations and hints. The most famous example is when you have to kneel down in front of a wall, having equipped a certain crystal and then wait for a couple of seconds that a tornado takes you to another place. There is apparently no place in the game where you are told/hinted to do so, which means you had to use a walkthrough if you wanted to beat the game.
Some suggested that a hint was given in the Japanese version of the game but somehow got lost in translation. We checked it out by ourselves, and here is our report.
First of all, we checked reviews and comments to see if anyone “extracted” the sentence that should have given a hint on what to do. Gamespot mentioned the following sentence: “hit Deborah Cliff with your head to make a hole”, from a NPC in the town of Aldra.
After checking the Japanese version of the game, we could find the former sentence, which is : “デボラノガケヲ ズツキデ キリヒラケ スルト オオキナ アナガ アク”.
Its meaning is actually pretty close to the English one. It literally says you should give that wall a headbutt (this is the exact word used) and make a big hole. It’s not like the text is ambiguous, there is just no way this can be understood as “Kneel down and show the red crystal”.
It was also confirmed by Koji Igarashi that villagers in the game were deliberate liars, so it seems this part of the translation was not that bad -the lie is intact-, or at least it’s not the one that drove a lot of gamers crazy.
Anyway, we didn’t give up and instead tried to find other references to that “Deborah Cliff”. And guess what: we found one, in a book! In Brahm’s Mansion to be exact. Here is a screenshot of the place where you will find this book, after using some holy water.
When you find this book in the Japanese version of the game, it reads: “デボラノガケノ マエデ アカスイショウヲ カカゲ カゼヲマテ “
which could be translated as “Show/present the red crystal in front of Deborah’s cliff and wait for the wind”. Fairly explicit, as you can see.
Now let’s see how that hint was lost in the English version. The book reads as follow:
“Wait for a soul with a red crystal on Deborah Cliff”. It could be understood as something like “Climb up the cliff and wait for someone who carries a red crystal”, which doesn’t make much sense in the game. This is why most of gamers didn’t understand what to do, got lost and often gave up.
Well, it looks like we solved our mystery! Castlevania II in its English version was indeed made harder, virtually impossible to beat because of its approximative translation, and we found the exact place in the game where the hint was lost. Now you know what you’ve got to do!
By Anthony Teixeira  Tweet This Post
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under Deutsch, Game Localization by AGM, Localisation de jeux vidéo, Localizzazione di video giochi, Traducción y localización de videojuegos, Uncategorized.
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