The localization of Samurai Shodown
THE LOCALIZATION OF
The localization of Samurai Shodown
The year 1993 saw the debut of Samurai Spirits as it was known in Japan, or Samurai Shodown, as we knew it in the rest of the world, a saga that would continue to gain popularity over time and would fall, like so many others, in the so-called era of 3D games, although it would return with more force in 2019 with a complete reboot for the new generation of consoles and taking into account the features of the modern audience.
The original idea of SNK, in those days, was to bring to the arcades one more fighting game but with a variant that differentiated it from almost all those that were already on the market; for that it gave all the fighters some kind of weapon, which made the combat revolve around this element, even in the way of attacking or defending and in how this affected the fighters' energy bar.
Behind the development of the game there were several well-known names within the team of SNK who had already worked on titles such as Fatal Fury or Art of Fighting and who were joined by former employees of another giant of the fighting genre: Capcom.
Following the trend of originality, SNK decided to move away from the modern street struggle that seemed to conquer everything since the appearance of Street Fighter 2 and take its new product to feudal Japan thus proposing a story different from the standard of those days.
A bit of history
Samurai Shodown presents 12 fighters from different parts of the world that for different reasons must face Shiro Tokisada Amakusa a being that after being killed by the forces of the Tokugawa Shogunate is reborn thanks to a deal he made with the god Ambrosia.
Name change
The American distributor of SNK was not convinced that the name "Samurai Spirits" managed to convey the essence of the game in the western territories, or even establish that it was a fighting game, so they opted for an interesting word: "shodown", which could well be considered a transcreation ahead of its time.The term mixed the English word "showdown" with the Japanese "shogun" since in those days there was a TV miniseries with that name that had acquired a lot of popularity among young people in several countries.
The dreaded location
After leaving Japanese lands, Samurai Spirits became Samurai Shodown, but that was not all, reaching the European market meant bringing the game to other languages, including Spanish.
Although it was quite a milestone that at that time video games reached a language other than English and Japanese, the quality of SNK's translations was far from being even tolerable.
The problems are not limited to typing errors as in the case of one of Ukye Tachibana's cinematics in which the word " herida" has another "r" or the absence of the same letter in one of Jubei Tagyu's sentences in "seas" along with another missing "U" in the word "discípulo" in the same sentence but in many cases they are an absolute nonsense.
In this publication there is a wide variety of examples to select a favorite, although if I have to choose, I would say that " No evitaras mi espada a la manera del texto" has a very high place on the podium of this terrible translation.
Softened language
Samurai Shodown had versions on almost all consoles of the time, including Sega and Nintendo hardware. Beyond the limitations that occurred in the ports of the title given the technical characteristics of the home consoles of the time and the technical portent that were the SNK boards and even the Neo-Geo, the Super Nintendo edition contains some linguistic retouching compared to its counterpart of the arcades that sought to soften the final messages and adapt them to an audience that was believed too childish to read certain things.
This is how, for example, one of Nakoruru's lines of dialogue originally reads "Scourge to the ainu. Prepare to die" and in the SNES version it reads"Scourge to the ainu. Prepare your fall”On the other hand, Kyoshiro spits to his rival in the original version: "Now in this scene I rip open your belly" something that in Nintendo's home version ended up being "Now in this scene you cry like a baby".
On top of the violence omitted in the text, expressions that could be classified as insults were also changed, for example, in one of Amakusa's cinematics, the original version said: "l awake from 100 years of sleep to kick butt" something that was changed to "l awake from 100years (sic) of sleep to wreak havoc".
