Bewitching games since 1999.
Harvest Moon: Lost in Translation
There are hardly any gamers out there who didn’t play games made in Japan. It’s often said that these games are best enjoyed in original, but those of us mortals who can’t tell hiragana from katakana have to rely on the ‘inferior’ localized English version. I’m not sure how good or bad they are in general, but the occasional mistakes can result in a hilarious outcome.
Take for example the game Tree of Tranquility from the popular Harvest Moon series. If you play the female protagonist, at one point a hunky guy professes his love to you in the following letter:
Wednesday,top of the tree,dynamite.
Erm… okay dude. But before we write this up as yet another quirky cultural thing that we could never understand, let’s look at the original Japanese:
Suiyobi
Ki no ue de
Dainamaito
Reading the bolded parts together gives Suki da = “I love you”, which makes more sense – a play with words that was butchered by the verbatim translation. It would’ve been much better if the translators were a bit more creative and gave us a similar wordplay in English instead (I… Lo… Ve… You…. – any ideas for this? Let me know in the comments.)
Take-home message: just because it’s in the game, it doesn’t mean we need to take it as correct. 
This is best demonstrated with pandas. Normally they’re very slow, but place a tulip garden next to them, and once they become hungry, they run towards the garden faster than a fox could say ‘wow’. Now replace the tulip garden with the more expensive roses, and watch what happens next time the panda becomes hungry: it will slouch towards the roses with the same slow speed it uses for working. Picky pandas!
With the release of 