A look at Lufia 2
Part 1: Tlansration - Location Edition


The 8 and 16 bit eras were a rather unique time in terms of game translation. Cartridge limitations and lack of staff led to some real gems being produced. Honestly, I think that part of the charm is the wonky translation.

So let's look at some of that charm that's just oozing out of Lufia 2, shall we? i'm using the NA version unless otherwise stated.

The ROM I'm currently using has the Fixxxer Deluxe patch by Relnqshd applied. So some issues are already taken care of. You can get that patch here This is different from the Frue Lufia patch by Artemis. That patch is an upgrade that retains all of the fixes from the Fixxxer Deluxe patch. I haven't tried that one yet. I decided to download an unpatched ROM and some save states so that I can get the full monty here. Of course none of this stuff is new. I'm just bringing it to you through my lens. :P

The screenshots used for comparison are from clean, unpatched ROMs of the North American and Japanese versions of the game. When those versions are used it is noted as such. And yes I cheated to get the screenshots faster and easier. XD

If you are interested, there's a whole mess of nice codes right here This is different from the here. I used the following for starting game Maxim to solo his way around the map unhindered:

Walk through walls (world map only): 6D21-44AE & 6D8F-176E *make sure to enter those separately*
No random battles on world map: 7E11E300


Before I go on about the town names being wrong, take a look at the description text for the warp screen itself.

PLACE WHERE YOU WANT TO MOVE TO
Sounds like somebody literally the literally here. It's very awkward wording. But there's a lit of that in this game anyway. Something as simple as "Choose a location", a simple "Where to?" or even a "Warp" would have fit much better. Maybe someone stuck this awkward descriptor here because they were unsure of how this should be translated. I'm not the least bit surprised it wasn't polished later.

Anywaiz, here's how Parcelyte and Karlloon appear on the warp list. These two little mistakes just never got caught. However, when entering these places the spellings are correct.

Even Parcelyte Castle, which you can't directly warp to anyway, has the correct spelling. Now Percelyte is an understandable typo. The "e" isn't that far from the "a". Think frue here. But what about Caron?

I decided to check the Japanese ROM by traveling to Parcelyte and Karlloon using the walk through walls on the world map code for that version (DDC8-4DE0). I don't have a no random battles code for the Japanese version. And my game was fresh. The workaround is to enter and exit the menu every few steps. Annoying. But it works.


Paseraito

Caron

Paseraito makes total sense here. It is what it is. Honestly, with the way this translation goes I'm surprised that we didn't get Parceryte, Palceryte, Palcelyte ect...

I'm not sure if the name Parcelyte is totally made up or if it's a reference to the Parsi or Parsi people or just Persia in general. That's the only thing I can really think of. It probably doesn't matter anyway. I'm just speculating.

On to Caron. That's an interesting one because the English warp list transliterates the Japanese name completely. Yet the English name for the town is Karlloon. And given that it's such a fancy sounding name I'm going to say that was the intended spelling for the translation.

The next two sets of location name blunders are not due to simple mistranslaion but a coding error that occurred during translation.

This is the cave where you get the Red Fish Capsule Monster.


Original North American retail version.

Fixed with the Fixxxer Deluxe patch.


And this is the entrance to Gratze Kingdom.


Original North American retail version.

Fixed with the Fixxxer Deluxe patch.

The 3y Kingdom. Not to be confused with the 3M Kingdom. The kingdom of Scotch Tape! XD

So, what's going on here?

Well The Cutting Room Floor can explain it better than I can.

A couple of map names are not decompressed correctly and appear as gibberish.

The most well-known instance of this are the U e MoV T Cave, a series of undersea caves in the northeast part of the world, which contain a few chests and one of the capsule monsters. If decompressed correctly, the name is Capsule Monsters Cave (the missing grave accent applies to this map name, too.)

Another instance is any map name using the word Gratze, other than Gratze Sth. Submarine Cave, which will display as '3y instead.


In other words, they screwed up. This translation certainly is.... Something. o.o

You couldn’t get away with that today without a ton of internet backlash about how awful the job was. But when the translation came stateside in 1996 the internet barely existed. And it’s not like they could patch it out. Things are so different now. But back then it was par for the course. You laughed at the blunder and hoped that there was nothing too severely game breaking in there.

There's another, less wonky location text display issue concerning Kamirno Isl. Sealed Tower and Strahda Isl. Sealed Tower. Let's take a look.


Notice something is missing? You might not think much of it. Owing it to a very weird decision in text truncating necessity. But that's not what's going on here because Shuman Isl. Sealed Tower doesn't suffer from the same issue. And it's not because Shuman is a shorter word than Kamirno and Strahda.


As you can see, "Tower" isn't missing it's "r". So what happened here? Let's refer to our good friend The Cutting Room Floor once again.

Strahda and Kamirno towers don't display the r in Tower due to a simple error: the translators specified 5 bytes/letters to copy for the word "Tower" while decompressing the map name, forgetting that the preceding space character is copied, too.

I guess this was either missed while checking for errors or not deemed important enough to bother fixing. After all, it's not a game breaking bug. It's just a missing letter. And this game had far worse problems. We're lucky the translation didn't completely break the game. XD

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