Glitches & Other Fun Errors

One thing Natsume is known for, in addition to having some pretty fun games, is the fact that there are inevitable localization errors. While CIMA is hardly the game with the highest error count among their library (some say the award goes to Lufia: The Legend Returns but others have said it's one of the Harvest Moon games), there are still some entertaining ones left around. Not only that, but it seems a few programming errors are in as well. None of these make the game unplayable by any means, but spotting them is worth a few laughs.

This list has been divided into two sections. The first is general glitches that happen or interesting coding errors. Second is real translation mishaps.


~*Glitches*~

In Beginning World, most characters have five Talk Sessions: Floor 1 going down, Floor 2 going down, Floor 3-post Jester and Pike battle, Floor 2 going up and Floor 1 before the separation. However, Diana's coding works a little differently and she only has three sessions: Floor 1, Floor 2, Floor 3. In this case, her Floor 1 and 2 conversations from when you're going down are the same as her Floor 1 and 2 conversations when you're going up. Note that she's not the only case of this; here are others that I've found...
Also in Beginning World, Emmy, Eberle and Doug say the same things on both versions of Floor 1, while Yurald and Claude only have one item to talk about on Floor 2.
Ivy starts to speak twice in Dragon's Dungeon (before Emmy's story scene on Floor 3 and after the boss) where no one else has anything, but when Vanrose and the kids get the chance to speak up later on the same floors, she just repeats what she said before.
Once you switch control from Ivy to Ark in Weakling Forest, the Talk Sessions on the floor where the Teleport Trap was are the same as the ones spoken on the next floor.

There seems to be an error with Emmy's coding regarding her 100 Trust Conversation. Normally, I cannot get her to come out alongside the rest of the team to give her lines. Further experimentation makes it seem I need to both see all her previous conversations, and not to allow anyone other than her family members to come out at the same time; it also works if she comes out alone.
On a side note, this has never happened when I'm playing Frontier Stories, so the error might have been found and squashed.

Color pallet swapping sometimes occurs between characters. It won't screw your game up any, but it's pretty funny when your Doug has suddenly acquired Diana's pink hair, or Halley's turns blond to an extent where he could play Super Saiyan Gohan in the live action DBZ movie.

If you go to the Talk Menu during the Rescue Ivy & Emmy segment in Dragon's Dungeon, the girls will vanish from the screen. To see them again, just use the R button to open the movement menu and send them off. Not a big deal, though I did freak out the first time it happened.

After killing the Dragon at the end of Dragon's Dungeon, if it was gearing up to use its firebreath attack when you landed the final blow, the room will keep the reddish tint that accompanies the attack.

It may not be a glitch, though it's an interesting story error. Though the Japanese version has a Talk session both before and after you rescue Doug in Panic Factory, the English version only has one after. In the English case, Ivy, Vanrose and Halley's lines sound like they still need to rescue Doug, and while I can't exactly read a lot of Japanese, some Katakana hints suggests Emmy's English line is closer to her post-rescue one (as she says Doug's name in both the English conversation and second Japanese talk). Oh, and Doug didn't talk before in the Japanese version, so his line would definitely come from the second conversation as well.


~*Translation Silliness*~

The most common error is, of course, due to misspelled words. While some do stick out and are pretty noticeable, I manage to not see most of them unless I know to specifically check that line of text. Part of me thinks it has to do with how our brains are wired; I remember taking this test once where I read a paragraph with a ton of misspelled words, and because the first and last part of those words were spelled correctly, my brain apparently registered them as the intended word.

As stated in the individual Character sections, some of the ages in the instruction manual are off. Vanrose is 31 in the Blue Creek's Character books, but 32 in the manual. At the same time, Rick and Diana go from being 28 and 26 to 24 and 21. Out of the three, Diana's manual age is the only one to match up with her Japanese age, so that's probably not where the error came in. As to which ones are correct, I go with the game since it's not the first time any company has had errors within their manuals.

In the English version of the game, after you enter Dragon's Dungeon proper, Ivy says, "Emmy looks like she could fall any moment..." Note that Emmy won't be seen until another floor. Her Japanese text, according to my translation experiments, seems to suggest Ivy's asking if she's hanging on (thus somehow becoming falling, as it's related to one meaning of hanging on).

In Lonely Factory, after rescuing Doug and Ileyda, the former asks the later what happened and where Falcken ran off to. However, Ark responds with the line "Eberle saved you, dear." which was clearly supposed to be Ileyda's. What I think happened is that the script writers wrote the line in for Ileyda, however the programmers had already decided Ark was going to answer instead and didn't bother to proofread to see if it was feasible for him to say it.
Note, that in the Japanese version, the line is "エバリーさんのおかげですよ。 [Eberle-san no Okage desu yo.]" which basically boils down to Ark saying that Doug should thank Eberle (Okage is a way of saying thanks, but I dunno exactly what context you'd use that over Arigato, the word I learned in Japanese class for Thanks).