LemmaEOF

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Hey! I'm Lemma, and I'm a chubby queer robot VTuber who both makes and plays games on stream! I also occasionally write short stories and tinker with other projects, so keep an eye out! See you around~

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ticky
@ticky

You may be familiar, even if merely by reputation, with Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), a colossal disaster of a game which has been much dissected over the years.

If you're not familiar, you may have missed the true champion of Sonic 2006, Middle-aged Man:

A man in a grey shirt and black, backwards baseball cap says "I've combined happy and lucky into one word! Luppy!"


This man has some degree of notoriety as a pure distillation of the baffling state of the game. Sure, the Havok-powered physics they were all too eager to implement are janky and seemingly bring the game's performance level to unreasonable depths. Certainly, the level designs are unpolished, and the gimmicks feel rushed. Yes, the story kind of strings things together but not in a way that feels ultimately satisfactory.

But here, in the town of Soleanna, we have Middle-aged Man. And he is not interested in the struggles against existential threats to the very world he lives on. He is thinking about language. He is experimenting.

For my part, I always sort of gave this guy the benefit of the doubt. Surely, I thought to myself, surely this is just an awkward translation. Surely in Japanese this guy is making a better, clearer joke. Surely this is just the localisers trying their best. It can't be helped.

Later in the game, he does it again. Not content to merge two existing English words, he's now merging the word he made up with itself. "Luppyluppy" is born.

A man in a grey shirt and black, backwards baseball cap says "I've combined luppy and luppy into one word! Luppyluppy!"

Maddening. Once more Middle-aged Man has confounded us. This sentence surely cannot be any more than a localiser struggling and giving up with whatever fit. Right?

Well, after wondering for this long I finally decided to look into it.

I have some bad news.

A man in a grey shirt and black, backwards baseball cap says "「ラッキー」と「ハッピー」 を合わせて、「ラッピー」!", or, "'Happy' and 'lucky' combine to make 'luppy'!"

There it is, 「ラッピー」 is real. Luppyluppy is likewise directly brought over from the Japanese version:

A man in a grey shirt and black, backwards baseball cap says "「ラッピー」と「ラッピー」 を合わせて、「ラッピラッピー」!", or, "'Luppy' and 'luppy' combine to make 'luppyluppy'!"

this picture was much harder to find, shoutout to @dog for getting the goods 💜

The Japanese version doesn't have some secret better joke. This is about as close to a literal translation as you can get. Luppy, 「ラッピー」 is exactly what the original writers intended. As is luppyluppy, or 「ラッピラッピー」.



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in reply to @ticky's post:

"The Japanese version doesn't have some secret better joke."

It might? This could be me reading too much into a joke, but chopping up English words to create slang words is kinda common in Japanese. Cosplay is an easy example to point to, but there's also words like kansuto (counter stop) and jioburo (region blocking). Back to Sonic 06, luppy fits the pattern in a comical way, but luppyluppy doesn't. Sure, doubling up a word is a thing in Japanese, but it only happens under very specific conditions, and luppyluppy doesn't fit them. So the way I see it, there are two possibilities for how to interpret this:

  1. The rule of escalation: the first dialogue sets up something comical but within reason, and the second exaggerates that beyond what's reasonable for comedic effect.
  2. Between how strange luppyluppy sounds, the total lack of any use case for it, and its inventor being a dumpy-looking middle age man, this could be some Sega writer's way of making fun of people in Japan who make trendy new slang words by mashing English words together.

Yeah, I definitely see the case for number 2. To be clear I meant more, was this mashing up two native Japanese words which went together better, which it clearly isn't, the joke is the same in both languages, and to me as an English speaker it comes across as maybe-borderline-droll but not clearly aiming for that.

as someone who knows a fair bit of Japanese and their love of English loanwords i pretty much figured this bit was identical in the original Japanese

it helps that in Japanese, "happy" and "lucky" have slightly more assonance than they do in English - you might notice that they're each written with four characters, and two are identical (the sokuon, which repeats the following consonant, and the cho'on, which extends the preceding vowel); they even share the same vowels

now here's a genuine mindblower for you: the weird unhelpful NPC dialogue in Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest is also not the product of poor translation, but actually how the original Japanese reads as well!

i wonder if this is supposed to be an attempt to come up with an explanation for the name "rappy", the long-running phantasy star mascot. they are both sega properties and yuji naka had just worked on phantasy star online. this doesn't really help explain "rappyrappy" at all though.

also, the fact that yuji naka worked on both this game and balan wonderworld is truly astonishing.

holy crap me spotted!!!!!!!! i had always figured it was some insane linguistics joke lmfao...i should have expected this from the localization team that got eggman in SA2 literally saying "yosh!!!" every three seconds

My first thought upon seeing the katakana is that it's a reference to Rappy, the cute yellow birdlike creatures from Sonic Team's Phantasy Star Online. I don't know why he would say "Rappyrappy" in his second piece of dialogue, though.