I've been going through the Dragon Warrior games. I grew up with the first one and loved it, but never got around to any of the sequels; I remember playing about two hours of Dragon Warrior 7 and about two thirds of Dragon Quest 8, which I wasn't hating, but holy shit it was too long. I just wrapped up Dragon Warrior III last night, which, this is totally irrelevant, but, great game and all, but do not play through it without any kind of guidance. I don't think this game was meant to be played "blind" in the 2023 sense of the term.
Anyway, I just left about an eight-year career working as a manga translator, which has given me a (not particularly charming) habit of picking at the writing of every game I play and every comic I read. A lot has been written about modern Dragon Quest translations, and, my distaste for goofy dialects and accents in English writing aside, I get the impression that they're quite excellent. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Dragon Warrior 2 translation, though, and I think DW1 was pretty well-written for its time, too; the game is just a touch on the simple side, with so little story that it's hard to meaningfully hamstring it or punch it up.
The faux Elizabethan English was, in hindsight, absolutely not the right choice; this was a series that lit Japan on fire for the entire lifespan of the Famicom and then some, and was in all likelihood more instrumental to the console's success than Super Mario Brothers. At the time, of course, I was digging it; I was a precocious little shit when I got my hands on a copy of Dragon Warrior, so I went and asked my parents what "thee," "thou," "hast," etc. all meant, and I was all in. But I think if you're counting on millions of little kids picking up your game, as hard as this line is, as excellent as it is for 1990, if it's the first thing they see, they're going to turn up their noses.
It's not particularly faithful to the Japanese tone, either. But, all questions of accuracy aside, as English writing, as a co-authored derivative work, which I think is the best way to understand all translations, it's good.
One thing I'll say, though, is that the enemy and spell names are completely sauceless. This is something even the worst modern Dragon Quest translations always knock out of the park, and while Dragon Warrior II made great strides in this department -- the godawful name "HURTMORE," which was a "translation" of "Begirama," has been replaced with "Firebane," which I don't like very much, but at least it's got flavor -- the first Dragon Warrior did a lot of damage here. Take this guy, who you killed seventeen thousand of on the little sand bridge outside Rimuldar:
In English, this monster is just called "Wolf." In Japanese, it's "Rikanto," which is "Lycan," "Lycant," "Lycanth," whatever you like. You might wonder why they didn't translate this as "Werewolf" at least, or you might assume it was because of string length limitations, but that's not right; they saved that name for his big brother in the Cantlin area. These were called "Killer Lycan" in Japanese, so I have to wonder if Nintendo just didn't want them using the K word and this is what they landed on.
The dragons have it even worse. Take "Doragon," which we called either "Dragon" or "Green Dragon," I forget which. That's simple enough, and I have no qualms with this one.
Deep in Charlock, the Dragonlord's castle, you find these much more powerful monsters. The Dragon Warrior translation calls them Blue Dragons. You know what they are in Japanese? "Kiisu Doragon," or, bear with me, "Keith Dragon." I would call these "Keese Dragons" if I wasn't worried about Nintendo suing me for trademark infringement. The point is, like the spell names, the enemy names have a little more flair; they're less descriptive and more flavorful, playing an important role in setting a tone that the official translation completely threw out. Incidentally, fan translators say these guys are called "Kiss Dragons," but that's definitely not right. The English word "kiss" is not katakanized in this way.
A few rooms before the end of the game, you start encountering these even nastier dragons. They're called Red Dragons in Dragon Warrior, but in Dragon Quest, they're "Daasu Doragon," or "Darth Dragon." That's why I'm almost positive "Keith" is what they were going for with the blue guys; they just picked it for how it sounds in Japanese syllabary, blissfully unaware that it's homophonous with a very common English name.
Dragon Warrior 3's translation is definitely not horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit disappointed; it's certainly a step back from 2, with a surprising number of spelling errors, some funny grammar, and lots of glitches -- for example, when you dismiss a soldier, the game is supposed to say "Hero parts with Soldier," and most of the time, it does, but occasionally it says "Hero part with Soldier" instead.
One interesting thing about it, and I might speculate that this is part of why the writing is so much worse than Dragon Warrior 2, is that it hews much closer to the original Japanese. The new spell "Bikill," for example, is "Baikiruto" in Japanese, so all they've really done is chop off the T at the end.
The excellent town name "Brecconary" somehow got misromanized as "Brecconaly," too, which is funny, because it's called "Radatoomu" in Japanese. As an aside, everyone romanizes that as "Ladutorm," which makes me want to take an icepick to my ears -- I don't know why you wouldn't at least go with Rhadatome or something. Reading between the lines, I wonder if the original translation team sent notes to Chunsoft or Enix, and through the game of telephone, the DW3 translation team ended up with Brecconaly.
This is all speculation, but these two details make me wonder if Enix or Chunsoft's Japanese office decided to get a little more hands-on with the Dragon Quest series at this point, possibly blaming poor sales on Nintendo and/or the first two games' translations (and as I said, I hate to say it, but I'd have to agree with them).
I mention all this because if you're already familiar with Dragon Warrior 3, when I was talking about how Red Dragons are called Darth Dragons in the Japanese DQ1, you probably immediately pictured this fan favorite monster:
The Darthbear. That's neat, right? This is a detail that every Japanese kid playing DQ3 would have caught, at least if they'd played DQ1: in the same way that Darth Dragons are the third tier dragon, these guys are like the third tier bear; the strongest version of the other bears you've been fighting in the world above, the Fierce Bear and the Grizzlies.
But here's the thing: that's not right either. If you know Japanese, you would expect these monsters to be called "Daasu Guma," since the Fierce Bears are "Gouketsu Guma," etc. You know what they're called? "Daasu Rikanto." They're Darth Lycans!
I really, really like this little detail, and unfortunately, it wasn't just in the Dragon Warrior translation that it got scrubbed away; even the modern Dragon Quest translation, "Ursa mega," obscures this connection. These guys aren't the third tier bear so much as the third tier werewolf, which doesn't make sense at first blush, but who's to say that's not how lycanthropy works in Alefgard? That the same curse that turns you into a wolf can turn you into a bear if you happen to have a particularly nasty case? It's a little bit like how sometimes kobolds are little lizard guys, and other times they're canine. Why not?
Think of the implications this has for the story, too: it's almost like Zoma is so much stronger than the Dragonlord that he doesn't turn men into silly little wolves that pop you for 15 damage, but towering, drooling bears that hunt in packs and can crit you for your entire max HP. There are a hundred tricky little details of the endgame sequence of DQ3 that make it a swerve for players who were familiar with the first game: the path through the giant cross-shaped room in Charlock is counterclockwise, not clockwise; Garin is a chump who left his harp at home so he could go drink away his sorrows in Cantlin; Cantlin itself has no shops when it's where all the best equipment is sold in DQ1; the fairy flute serves a completely different function; and so on, and so on. Darthbears, or Darth Lycans, just happen to be one such detail that you'd completely miss in all official translations of the game.
Funny thing, too: if you think about it, if they'd kept to the translation conventions set in Dragon Warrior 1, Darthbears, which are hulking blue bears, would be called "Red Wolves."
