tinyvalor

vivi-n

@tinyvalor

will never have the shoes

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tinyvalor
@tinyvalor
Gadfly-Goods
@Gadfly-Goods
ticky
@ticky

Feeling luppy-go-luppy, or, what on earth did that guy mean in Sonic The Hedgehog (2006)

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!"

blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

Recently I had my own "giving Sonic 06 the benefit of the doubt" moment that ended in a bizarre realization.

A balding, late middle age man named Alberto Robert rambles at length to Sonic the Hedgehog about making new types of shoes for the residents of Soleanna.

In Sonic 06, one of the very first things you do in Sonic's story is a quest for an old man named Alberto Robert where he wants to give Sonic a special pair of shoes. It's been a few years, but I think these shoes give Sonic the lightspeed dash, which enables him to access the game's first level, Wave Ocean. You complete a simple challenge, basically a gameplay tutorial on how to move and jump with Sonic, and he gives you the shoes.

An infamous Sonic 2006 loading screen with the quest title, 'The winder of a Shoemaker'

The quest/mission/challenge/whatever is called "The winder of a Shoemaker." And, for the last 17 years, I've taken that completely at face value. What's a Winder? No idea, but it's used with such confidence that I just assumed it's obscure regional slang and it just washed over me.

Until basically a couple nights ago when somebody pointed it out that it was probably a typo. In Japanese, the mission is apparently 奇跡の靴職人 -- which Google Translate tells me means "Miracle Shoemaker", but more specifically it's been said the quest was probably meant to be titled "The Wonder of a Shoemaker."

Literally the first thing you do in the whole entire game has a typo in it that they never corrected. Sonic 06 even had a patch or two! It even had a PS3 version come out nearly three months after the Xbox version! And nobody ever said "Hey wait a minute"

Now, to be fair, winders are a real thing. Several things, actually. Mechanical clocks have winders for their gears, there are winders in metalworking, and there are winders in sewing. Depending on your accent, winders are even the thing you open to let fresh air in.

But in this context? It means nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's just a typo.

Shoutouts to vgperson for digging up and translating the original Japanese quest title, plus Dr. Melon and Madelyn Himegami for the reminder of vgperson's translation in the videochess world discord. I'm still recovering from this realization.

Gadfly-Goods
@Gadfly-Goods

Apropos of nothing, but I've decided now to combine the names "Alberto" and "Robert" into one name: "Bertbert"

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in reply to @ticky's post:

Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

"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.
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ticky
@ticky

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.

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ryusui
@ryusui

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!

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yrriban
@yrriban

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.

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boocanan
@boocanan

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

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Danthrax
@Danthrax

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.

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