This Be Bad Translation #05, Gunbarich!

15 Comments

Gunbarich is a popular Japanese arcade game from the early-2000s that was recently ported to the Nintendo Switch. After its release, it quickly gained the attention of gamers outside Japan for its poor English translation.

If you liked this, check out This be book bad translation, video games!, my book dedicated to game translation disasters from the 1970s until today!
15 Comments
  1. “The person who have no appointment must be punished!!”
    Gosh I love Engrish. ^_^

    1. If only it said person.

      It says parson, which is a lot worse.

      1. Ha Ha! I didn’t even catch that! ^_^

  2. Didn’t the original arcade edition have an English script as well? Might want to compare the two versions to see how they are different, if they are even different to begin with.

    Psykio’s in-house English translations of their arcade releases are a mixed bag honestly, especially Space Bomber (which didn’t get any port yet, here’s hoping)

  3. Don’t they ever make the effort to polish these translations at all or do they just do these in one night while chugging beer and wolfing down pizza? Seriously, come on.

    1. It seems like doing international digital releases has become easier from a *business* standpoint, so I think what we’re seeing are companies not wanting to pass an easy buck by, but also not considering it worth more than the most minor effort.

    2. My best guess is that they either do it in house with the best English speaking person on staff (and the help of something like Google Translate), or they just higher someone local who is extremely cheap.

      They just want something that is usable by English speakers so they can have a wider audience. They don’t care to get it exactly right.

  4. Phantom Dusclops'92

    Oh look, names being costantly inside quote markings! The part I prefer the most of bad translations from Japanese!

  5. Ok, I checked a video of someone playing the original arcade version on MAME. From what I can tell, the Nintendo Switch version’s English script is 1:1 copy-pasted straight from Psikyo’s original arcade release.

    So this is not a new translation at all, the porters of this game have just taken a 16-year old unpolished script and put it in the Switch port without giving a second thought of at least fixing up the awkward grammar a bit. Don’t know how to feel about this.

    1. I didn’t even know there WAS an English translation in the Arcade version.

  6. So, what’s going on here?

  7. If anyone is interested, here is a video of the Japanese DS version :
    https://youtu.be/1-0fVZl3Dzo
    If you want to look for screenshots or videos of the Japanese version on youtube, nicovideo or whatever,
    use the Japanese name ガンバリッチ .

  8. 100,000 score items in each world?

    And I heard Rare put too many collectibles in their games. 😀

    1. Man, that would be awful if going for 100 percent…

  9. So, is Mato interested in numbers? While the Japanese today would use the same number as we do. 1, 2, 3 and so on. However, you can still find the traditional chinese numerals/kanji used in places as well. Example? Well, while it might be a stretch, the usage of these traditional kanji might place the characters as old-fashioned in a sense.