A reader named Matteo asked a question about Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, one of my favorite games!
The final boss of chapter 7, is a very particular type of zombie. According to its owner, It’s equipped with “the fists of a Dark Karate master”, “the legs of the fastest demon in the netherworld”, “the brain of Mahogany, a famous sorcerer”, “the iron body of Hercules”, and a “horse wiener” (yes, I’m not kidding, you can even steal it from the boss!).
I was wondering about the horse wiener part. Was it added in the localization? Or was it part of the original japanese script?
I’ve always been curious about this myself, so I took a quick look around and gathered up some screenshots. Here it is mentioned in a voiced script scene:
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And here it is in the battle portion of the game:
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So, did the Japanese game talk about horse wieners? The answer is… yes.
…This game is weird sometimes. But I looooove the gameplay, dood.
![Passport to MOTHER 2 [Learn Japanese!]](https://legendsoflocalization.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/pp-m2.jpg "Passport to MOTHER 2 [Learn Japanese!]")
And it shows it isn’t a hot dog made of horse meat either…
Oh. The item icon is an exclamation point.
If my memory serves that right that’s the “rare item” icon, it’s not exclusive to the horse wiener.
I just found out “TL;DR” means “too long; didn’t read”.
Chapter 7 is probably the weirdest part of the original game, and this line just tops it all off. XD
Horse Wiener is legendary in Disgaea circles, I’m not surprised this question came up. XD
Well, that’s certainly… Interesting. As a bonus, I now know the kanji for horse! I love cute, easy-to-remember kanji like this.
That zombie in Japanese has the body of “Hebocles” by the way, hah.
Dood! I had a feeling it was the same in the original. It just seems like the kind of game that doesn’t NEED to change much.
They say that the French translation misconstrues it as “Horse Frankfurter”. Given how some European translations of things are based off of the English ones for whatever reason, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Europeans getting Telephone-esque translations of translations is sadly the standard, as the opposite would imply caring for Europe. It’d be hardly the first mistake like that, the Italian translation of FE: Blazing Blade calls Elfire “Fuoco d’elfo” or “Elf Fire” because they thought it was a weird shortened word, when El-whatever is just FE shorthand for a stronger magic spell. Also the Spanish translations of Pokémon, where Counter was translated as something that counts, Slam was a door slam and Double Team was taken as a team that there are two of, among others. Terrible.
Spanish FF translations are legendary in their badness.
But yeah, the Pokemon one also translated Party (as in “the group of Pokemon you lug around”) as “fiesta” and “partido”. Apparently a lot of localized Spanish games make that mistake.
My brothers and I play the game with the Japanese voices rather than the English ones, and we looked up a number of terms from the Japanese script, wherever we wanted to verify the translation and couldn’t tell just by listening; this was obviously one such case.
I think there’s a bit of nuance in the original that gets lost in the translation, but it’s by far the closest approximation I can think of.
(I think there’s quite a bit of benefit to be gained, at least for the casual student/fanboy of Japanese, in playing games with Japanese audio and English text; it’s a bit akin to watching subtitled anime, with the added bonus that in many cases the Japanese voice acting is better than the English.)
チンチン isn’t a taboo word in Japanese entertainment?
I used to see such words having one kana or more replaced by ○●◎〇Ｘ or stuff like that, think something like “P**is”. (For example, Ginatama ep 99)
It’s probably a lot like our own swear words here where it’s acceptable in some things but not others. I doubt it’d be left as-is on Japanese TV, but maybe it’s fine for games meant for very niche gamers. That’s my assumption, anyway.
“…This game is weird sometimes. But I looooove the gameplay, dood!”
I think you mean “ssu!” 😛
It’s been a while since I played Disgaea, and my knowledge of Japanese was far less refined at the time, but from what I could tell, the script was pretty accurate for the most part. Later NIS games, on the other hand, are far more prone to using dubtitles (to be fair, the first Disgaea was localized by Atlus whereas NIS started doing their own localizations afterwards), some even changing characters’ names in spite of the Japanese audio option. They might be worth looking into.
On another note, I’m surprised “chinchin” wasn’t censored there. For Christ’s sake, most hentai manga bleep it out.
Dood is way better than that archaic ssu nonsense. Please stop.
ssu is still in pretty common use though?
Wow, I’m happy that you considered my suggestion, thanks a lot! 🙂
It’s interesting how it was the same in the Japanese version, and that it wasn’t censored/altered in any way in the US release.
Disgaea is such a crazy series. 😀
I’ve never heard of this game before… This article as a first impression is… uhh, interesting. 🙂
The horse wiener part is one of the weirder parts of Disgaea 1. Haven’t played the game, but I have watched HCBailly’s LP of the main game.
(I’ll be honest, the only thing that seems great about this game is the weirdness. It kind of gets replaced by a more serious tone later on, which made the game boring.)
For god’s sake, do NOT look up 馬のチンチン on Google Images. Let’s just say you’ll mostly get some disturbing non-Disgaea results for sure.
Well I guess the horse wiener makes sense, considering that this zombie is supposed to be the ultimate being made from the best parts. And you know, horse wieners are huge and considered sexy enough to make dildos of. Probably easy to say that horse wieners are considered the sexiest huge wiener too.
The Zombie’s name is “Sibyl” in English, but something like “Criteria” in Japanese?
I wonder why change the name of the boss, if you went all the way to keep the horse wiener joke…
In Disgaea, quite often the names of enemies are pulled from one of two Pools of Names, (Male or Female) I believe the “boss”, is actually standard enemy class that may be seen in other places, and the game pulls the name from a random pool of names. In another YT play though, on the PSP version, the boss is called “Tarte.” Most other Bosses are unique and where named during a Cutscene. I will note that PSP version did make quite a few changes, they re-recorded at least Etna’s lines due to a new VA. (The PSP added a new mode that featured Etna.)