Final Fantasy IV Translation Comparison: Baron Castle

Good Old Days

The area beneath Baron Castle is called the “Old Waterway” in Japanese. The English version is essentially the same, but it has an interesting spelling: “Old Water-way”. I don’t think I’d ever seen it spelled that way until I played this game.

Later translations call it “Old Waterway” or just “Waterway”.

Secret in the Blue

As we’ve seen before, the game’s hidden passages aren’t clearly displayed in the original game. But in Final Fantasy IV Easy Type and the English localization, the passages stand out ever-so-slightly.

Just how well the not-so-hidden walls show up seems to depend on the location, though. In this particular dungeon, you can barely, barely see the hidden passages and their dark blue color. But in other dungeons, they’re extremely obvious. I’m guessing it has to do with color palettes and technical stuff.

Treasure Hunt

Finally, some more treasure chests to compare! Here’s what you’ll find in each version of the game during this trek beneath Baron:

Unsurprisingly at this point, the special battle items were replaced with Revive Medicine/Life potions in Easy Type and the English version.

What’s most interesting, though, is that the Ancient Sword exists in the original version and the English version, but Easy Type has a different sword altogether. More on that below.

Sword Switch

As we just saw, Final Fanatsy IV and the English release give you the “Ancient Sword” in this dungeon, but the Easy Type version of the game gives you the “Coral Sword”.

In Final Fantasy IV and the English release, this sword can sometimes inflict the curse status on an enemy. This lowers various stats and such in ways that I forget, but it’s kind of neat when it works. It’s also effective against spirit or ghost enemies.

In Final Fantasy IV Easy Type, this sword not only got renamed, its effects have been changed too. As you might expect from the name “Coral Sword”, this sword works well against water-elemental enemies. Which is handy, because you’re surrounded by water enemies at this point in the game, and you’re about to face a major water-elemental boss.

Besides that, the Coral Sword also has increased offense and accuracy. It doesn’t inflict the curse status ailment like the Ancient Sword, though.

This is a Castle

We saw another instance of this earlier in the game, but here we see that Baron Castle is called “Baron Castle” in the Japanese versions but simply “Baron” in the English localization.

A Class Act

Once Cecil’s party has successfully infiltrated the castle, Beigan/Baigan shows up and offers to join the party… But it’s a trick!

When I first played this game as a kid, I had to rent it from a store. This scene and the following battle was as far as I got my first time around, so it’s always held a special place in my heart. So let’s take a close look at it now.

There are a few points of interest here:

• Cecil has the “Sir” dropped from his name again in the English localization.
• In the English localization, Baigan welcomes him back to Baron. But, as explained in the Japanese version, he supposedly infiltrated the castle to save Cid too, but failed in the process. Of course that’s a lie, but it’s missing in the English localization entirely.
• By this point, after both Kain and Yang have been turned against Cecil (although Yang’s better now), it’s clear that Golbez is controlling people. The English version gave this revelation away back in Fabul, but it isn’t until around this general point in the Japanese version that Cecil figures out what’s happening.
• All mention of Cid being held prisoner here is missing in the English localization. Now that I think about it, as a kid I don’t think the idea of saving Cid was my main motivation for getting back into the castle – I think it was just because that’s where the key item said to go and because the castle guards had turned evil earlier. Maybe the rewriting in this scene is partly the reason for that.

After this scene, the party starts to walk toward the throne room, but Palom and Porom stop in their tracks.

Here’s what stands out about this particular exchange:

• Palom’s line in Japanese literally translates to “It stinks!”, but in some contexts it can mean that something’s suspicious or iffy or seems off. So seeing the English translation say, “Something’s fishy!” here makes me very impressed!In fact, aside from the changes made to this whole scene, the English writing here is pretty good compared to other writing in the game. Based on this line and a few others, it feels like a native English speaker edited parts of this scene.
• Porom’s line in the English version, “Can’t you act a bit better?” originally struck me as meaning “Can’t you behave better?” It wasn’t until subsequent playthroughs that I realized it was actual “acting” as in playing a fake role.Sometimes this sort of thing happens in translation, where a translated phrase can have unintended alternate interpretations, so it’s always important to watch out for this pitfall when translating. In this case it isn’t a huge deal, though.
• Cecil’s reaction to realizing Baigan is a bad guy is changed slightly in the English localization. And then Baigan’s response to his reaction is removed entirely.

Also, the J2E fan translation is infamous when it comes to this scene. Palom’s line about the bad acting was changed to say, “I think William Shatner is more convincing than you.”

Again, for what is supposed to be the definitive translation of Final Fantasy IV, there are some really major changes to the text. Changes that go way further than the official Super NES translation.

Also, for whatever reason, the fan translators not only over-localized this line, they changed the script order so that Porom talks about the bad acting first, so that Palom can end the discussion on this line. I’m actually surprised by that – it’s pretty uncommon to see anyone rearrange scripts in translation.

Baigan Wants a Hug

When fighting Baigan, you also have to fight his left and right arms. In the English version, they appear on the enemy list just as any normal enemy name would. In the Japanese versions, though, the arms’ names are slightly indented on the list, showing that they’re sub-enemies of the main enemy.

My guess is that this was because it takes more characters to write the names in English than in Japanese, so the indentation needed to be removed for them to fit.

Faking It

After defeating Baigan and heading further into the eerily empty castle, Cecil finds the king in the throne room. While we’re still on the topic of the fan translation, let’s put it side-by-side with the other versions too!

Oh, man, at a glance that looks like some kind of brain-teaser puzzle or something. I’m not even sure where to start, so let’s just dive into the points of interest – we’ll start by comparing the two official scripts:

• As seen before, the official translation just calls the king “King” rather than “King Baron”. This usually wouldn’t be any cause for note at all, but in this scene Cecil actually decides to simply call him “Baron” at one point in the original Japanese script. By calling him “Baron!” like this in Japanese, he’s indicating that he suspects the king isn’t the real king or is at least done with obeying the king. In the English translation, Cecil simply says, “King Baron?” which seems to indicate confusion rather than suspicion or dissent.
• Some lines were removed in the official translation.
• Also, a line was added to the English translation that wasn’t in the original.
• The official translation has some grammar issues, like, “I see you’ve become Paladin.” I was actually going to say that was a really nice translation choice for that line until I saw the grammar issue there.
• Most of the king’s laughs are missing in the English translation. One thing that might be worth noting is that it’s very common in Japanese entertainment to give unique laughing styles to different characters, but this is always really hard to put into English without seeming really weird. It can be a translation nightmare – I remember that trying to keep track of all the laughing styles in the One Piece anime was a crazy experience, for example.
   
  Anyway, in this particular case, some of the king’s laughs have a sort of eerie, inhuman vibe to them.
• The king talks in a pretty unusual, king-like way sometimes in the Japanese text of this scene. So seeing the English translation use things like “wanna” is pretty strange.
• This water fiend’s name comes from Dante’s famous “Divine Comedy”. In this case, it’s a reference to “Cagnazzo”, one of the twelve Malebranche. I’m guessing the official translators weren’t aware of this and went with their best guess on how to spell the name in English.
• As seen before, the four fiends are called something like the “Four Heavenly Kings” in Japanese. It sounds cool in Japanese but not so cool in English, so I’m glad they changed it in the official translation. I might’ve suggested something more like “Four Elemental Fiends” rather than “Four Fiends of Elements”, though.
• There are other nuance changes in the text that are too minor to point out one by one.

True to its goal, the fan translation fixes a number of the issues found in the official translation. But it makes up quite a bit of stuff too, which is where things start to get messy.

It’s true that localization means straying from the source material, but generally only when it makes sense to. Changing things willy-nilly or out of personal feelings for the source material is understandable – but there comes a point where you can no longer call it a translation or a localization. Which is fine, except the creators of this patch led everyone to believe it was the best and closest translation of the game ever made.

Basically, we can see in this scene that the fan translation has its good points and its bad points. Here’s a quick summary:

Good points

• Lines weren’t removed from the script.
• The laughter was kept in and handled nicely.
• The general tone of the fake king’s text gets closer to the original script than the official translation. It succeeds in giving the fake king a nice, weird vibe. The fake king’s tone also doesn’t veer off into casual style with things like “wanna”.
• When not overly-edited or altered, the text is well-translated.
• The fan translation properly catches the Divine Comedy reference. Indeed, if there’s ever been something that fan translators really excel at, it’s doing research.

Bad points

• Things are changed or made up out of nowhere for no real reason.
• Over-writing – this is extremely common among inexperienced translators. Whether it’s done on purpose or not, you’ll often see inexperienced translators use fancy writing or fancy words to compensate for their lack of skill. If you’ve ever seen a fan translation and thought, “Man, why does this character talk like a thesaurus?” this is probably why.
• The fan translation sometimes isn’t a translation at all and is just a rewritten version of the official translation. That’s why there’s a line in both the official translation and the fan translation that wasn’t in the original script at all.
• Although it’s a silly thing to point out on this list, there’s a capitalization error in one of the lines.

I guess the main thing I wanted to accomplish by showing the fan translation side-by-side with these other versions is that the fan translation is actually pretty good when it’s just trying to translate the text. But the fan translation also tends to go off and do its own thing. In doing so, it isn’t quite a translation or a localization – it becomes some kind of strange fan creation all its own.

Anyway, like I said, this particular scene is pretty tame example; I wanted to show that although the fan translation is amateur and sometimes over-the-top, it does have its merits and good qualities that improve over the official translation too. The fan translators just needed more experience and discipline.

That, and it seems like there were too many people on the team, each with different, competing goals. One of them seemed to just try to take the official translation and punch it up, for example, while it seems like someone else on the team genuinely tried to retranslate from scratch. And then possibly someone else tried to merge it all together while adding in a dash of 90s era Working Designs-esque localization.

Whew! While we’re at it, let’s take a look at the PlayStation translation too.

Whoa, whatever I said about the fan translation, multiply it by five and you have the PlayStation translation!

The bad news is that the PlayStation translation was the basis for the GBA translation, which was in turn the basis for other versions. Things in the script were fixed little by little with each new iteration, but in all honesty the PlayStation translation feels more like an episode of MXC than an actual translation or an actual localization.

Litting Up the Barrier

In battle, Cagnazzo sometimes stops to charge up a water technique. If you hit him with a lightning spell or item during this time, it’ll stop Cagnazzo’s technique and display a message.

In the English translation it says, “The Lit scared him!”

In the original Japanese text, it actually says, “The lightning element shattered the barrier!”

I’m not sure how it’s translated in other versions, but I assume it’s been changed to something closer to the original text.

Cranky Cid

After Cagnazzo is defeated, Cid barges into the throne room:

The big things to take away here are:

• A number of lines are completely missing in the English release.
• Palom’s rudeness and big-headed attitude are taken out of the English translation for some reason.
• Porom says she’s a wizard-in-training or a wizard apprentice in the Japanese version, while in the English translation she calls herself a full-fledged “white wizard”.
• The Easy Type script has a tiny, tiny change in a sentence in this scene that doesn’t really change anything in the meaning or translation. It’s just a style thing to make things clearer for Japanese readers, I guess.

I will say that the English translation does some nice rewording in places to make things sound more natural. Which is actually a surprising thing to say, given everything we’ve looked at so far.

In particular, I like how the translation was able to keep a tiny bit of Cid’s personality in the text; it would’ve been extremely easy to accidentally translate his text with a standard, style-less text that sounds like every other character. Whether by accident or not, many characters in the game get this standard-ization treatment in the translation, but Cid is an exception.

That said, sometimes it’s possible to go too far with speech styles. The PlayStation translation does this with Cid. It’s hard to explain, though. You know how people sometimes go crazy with the lens flare filter when using Photoshop? That’s the same sort of feeling I get here – like someone just went way overboard with things.

The fan translation continues with its bizarre localization choices in this scene, too. In one line, Cid says, “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass!” Which is a quote from the Quentin Tarantino movie “Pulp Fiction”.

This is another in a line of pop culture references the fan translators inserted into the game for whatever reason. These references in the fan translation actually gave some players the mistaken impression that the Japanese version had cultural references of its own. So, just to be clear, there were no pop culture references in the Japanese script to begin with.

It’s mystifying, though, because later in this scene the fan translation does a great job with the writing. Here’s a good example:

But, wait, they’ve apparently inserted another pop culture reference into the script shortly after. Or, at least what seems to be one… I’m not sure which one this is referencing, I’m guessing it’s the Saturday Night Live skit/movie that was popular around the time this fan translation was made.

Again, this treatment really does remind me of how Working Designs handled the Lunar games and such back in the 90s too.

Twin Stones

After leaving the throne room, suddenly the party is trapped in a room as Cagnazzo’s voice thunders from nowhere in particular:

There are a quite a few changes here:

• A few lines are missing in the English translation.
• The line about being more powerful in death is missing in the English translation. This line actually goes in parallel with a similar line Scarmiglione said too, so this is a connection that was lost in translation.
• “Hell” was changed to “Dark World”. I always felt that this sort of write-around was lazy, even when I was a kid. Even just something like “afterlife” or “netherworld” would sound better than “Dark World”, you know? Actually, that’s a good exercise – what are some other, better ways of saying, “I’ll see you in hell!” without saying “hell” or “death”? Let me know, I’m curious to know what other ideas people can come up with!

The walls in the room suddenly start to close in!

So, in the Japanese version, we see that Porom reveals that she’s grown to see Cecil as a big brother figure to her. This bit of character development is completely missing in the English translation.

Strangely enough, the English version adds some stuff for Cecil when he tries to stop Palom and Porom. And, for some reason, a similar line spoken by Tellah in the Japanese version was changed into a Cecil line in the English release. How odd.

The spell in the game that petrifies enemies is called “Break” in the Japanese version, but is called “Stone” in the English translation. That change is reflected in the scripts for this scene – it would’ve been weird for them to yell “Break” in the English translation when no “Break” spell existed, you know? So the translators did a good job of keeping things consistent.

Similarly, the ailment-removing spell is called “Esuna” in Japanese but “Heal” in English. This, too, was changed in the English script for this scene.

And, of course, we can’t overlook the “kill” reference being changed to, “You won’t be stuck in a place like this!”

There are some more minor nuance things too, like Tellah’s line after the twins turn to stone – the Japanese line is said with a little bit of anger. The English line seems more like he’s just sad and quiet. In fact, he’s even missing a line in the English translation.

Another thing is that although Cecil technically does say “Wait for me…” at the end of the scene, in this context this Japanese phrase is more akin to “I’m coming for you…”

Meanwhile, in the Secret Lair

At this point, another scene begins. Kain and Golbez talk while Rosa is tied up.

Here’s a look at some of the most noteworthy changes and differences in this short scene:

• One of Golbez’s lines is missing in the English translation.
• In the English translation, Golbez simply says that the last crystal “is a problem”. It took me a while to piece together what he was talking about when I first played the game in English.In the Japanese script, it’s clearly stated that the location of the crystal is what’s problematic – namely, it would be tough for anyone to venture into the magnetic cave where the crystal is being held.
• Kain’s final line is changed in the English version to have more romantic jealousy than what’s in the original Japanese line. There’s no mention of “sweet Cecil” or anything like that – Kain literally just says “better” or “above” in the Japanese version.

The Hidden Ship

The scene now dramatically switches back to Cecil and friends, who are on their way to Cid’s hidden airship. Cid faces what appears to be a normal wall… but it’s not!

Some of the lines in the scene never quite made sense to me when I played the English translation as a kid. Looking at the Japanese text, I can see why – this scene was definitely overlooked during the editing phase.

My guess is this is because this scene’s text is stored in a separate, random block all by itself, which is extremely common in games. Whatever the case, this has all the hallmarks of a non-native English speaker trying to translate something into English.

“It’s a surprise.” “What a surprise!” is a charmingly silly exchange, though.

Also, Cid’s final line in the Japanese text is basically, “Let’s go!” with a little bit of a non-standard flair added to it.

A Courteous Visit

The Enterprise takes off. Another airship quickly approaches.

There’s nothing too much here, but let’s quickly take a look anyway:

• Cid wants to “show” what the Enterprise can do in the Japanese version, but wants to “see” what it can do in the English version. There’s not a huge difference, but the English version does give the connotation that even he’s not sure what the Enterprise, his latest airship, is capable of.
• The meaning of the white flag is spelled out for the player in the English translation. The Japanese text assumes that the player already knows that white flags are equated with surrendering or non-hostility. Maybe the translator thought the North American target audience might not know this.
• Tellah’s line in the English translation should probably be capitalized.

After this, the two airships line up and Kain approaches Cecil aboard a bridge of some sort.

Now this is a little more interesting to dig into:

• Various lines and parts of lines have been removed.
• The kingdom of Troia is mentioned here. This name can be spelled many different ways, it looks like the English translation went with “Toroia”, which is probably the safest choice. Later translations went with “Troia”, though.
• In the Japanese version, Kain explains that the Earth Crystal belongs to the Troia kingdom. But in the English translation, things are changed around for some reason and it’s Cecil who explains this fact.
• I really like Tellah’s translation of “Dirty slime!” Nice one, whoever did that line!
• Kain specifically says he (or they) will make contact again once Cecil has the crystal. This is missing in the English translation. In a weird way I kind of like it like that; Kain suddenly talking after you get the crystal made the bad guys seem especially almighty and all-knowing when I first played the game as a kid.
• “Crystal or Rosa’s life!” has that non-native vibe to it. It and a few other instances here also make me think they needed to pare down the text to fit within certain memory limits.

Unsurprisingly, the PlayStation and GBA translations fluff things up a bit in this scene. As an example, Kain comments on Cecil looking like a crossdresser in the PlayStation version: “Heh! That drag suits you well.”

Overall, the GBA translation is based on the PlayStation translation but has some changes of its own. Here we see that the crossdressing reference was toned down to, “Heh! So you’re still among the living.” Even with this “fix”, I still feel this wasn’t the spirit of his character in the original scene, though.

The PlayStation and GBA scripts have all sorts of similar things like this throughout the game, but I don’t have the energy to point out every single one, so the above is just a tiny, tiny sample.

Actually, since we’ve already spent so much time looking at the fan translation during this part of the game, let’s check out how it handles this scene too:

The fan translation definitely relied too much on adding swearing in there unnecessarily. I cannot, at all, see Yang saying, “You son of a bitch!”

And Cain calling Rosa a whore? Where did that come from? Yikes.

I assume the fan translators decided to go with “son of a bitch” for Yang’s line because he says “kisama”… which is a rude version of “you” that we’ve encountered several times in the script before. Each time, the fan translators felt the need to hit the “maximum rudeness button” and insert swearing.

It’s an amateur mistake to translate every rude or improper pronoun as a swear, though. Here are some perfectly acceptable translations that they could have used instead:

• Curse you!
• You wretch!
• Why, you…!

Sometimes it is okay to use swearing in translation, but it has to be for a good reason. In this instance, Yang’s “disgust” is the key point that needs to be conveyed. Swearing isn’t necessary for this, plus it doesn’t suit his character at all.

In fact, the GBA translation handles this pretty well and actually goes with, “Why, you…!” too.

Fly Away

After Kain leaves, Cecil and his companions sulk for a tiny bit and then get started on their next goal.

As you can see, the Easy Type and English versions of the game have added information on how to use the airship. The original game just sort of assumes you can figure it out since it’s not all that different from riding Chocobos or using the hovercraft.

There are a few things that interest me, though:

• The list of things you can’t land on was rearranged for the English translation. I’m not sure why – and it’s not a big deal, of course – but it caught my eye anyway.
• The phrase, “It’s the northwest!” is pretty funny for some reason. The Japanese phrasing actually makes it clear that it’s in the northwest “direction”. I guess this strange phrasing was due to non-native English writing.
• Capitalizing “Airship” seems odd.
• Translating it as “When you want to get on an airship” rather than “this airship” gives the unintended impression that players will encounter multiple airships in the game. It’s not a huge spoiler or anything, but it does give away advance information without meaning to.

For reference, the PlayStation and GBA versions don’t include these extra instructions.