As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Difference between revisions

** In ''Sims 3'' Simlish includes (correct, but irrelevant) phrases in French, Spanish and German. It also features licensed music from various bands... "translated" to Simlish. The cadance and intonation of the nonsense words follows the actual lyrics, and sometimes, the gibberish sounds ''almost'' like actual words.

* Every Civ leader in ''Sid Meier's [[Civilization]] Revolution'' speaks in themed foreign sounding gibberish... Intentionally.

** On the other hand, the only main-line ''Civ'' game to incorporate talking units, ''[[Civilization]] IV'', has each of the units respond in the appropriate language. There was a little bit of [[Blind Idiot Translation]], but the fact that they bothered to come up with good translations--and find native speakers where applicable--is rather touching. On the other hand, it also reinforces--to some degree--[[As Long as It Sounds Foreign]]: for instance, the Egyptians, who are very clearly based on the ''[[Ancient Egypt|Ancient]]'' Egyptians, speak ''[[Modern Egypt|modern]]'' Egyptian Arabic. Similar situations are found with the Greeks (whose units speak modern Greek) and Persians (whose units speak modern Persian). The Vikings one-up these: modern Norwegian instead of Old Norse -- and the faction leader, Sveyn Forkbeard, was ''Danish'' (so not only do they speak a modern version of the language, they don't even speak the ''right'' modern version). The Roman units, however, speak actual Latin--and remarkably well-rendered, with all the "c"s and "g"s pronounced hard, the vowel lengths and qualities properly distinguished, and a voice actor who really gave his all to creating a ''living''-sounding Latin (the end result sounded--surprise, surprise--like a particularly energetic Italian).

** ''Civilization V'' did away with the talking units. They just grunt now. Instead, they introduced talking leaders. Of course, the phrases the leaders say and the subtitles are completely different, even for leaders like [[George Washington]] and Queen Elizabeth I. There is still the problem of Rameses II not using proper Ancient Egyptian (this is justified by ''no one'' knowing what it's supposed to like) and other historical characters using modern-day versions of the languages. For example, [[Catherine the Great]] sounds like a modern Russian woman despite being born in a 18th century German principality (her subjects often complained at not being able to understand her heavily-accented Russian). Washington also sounds like he could be living in the 21st century. This troper can't speak for any others.

* The ''[[Star Ocean]]'' games have some terrible names (including 'Fayt' Leingod, romanized with a Y to save us from laughing out loud) but nothing, nothing beats the protagonist of [[Star Ocean 4]], 'Edge Maverick'. Really.

* The ''[[Star Wars]]'' game ''Masters Of Teräs Käsi'' features the martial art "Teräs Käsi" that's inexplicably and ungrammatically Finnish. It means something like "steel, hand". If you must have a Finnish title, try "Teräskäsi" for "hand of steel".

* ''[[Daikatana]]'' has this before you even install the game. The front cover features two prominent Japanese characters. They do, in fact, translate to "large sword", the same as Daikatana would. The problem? It spells "Daito", a much different style of sword. This gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect from the game.

* ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' has perfectly well spoken modern Turkish... for the decidedly European and Christian Templars.

** The residents of Facade also speak in a language that was apparently created by shuffling hiragana around, which sometimes makes it sound like actual Japanese.

* ''[[Pokémon Colosseum]]'' has characters whose names go from just slightly off normal names to a random string of letters.