Cut and Paste Translation/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Cut and Paste Translations in Video Games include:

  • A rare positive example of this is Decap Attack, where a previously so-so Platform Game licensed from an obscure anime became one of the silliest, strangest and most bizarre games to hit the Sega Genesis.
    • Power Blade is a similar case: not only was Steve Treiber, the Mega Man-like player character of the original Japanese version, was swapped out for an Ahnold-type dude named Nova, the game was made both more playable and more complex.
  • Back in the early days of Atlus, they localised the cult hit Shin Megami Tensei: Persona as Revelations: Persona by scrubbing the script of any Japanese referents, redrawing the characters with different skin tones (including making one into a jive-talking black sidekick), and trying (inconsistently) to relocate the setting from Japan to a strange America full of Japanese landmarks. This gets confusing in Persona 2: Eternal Punishment when several characters from the first game make an appearance, retaining their American names (for continuity purposes) but looking a bit different (the hero in Persona had an earring in the Japanese version and looked Angstier, and when did Ellen dye her hair black?!). They also removed an entire ten-hour Bonus Dungeon for reasons unknown, though as part of it is translated, it's likely this was simply cut to speed up the localization process.
    • Atlus tried to make up for their blunders in the first game to some extent by pretending Nate/Kei never got a last name change, Guido Sardenia was an alias (as they couldn't rename him Takihisa due to the spoken cutscenes calling him Guido), so they broke even and established his original name was Guido Kandori, as well as few other minor changes to compensate. It's still a much messier Retcon that Nyarlathotep was manipulating things from the beginning, as his name was changed to Massacre for the US release.
    • The real strange part is that Atlus today is one of the most respected publishers in the West for its studious attention to detail and its respect for the titles it brings out. Obviously they learned their lesson, as the US release of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment made no attempt to hide the fact that the game was in Japan, and recently the PSP remake was released in the US, with better translation and the entire game translated.
  • In Japan, Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere was a fast-paced flight arcade game with highly competent teammates, a deeply involving, character-driven, completely non-linear storyline, featuring five young pilots caught in the middle of a struggle between two megacorporations, a guerrilla faction hell-bent on digitalizing everybody's minds, and a secret peacekeeping force where some dark monkey business is going on deep inside; all of that interspersed with beautiful, sleek anime cutscenes by Production I.G. When the game was released in the West, the editors somehow thought Western gamers were a bunch of hotheads who just want mindless, fast-paced action and slaughter (and weren't willing to risk the huge expense of translating a game that had underperformed at retail compared to the previous entry in the series), and everything that made the Japanese version stand out from the rest was horribly destroyed. The truly intelligent teammates were removed, making all your missions solo. The original plot was replaced with a bland, highly generic story about a peacekeeping force who just jumps in and ruins enemy stuff every time something bad happens. The anime cutscenes were replaced with text slideshows that just threw an Info Dump on what was going on. The entire "story tree" was replaced with a completely linear plot that just goes from point A to point B. Even Dision's quest for causing massive mayhem was Retconned with a computer AI that suddenly went haywire! For once, a case where They Changed It, Now It Sucks was true.
  • XS Games bought the rights to two unrelated Bullet Hell shooters, Gunbird and Shikigami no Shiro (Castle of Shikigami), and released them as Mobile Light Force 1 and 2, respectively. The original Japanese scripts were tossed out completely and replaced with an English script that made no sense, and the original covers were supplanted in favor of a Charlie's Angels-style cover that had absolutely nothing to do with the game. After great anguish from fans, XS Games brought over Castle Shikigami 2 uncut, though the translation was still filled with Engrish. The third game was brought over by a different publisher, Aksys Games.
  • Then there's the first Ranma ½ game, which was edited into Street Combat, changing the premise and removing all Japanese elements and renaming and redrawing all the characters completely differently.
  • Drakengard had almost all plot points pointing to incest removed, and everything related to pedophilia removed. Some other parts of the script were also gummed up and rendered incoherent, such as the scene leading in to the third ending.
  • Several Puyo Puyo games got this treatment, being reworked into games starring Dr. Robotnik on the Genesis/Megadrive or Kirby on the SNES. These cases weren't quite as bad, as they still turned out to be good games in their own right.
    • The Puyo Puyo franchise still lives on to this day under its original title, even after the demise of Compile, the company who created the series.
    • A similar thing happened to the Panel de Pon series, released in Japan with cute shoujo-style characters. It was released in the US, with characters from Yoshi's Island, as Tetris Attack, even though the games don't have anything to do with Tetris.
    • Perhaps the most well-known act of cramming mascots into ported oddities is the US version of Super Mario Bros. 2, which is a sprite hack (with other changes/improvements) of Doki Doki Panic. The proper Mario 2 epitomized Nintendo Hard—it eventually reached the US as "the Lost Levels".
      • On the plus side, either due to Miyamoto's involvement with the original Doki Doki Panic or the fact the title was later released in Japan, many of the monsters from Super Mario Bros. 2 have joined Mario's Rogues Gallery. Bob-ombs were in the immediately following game, Super Mario Bros 3. Yoshi's Island featured Shy Guys, and most Mario games since then have featured at least a few enemies who originated in Subcon. Furthermore, in Super Smash Bros.. Melee and Brawl, Princess Peach has a few abilities based on her appearance in Super Mario Bros. 2 namely her ability to throw vegetables and hover in midair.
      • 2 can best be summed up as a game that got a cut and paste translation, but ended up better than the actual sequel and Nintendo went Sure Why Not and made it canon.
  • The translators of Earnest Evans moved the year from 1925 to 1985, made Earnest Evans into Earnest Evans III, tore out the entire story, made Annet his mom instead of his girlfriend, and changed Al Capone into Brady Tressider. Of course, the game was reverse-ported from the Sega CD to the Sega Genesis cartridge, so a lot had to go.
  • Probotector for the Mega Drive, the European localization of Contra: Hard Corps not only replaced all of the humanoid characters with robots (much like the previous Probotector games for the Nintendo platforms), it also turned the plot of the game into a barely coherent mess, by replacing references to the enemy being an Earth-based terrorist organization with some nonsense about "Alien Rebels", as well as downplaying the role of Dr. Geo Mandrake so he was no longer a traitor.
  • For the American version of Streets of Rage 3, the main characters were recolored for the purpose of having "gender-neutral" colors, female enemies have more clothing, and the story is completely rewritten, changing the plot from one revolving around nuclear weapons to one about robotic duplicates of city officials.
  • There's a lot of Internet Backdraft related to Working Designs about whether or not their scripts fall under this or Woolseyism. They were notorious for slipping in an ungodly amount of pop culture references, as well as playing fast and loose with the dialogue in the games, which made keeping track of changes in the various Lunar ports difficult just because the player never knew whether a change was added for the new version or just added to the English version. On the other hand, this notoriety is also what made their games appealing. The Clinton joke in the original Lunar: Eternal Blue is legendary, to the point where many mourned its loss when the PS 1 version came out and they had updated it to something more relevant.
  • While otherwise a decent game, the poor translation effort put forth in Warsong, the Genesis version of Langrisser, is said to have contributed to its low sales and the prevention of any other game in the Langrisser series to be released outside Japan.
  • Nintendo of America's self-imposed decency guidelines scrubbed almost all references to religion, Nazis, sex, and gratuitous violence from the NES & SNES.
    • If you didn't beat it, you probably didn't know Bionic Commando was about stickin' it to Hitler.
    • EarthBound took a number of edits, but more notably so did its Japan-only NES predecessor Mother (AKA Earthbound Zero). Since the US port team fixed bugs and added features as they meddled, that officially unreleased translation / edit was used in Mother 1+2 for the GBA.
    • Oddly averted in Harvest Moon, which features an apparently unaltered church complete with pastor and gigantic gold cross.
  • Germany is infamous for its game edits. Nazi symbolism is verboten, so games like BloodRayne (set in Nazi Germany) get set in Ruritania with we-swear-they're-not-swastikas everywhere.
    • "They're just machines" is common there, too. The back page of the official guide to the N64's Turok: Dinosaur Hunter touted the PAL-version replacement of all the human mooks with robot soldiers as a feature.
    • One of the worst examples is the removal of Nimdok and his section in the PC game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. What makes this seriously stupid is that the game wasn't changed to not require his section to be completed to beat the game, making the game Unwinnable.
    • This German requirement has led to the international versions of many strategy games set in WW 2 using the imperial German flag and symbols instead of the Nazi ones, and replacing Hitler with a fictional character. This of course leads to Unfortunate Implications as it can appear to be historical revisionism and claiming the Nazis never existed.
  • The German releases of Command & Conquer changed everyone in the whole series into robots, but Generals was by far the worst in this regard:
    • Every face was cyborgified.
    • All voice samples were modified to make them sound more like robots.
    • Blood was changed to green.
    • The GLA suicide bomber was replaced by a bomb with wheels, which inexplicably starts talking once you put it into a car. Oops.
      • All this was parodied by AH Dot Com the Series, whose German mercenaries have a small army of "Cyborg Robots With Green Blood" who they called upon when required to fight for civilisations so squeamish they faint at the sight of real humans fighting.
  • While we're talking about German versions, the German version of Half Life not only changes all enemy soldiers to robots but also removed all blood and gore and made it so that instead of dying when shot, the science team would just calmly sit down while shaking their heads in disappointment before fading away.
  • Dynamite Headdy removed all dialogue except for the tutorial segments and the end of Scene 4 from the US version of the game. What was once an intentionally silly but coherent plot becomes an incomprehensible mess that's barely discernable past random action sequences because of this.
    • In the original Japanese version, if you enter the tutorial segments, you'd be asked if you want to practice, which is nice if you have second thoughts about doing it. In the US version, once you enter the room, there's no turning back. And you don't get any dialogue if you fail these attempts. At least they had the sense to change the ending in light of the dialogue removal: in the US version, Smiley rejoices upon seeing Heather, who turns to Headdy and glomps him. During the ending demo, Headdy sees Heather off with the rest of his friends. In the Japanese version, Smily pins himself to Headdy's face as Fingy looks on. In the ending demo, only Headdy's friends see Fingy off, as Headdy struggles to get Smily off his face.
  • The European and American versions of Magical Drop III removed a lot of things present in the Japanese version. The endless mode no longer has dan rankings, characters now use generic "I'm gonna beat you!"-style dialogue before each versus matchup, plot-related cutscenes have been removed, and characters no longer have individual voices—there's about three in the whole game (one in the American version), with each voice being shared by multiple characters.
  • How about Sonic CD? Sega of America delayed the US release by several months for the purpose of replacing 75% of the soundtrack, most likely due to Sampling issues as the Japanese sound track used a lot of 'em (Prime example if you don't believe that: Listen to the Japanese boss theme and then to "Work That Sucker To Death" by Xavier.). Even Spencer Nielsen, the composer working on behalf of Sega of America, sympathized with irate fans.
  • The Twinbee platformer spinoff Rainbow Bell Adventures was released in both Japan and Europe. The Japanese version featured an overworld map with many, many optional stages and potential paths to the end, and multiple endings depending on how much of the game you actually cleared before taking on the final boss. The European version stripped out all but one of the endings and made the game completely linear.
  • In Chrono Trigger, the legendary sword Granleon was renamed Masamune in the English translation. Although this doesn't seem like a very bad change (after all, Masamune is a pretty cool name and shows up as the name of a powerful sword in most Squaresoft games), but it does cause some problems.
    • In most Squaresoft games, the Masamune is either a katana or a sword that looks like a katana. However, the Masamune in Chrono Trigger is definitely not a katana. There are plenty of katanas in the game but the Masamune is not one of them.
    • The Masamune contains two brothers named Masa and Mune (or Gran and Leon in Japanese) who are Anthropomorphic Personifications of the swordsmith Melchior's hopes and dreams. Later on, you find out they have a sister named Doreen (Dream in Japan). By going to the right place, at the right time, with the right lead character, you can obtain an accessory that allows you to perform a Triple Tech that summons Masa and Mune... as well as their sister! The name of this attack is GrandDream since Doreen is helping her brothers with the attack (Gran + Dream instead of Gran + Leon). Unfortunately, when the Granleon is named the Masamune and Gran's name is Masa, the name of the tech sounds cool, but loses its meaning.
    • Since the Granleon is still called the Masamune in Chrono Cross, it causes problems there too. After you defeat a Bonus Boss who is being controlled by the now evil Masamune, Doreen shows up, and scolds her brothers. Then all three of them combine their powers to change the Masamune from a sword into a swallow (Serge's weapon type). In Japan, this weapon was called Grand Dream, once again signifying that the brothers are being joined by Doreen and also giving a nice shout out to a fairly obscure ability from the first game. In America, this weapon gets the cheese-tastic name Mastermune.
    • The DS remake of Chrono Trigger attempts to correct the Grand Dream attack issue. Unfortunately, it does so by renaming it Mastermune, which repairs the Shout-Out in Chrono Cross but still sounds incredibly cheesy.
  • In Um Jammer Lammy, a level taking place in Hell was relocated to a desert island for fear of offending religious types. The European versions got to stay in Hell, though.
  • Pretty much any instruction manual written by Konami of America's localization staff during the NES era and most of the SNES era, which usually changed the plots of the games and renamed all the enemy characters with incredibly lame puns. The changes usually never affected the games themselves, as many games at the time were lacking in-game dialogue at the time and when they did, Konami would often forget to actually change the plot of the game, leading to various game to manual discrepancies.
    • The most infamous example would be the NES version of Metal Gear. The plot within the game itself was mostly kept unchanged, but the manual identified the antagonist as a "Colonel Vermon CaTaffy", a clear pastiche of Lybian socialist leader "Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi". Its obvious that the writer of the manual never actually finished the game.
      • Or simply didn't want to spoil it?
    • Snake's Revenge, the NES sequel to Metal Gear, is an ever odder case. The game was released only in America and Europe, so the English manual has no Japanese version to be compared with. Even then it still manages to be inconsistent with the game itself, as the manual identifies the villain as a middle east dictator named "Higharolla Kockmamia", another pastiche (this time of Ayatollah Khomeini; at least not Hideo Kojima), but the actual bad guy is revealed to be a cyborg version of Big Boss in the actual game. Additionally, the manual claims that Jennifer "X" (Snake's female contact within the enemy base) is "rumored to be related to Ginger from Gilligan's Island".
      • ... now that's a crossover I want to see.
    • When the first Game Boy Gradius game was translated in America, the plot of the game was changed from a "Aliens are attacking us!"-style blurb to ridiculous crap about chasing down a criminal called "King Nemesis". While the Gradius series was never plot-heavy in the first place, the manual of this game has to be seen to be believed.
      • In the SNES conversion of Gradius III, "bosses" became "Mayors", and several bosses got renamed:[1] QB2B, Monarch,[2] Ice Ice,[3] Grim,[4] among others. Worst of all, the Vic Viper gets renamed to the "M.A.X."
      • The American manual for Life Force identifies the planet-devouring being of Zelos as the child of a "Ma & Pa Deltoid", as well as switching the names of Intruder (the dragon) and Cruiser Tetran (the core ship with the four tentacles).
    • In addition to having the cut-scenes actually removed from the first NES game, the manuals of the early Contra games actually changed the plot for each game as well, placing them in the present instead of the future. The manual for the original Contra, which was actually set in the fictional Galuga islands near New Zealand, sets the game in South America instead, while the manual of Operation C, which was originally about Bill Rizer fighting against an unknown superpower in the Japanese version, was changed by identifying the antagonist as another alien invader named Black Viper. While Contra III kept the futuristic setting of the game, it changed the identities of the main characters from Bill and Lance into their descendants, "Jimbo" and "Sully". The enemy characters were also given sillier names such as "Jagger Froid" and the "Babalu Destructoid Mechanism". Oddly enough, the manuals for the European Probotector games had more accurate translations, changing the text only to take into account that the main characters were robots.
  • The Super NES port of Wolfenstein 3D was given the No Swastikas treatment, and the Big Bad was changed from Hitler to "Staatmeister".
    • A longstanding rumor claims that the creators of Wolfenstein were so offended by this, that they actually gave the game source code to Wisdom Tree, a company that produced Christian video games, who in turn made Super 3D Noah's Ark, the only unlicensed SNES game in existence. While not believed to be true - it's more likely that Wisdom Tree was a normal code licensee - the id software staff did seem to know that the game was going to be an unlicensed release, and were apparently okay with that, at the least.
  • The MMORPG Digimon Battle's text was pretty much translated using Google Translator. The website's just as bad.
  • Much to the ire of long-time fans of the series, Sega's Yakuza 3 was brought heavily under the cutting knife in an effort to excise elements that "would not resonate with Western audiences." This includes the removal of a string of quests involving the management of a hostess bar, elimination of such alarmingly Japanese games as shogi and mahjong, and the tossing aside of massage parlors, a number of optional missions, and a rather deep trivia game. Because many of these events have appeared in prior Yakuza games, the changes have led many to believe the game was unnecessarily cu
  • Dragon Quest IV's DS remake had the "party talk" feature removed from the US version. Before you dismiss this, this constituted enough of the game's dialogue that the US version's ROM is a full 18 megabytes smaller than the Japanese one.
    • Dragon Quest IV DS and onward also have a huge number of Dub Name Changes. Most are pointless, but harmless, but there are also several that ruin Mythology Gags and Continuity Nods to other games in the series, by using a completely different name from the previous releases that are being referenced.
  • The U.S. version of the NES game Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cut out two levels from the Japanese version and replaced them with copies of other stages, which makes the Japanese version better. "Kind of like eating a skunk versus eating a skunk with a little salt on it."
  • When Magical Doropie was translated as The Krion Conquest, the story stopped at the intro, beyond which all cutscenes were removed and the ending became A Winner Is You. This only made the game look even more like a ripoff of Mega Man than it already was.
  1. ↑ click hottips for original names
  2. ↑ Crystal Core
  3. ↑ Big Core mkII
  4. ↑ Derringer Core
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