I think this is one of these old fantasy tropes were the characters are ostensibly using a real world product, but because that product is extremely common and "feels" relatively modern, instead of using its real world name, you tweak it a little to make it sound fantasy and like this could be some fantasy drink rather than a cup of coffee.
Like, she was so angry, and so excited at the prospect of pulling out the cannons and blasting the thieves to pieces, that Garnet's safety completely left her mind as a concern. She gets really hyped for massive explosion and destruction of private and public property.
See, part of the problem with your constant negativity is that actually good observations like this one will fall through the cracks because you've so thoroughly poisoned the well.
Yes, it is VERY concerning that Brahne's reaction to Garnet's kidnapping was indiscriminate ordinance in order to take down the airship. It definitely shows a lack of regard for Garnet's physical wellbeing!
Yeah, that's a good point. From Queen Brahne's speech and body language in that scene, the impression I got is that she... Literally didn't think about it?
Like, she was so angry, and so excited at the prospect of pulling out the cannons and blasting the thieves to pieces, that Garnet's safety completely left her mind as a concern. She gets really hyped for massive explosion and destruction of private and public property.
Queen Brahne: Now listen here you CRETINS. Queen Brahne: What you PEASANTS fail to understand is that as queen we act with ROYAL PEROGATIVE. Queen Brahne: That these CRIMINALS should steal into the heart of OUR kingdom with such malicious intent as to kidnap OUR DAUGHTER- Queen Brahne: (Interrupting our favorite play, no less! *sniff*) Queen Brahne: -demands IMMEDIATE RETRIBUTION, lest the resolve and wherewithal of Alexandria fall under spurious question! Queen Brahne: Moreover, as it has clearly slipped your COMMON minds, we are QUEEN of Alexandria. Queen Brahne: Do you perchance think the royal inventory is lacking in POHENIX DOWNS? Queen Brahne: If we must KILL our daughter in order to SAVE her, then we shall not hesitate! Queen Brahne: It shall serve as an important life lesson.
安息日 "ansokujitsu", which directly translates to "rest day", but is almost always used to mean "sabbath" in RL. Speculating wildly, I think this might be a case where the game writers wanted to indicate a weekly "rest day", but did not want to use the names of the RL days of the week (eg 日曜日 for "Sunday").
Then again, I've not seen 安息日 used to mean anything other than "sabbath", since it's an uncommon way to write "day of rest". So maybe "sabbath" is the proper translation.
It's mostly a confusing name to me because in my mind "sabbath" is heavily associated with Abrahamic religions, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to use it in the context of a fantasy world with fictional religion, but your explanation makes sense.
No, I think it's more politeness. Using 変 to describe a person, or anything related to people (clothes, mannerisms, accents, etc.), is basically the equivalent of calling them "weird." Which may be accurate but is a lot blunter and less polite than euphemisms like "different" or "odd."
Fair, yeah. I suppose I was too accustomed to every other character using 変 "hen" (or 変わった "kawatta"), including just about every NPC in Dali reacting to Dagger.
"Fushigi" still feels a bit too exotic a term for regular use, possibly to emphasize just how polite Dagger is being. Other options which come to mind are 珍しい "mezurashii" or (possibly more blunt) 妙 "myou".
I never thought about this, but it's definitely one of those ubiquitous issues that trip up a lot of translations from Japanese to English: the default for Japanese for listing out items or pointing out objects in images is going from right to left.
(I don't know which other East Asian cultures this also applies to; I've always learned left to right, but I'm Indonesian Chinese, and I can't tell which parts of my habits are Indonesian and which are Chinese.)
Also this might be the game trying to match the buttons on the Playstation controller, with the X being more on the "left" (bottom) and O being on the right. Still, given the method of interaction is via the battle interface (rather than a QTE), that doesn't really help much.
Did you meet her? If you choose to wait, and then actually waited for a bit - I'm not sure how long, but it's no more than a minute, I think - she actually shows up.
Spoilered in case Omicron wants to see for himself:
She calls herself "Part-Timer Mary" (or Marie or some such equivalent), of Item Shop Vega. I have no idea if this will turn up later in the game.
I vaguely recall "Item Shop Vega" being mentioned when I visited the North Gate as well, but I didn't take a screenshot of it, so I don't remember the context.
It's mostly a confusing name to me because in my mind "sabbath" is heavily associated with Abrahamic religions, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to use it in the context of a fantasy world with fictional religion, but your explanation makes sense.
Ah, yeah, I should have mentioned 安息日 does refer to the Abrahamic sabbath, at least as per the usual translation. Again, I don't know the history or context behind that translation, since as mentioned the literal translation is "rest day".
I suppose this is similar to the examples from earlier games, like 教皇 "kyoukou" being used to refer to the Catholic Pope in RL, but turned into "Archbishop" or "High Confessor" in the Final Fantasy games.
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Unrelated: I forgot to mention it in my earlier post, but I noticed a fairly clear (if inconsequential) mistranslation in the game.
One of the kids in Dali, specifically the one who barges into the weapon shop while Dagger is there, is called "Pasty Yacha" in English.
The descriptor ("Yacha" is correctly transliterated) in Japanese is わんぱく小僧 "wanpaku kozou". "Kozou" is a slightly condescending way of saying "young boy" or "brat". "Wanpaku", written here in hiragana, can also be written 腕白, and means "naughty" or "mischievous".
So Yacha should have been labelled "Naughty Yacha", not "Pasty Yacha".
My guess is the translator was not familiar with わんぱく, and since the kanji version consists of the individual kanji for "arm" and "white", assumed it was referring to "white/pale skin tone". Hence "pasty".
EDIT: A few more (non-translation) comments I thought of while re-reading the playthrough post.
"Dutiful Daughter Slai" is holding what I'm pretty sure is the local restaurant/tavern; a menu near her counter advertises prices for pickles, vegetable stir-fry, pumpkin salad, dried potatoes, kabobs, and "Lindblum pickles." That's an interesting look at the local gastronomy; it looks like people are particularly found of pickles, and Dali cuisine is heavily vegetarian. In theory, even the kabobs (or kebab) could be vegetarian. In any case, her store isn't open yet, but Slai can sell us basic medicine nonetheless.
For further context, all these dishes are the classic "drinking snacks", like beer nuts: stuff to nibble on while drinking alcohol in a tavern. The "kabobs" are kushiyaki, so this is probably another instance similar to the "Korean BBQ Plate" back in FFVII, where a well-known and common Japanese food was not nearly as well-known in English-speaking countries, and so the translator had to come up with a close enough equivalent.
(I'd have translated it as "grilled skewers", but I admit that's really boring.)
Notably, not listed in the menu: any type of alcohol.
As a note of characterization, the way that Steiner oscillates between being respectful and authoritarian is kind of fascinating. He just threatened this man with expropriating him, but he can't help but salute him and thank him. It may be overly charitable but I get the impression that Steiner's threat are more the behavior he thinks a cop knight should use to get his way, while helping young shopkeepers with her chores, sharing coffee with an old man, and thanking others for their help is the good heart locked in a bunch of rusty, clanking armor.
To add on, Steiner does seem to have an envy/inferiority complex, where he knows he's a Proper Knight, and he wants to be respected as a Proper Knight... but Alexandria sees the Pluto Knights as an irrelevant group of nobodies and incompetents.
So Steiner clings onto his perceived Duty and Responsibilities as a knight, because they're central to his self-esteem. His threats about bringing down the state apparatus of Alexandria onto people he's interrogating are clearly bluster, and I personally doubt Steiner can call down the authority of Alexandria.
Even Steiner going "I am Adelbert Steiner of the Knights of Pluto" leads to the Dali villagers going "Knights of Pluto...? I might have heard about them, or maybe not?", and they clearly don't recognize him. As you say, Steiner acts like he thinks a knight should act, which probably has as much relation to reality as whatever the equivalent of pop culture is in the setting.
All of which is also undermined by Steiner being a good person at heart, and also easily distracted, so his yelling "I am a KNIGHT of ALEXANDRIA" can be interrupted at will by offering coffee.
But the irony here is that if anything, Vivi helped distract the whole village from Dagger, with people being much more concerned with the rogue black mage "doll" wandering the streets than with the noble girl slumming it with the common folk.
So… Who gave us away and allowed Black Waltz N°2 to find us? I'm genuinely not sure at this point. It seems like everyone who looked at us suspiciously did so because of Vivi, no one seems to have noticed Dagger as anything but a girl talking a little strange, despite Steiner's best efforts.
My guess at this stage? Her pendant carries a tracking device.
Honestly I also think neither Steiner nor Vivi were responsible for the team being tracked down by the Black Waltzes. If it wasn't Dagger's pendant having a tracking device (or being tracked), it could be Zorn and Thorn stalking them and calling in Black Waltz reinforcements via insertion drop-pods or something.
As far as I can tell, nobody (at least in Dali) knows about Princess Garnet being "kidnapped". They might not even know what Garnet looks like, or have seen her at all. Steiner going around saying "I must escort a highly important person to Alexandria Castle" is seen with mere bemusement, and Dagger being all polite and aristocratic in speech just gets "what a weird girl" and little else.
Meanwhile, Vivi appears to be tagged as "just" an escaped doll. Possibly a bit more animated than usual, and acting a bit strange, but to the Dali villagers it's only "one of the products fell off the wagon, get it back to the delivery line". Definitely not the sort of thing to report back to Alexandria Castle about.
I think this is one of these old fantasy tropes were the characters are ostensibly using a real world product, but because that product is extremely common and "feels" relatively modern, instead of using its real world name, you tweak it a little to make it sound fantasy and like this could be some fantasy drink rather than a cup of coffee.
It would be amusingly ironic if the Japanese script tried to make the setting exotic by having "coshee" instead of coffee, and then when translated into English, it ends up being plain "coffee" anyway.
It would be amusingly ironic if the Japanese script tried to make the setting exotic by having "coshee" instead of coffee, and then when translated into English, it ends up being plain "coffee" anyway.
This got me curious, so I went and looked up the French translation of the game, and it seems they had the same conclusion: In French, the drink Morrid loves is "kafè," which is phonetically similar (but not identical) to café, the actual word for coffee.
While I'm at it, other translation notes: the oglops are "puluches," which sounds a little like "peluche," the word for a stuffed animal. The interaction between Dagger and the "granny of the field" has the granny use slang words, and those are what Dagger is getting tripped up by (using "fourguer" instead of "vendre"), so it's more "Dagger has never heard commoners/rural folks speak" than "Dagger doesn't know agriculture." Pasty Yacha is "Yacha le turbulent," where turbulent is a word for people who are very agitated and cause trouble, so closer in meaning to the original Naughty Yacha. Zidane's nickname for Steiner is "papi," equivalent to the English "gramps," so more accurate to the Japanese, but for my money "Rusty" is an improvement here.
Monster names remain where the FR translation is most baffling. Whether the quizz monster is supposed to be Ragtime Mouse or Ragtime Mouth, the translator appears to have completely missed it, and the monster is instead "Rataïme," which is approximately a phonetic spelling of "Ragtime" in French and has no other meaning. The Black Waltzes are "Valseur 1" and "Valseur 2," valseur meaning "Waltzer," but without the "Black" part the fact that their name is alluding to their connection to Black Mages is completely lost.
So, given that FFIX has the best Italian translation I've ever seen in a videogame, in way that is not even close - the way they manage to include a multitude of different accents and dialects without ever making things confusing and often helping make things even more charming than you'd expect is wonderful - what's your opinion of the French one? I imagine it's better than FFVIII, but how much, and how good is it in general, from your point of view?
Monster names remain where the FR translation is most baffling. Whether the quizz monster is supposed to be Ragtime Mouse or Ragtime Mouth, the translator appears to have completely missed it, and the monster is instead "Rataïme," which is approximately a phonetic spelling of "Ragtime" in French and has no other meaning. The Black Waltzes are "Valseur 1" and "Valseur 2," valseur meaning "Waltzer," but without the "Black" part the fact that their name is alluding to their connection to Black Mages is completely lost.
Ragtime Mouse in Japanese is Ragutaimu Mausu (ラグタイムマウス), so I think the intended translation is Mouse, not Mouth. FWIW it's Ragtime Rat in Italian, which does sound a bit better IMO.
So, given that FFIX has the best Italian translation I've ever seen in a videogame, in way that is not even close - the way they manage to include a multitude of different accents and dialects without ever making things confusing and often helping make things even more charming than normal - what's your opinion of the French one? I imagine it's better than FFVIII, but how much, and how good is it in general, from your point of view?
So far I'd call it "serviceable but unexciting." Better than VIII in being more accurate rather than wildly retooling the script for no reason, but it's not particularly wowing me.
There's one bit I'll be getting to in the next update that I feel differently about, I'll explain why when we get there.
Ragtime Mouse in Japanese is Ragutaimu Mausu (ラグタイムマウス), so I think the intended translation is Mouse, not Mouth. FWIW it's Ragtime Rat in Italian, which does sound a bit better IMO.
If I may bring up FFT again, according to the FF wiki the remaining Lucavi were originally meant to be Duma for Taurus (he shows up in FF14), Zebbeb for Cancer, Sel for Libra, Rophochehe for Sagittarius, Cheraub for Aquarius and Leviathan for Pisces.
So they'd be based on Dumah, Beelzebub, Rofocale, Cherubim, and of course Leviathan... but who's Sel meant to be?
My main guess would be it's a shortening of Samael, but it could also be Selena which 'Sel' is a real-life nickname for. With Japanese l/r mixing, it might be short for 'Seraph', since Hashmal and Cherub are also there
If I may bring up FFT again, according to the FF wiki the remaining Lucavi were originally meant to be Duma for Taurus (he shows up in FF14), Zebbeb for Cancer, Sel for Libra, Rophochehe for Sagittarius, Cheraub for Aquarius and Leviathan for Pisces.
So they'd be based on Dumah, Beelzebub, Rofocale, Cherubim, and of course Leviathan... but who's Sel meant to be?
My main guess would be it's a shortening of Samael, but it could also be Selena which 'Sel' is a real-life nickname for. With Japanese l/r mixing, it might be short for 'Seraph'
Considering we have "Zebbeb" for Beelzebub and "Cuchrain" for Cú Chulainn, "Sel" can be any sort of indicator, assuming it's even spelled correctly. My mind veered towards Salpsan, for some reason.
If I may bring up FFT again, according to the FF wiki the remaining Lucavi were originally meant to be Duma for Taurus (he shows up in FF14), Zebbeb for Cancer, Sel for Libra, Rophochehe for Sagittarius, Cheraub for Aquarius and Leviathan for Pisces.
So they'd be based on Dumah, Beelzebub, Rofocale, Cherubim, and of course Leviathan... but who's Sel meant to be?
My main guess would be it's a shortening of Samael, but it could also be Selena which 'Sel' is a real-life nickname for. With Japanese l/r mixing, it might be short for 'Seraph'
... Oh, that explains why there's just a random boss named Rofocale in the first Return to Ivalice raid. I was unsure where he came from between him not being in Tactics, 14 never explaining who or what he was, and even his Triple Triad card description being 'This guy was just sorta there, he talks like he's some sorta general but no historical record, reliable or otherwise, has his name in it.'
Not entirely sure why they put him in, though, nor why they gave him a Triple Triad card just to have some 'Man we don't know who this guy is or where he came from' text on it - it's not like the other RtI raids have two cards, either, it's just This One Guy who gets an extra one.
Some of my other guesses are Sel might be a spelling of Set, the Egyptian chaos god who was interestingly syncretised with none other than Yahweh. Or it could just be El, another name of Yahweh, since it's also one letter away
Some of my other guesses are Sel might be a spelling of Set, the Egyptian chaos god who was interestingly syncretised with none other than Yahweh. Or it could just be El, another name of Yahweh, since it's also one letter away
Ragtime Mouse in Japanese is Ragutaimu Mausu (ラグタイムマウス), so I think the intended translation is Mouse, not Mouth. FWIW it's Ragtime Rat in Italian, which does sound a bit better IMO.
I think this is one of these old fantasy tropes were the characters are ostensibly using a real world product, but because that product is extremely common and "feels" relatively modern, instead of using its real world name, you tweak it a little to make it sound fantasy and like this could be some fantasy drink rather than a cup of coffee.
I think the funniest example of this was in that cartoon Kim Possible, where for some inscrutable reason the executives told the writers they couldn't use the phrase "chocolate milk", so instead they (most precisely, the main villain) referred to such product as "CocoMoo".
