Sokaku Mochizuki
They keep trying to make him cool.
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A Man Who Battles the Shura Inside
Ending
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Sokaku: Nnnnnggghhh! | Sokaku: Whooooaah! |
| Tung: What's wrong?! | Tung: What's with you ,fool? |
| Sokaku: R-Raijin is...aaaaaaaaggghhh! | Sokaku: It's the Thunder God! Gwaaaah! |
| Tung: It...it's too late! | Tung: It's too later for prayers. |
| Raijin: GEEHEEHEE....I WILL MAKE THIS WORLD INTO HELL... | Raijin: I'm gonna make your life hell! |
| Tung: Waaaah! He that fights and runs away-! | Tung: Yeah? I'm outta here , big boy! |
So this has tone problems. Line by line the basic translation is all right, but overall it gives entirely the wrong impression. The editor clearly got to this one, unlike a number of the endings.
There's a lot of yelling in this, which always looks kind of goofy in English. Please understand. I did my best, and I assume SNK did as well.
Tung's first line is very straightforward in Japanese, he's worried about Sokaku. In English, he's more putting Sokaku down.
"Raijin" does mean "Thunder God", so that checks out. I left it in Japanese for flavor, but I understand why that would've been a bad choice for an official product. For reference, Raijin is the big blue guy in Sokaku's S-Power move. The Japanese leaves off the verb, but the impression is that something terrible is happening. This somewhat gets across in English, but it sounds less urgent.
Tung sounds much calmer in English. Even without the typo, it sounds more like he thinks this is just deserts instead of something frightening.
Raijin speaks in a very distinctive way in Japanese. All katakana (often a sign of inhuman nature), an odd laugh (gigigi, which I modified a bit), and well, he's flashing. It's immediately obvious in Japanese that Sokaku lost control of his shura and has been consumed. In English, this is much less clear, and almost sounds like Sokaku is threatening Tung for some reason. I remember seeing it on the VGMuseum and not being able to make heads or tails of it. The threat is also much smaller scale: Raijin is going to ruin the entire world in Japanese, instead of just Tung's life.
The phrase Tung uses is "にげるが勝ち", which literally translated means "fleeing is winning". It's used in the same places English speakers would use "discretion is the better part of valor" or "he that fights and runs away lives to fight another day". I went with the latter. So yeah, he's fleeing for his life, which doesn't come across in the English at all. It sounds more like he's walking away from the crazy guy.
Win Quotes
vs Terry
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| You dazzle me! | You're too slick for me! |
I guess?
This is a weird enough thing for Sokaku to say that I wasn't sure I was right at first, but it's also straightforward enough I don't think I'm wrong. But yeah, he's saying Terry is too bright/dazzling for him. I guess "slick" could go in there, in the sense of being cool, but it doesn't feel quite right.
I dunno, man.
vs Andy
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Do not be blinded by the Shiranui's radiance! | Don't be tricked by the Shiranuis! |
This is close, but it loses the continuing thread of the Shiranui being in the light while the Mochizuki are in the darkness, which goes back to Fatal Fury 3. Still, he's basically warning Andy to not be led astray by the Shiranui, which is close enough.
vs Mai
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| The Shiranui successor, a woman? Don't make me laugh! | You , a Shiranui? What a joke! |
This drops a couple things. One is that Sokaku doesn't think Mai isn't a Shiranui, but that she's not a proper successor. I suspect that got dropped because of character limits. The other is that the reason he thinks Mai isn't a good successor is because she's a woman, which might be more due to American cultural mores. Maybe. Could also be character limits, but I think they had the room if they got creative.
But the idea of Sokaku putting Mai down for being unworthy is in there, and the specific "don't make me laugh/what a joke" is in there too. That's something.
vs Tung Fu Rue
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Do not push yourself, elder. | Hey , don't knock yourself out ,pops! |
Tone problems strike again.
Sokaku is very respectful towards Tung in Japanese. He usually speaks in a fairly archaic way, but here he uses an extra-obscure literary form of the verb "to do" just to drive the point home, as well as adding an honorific to "elderly person" when talking to Tung. A lot of people are polite towards Tung in RBS, but Sokaku goes the extra mile.
Problem is, there aren't a lot of good ways to politely call someone old in English. I did my best, but SNK just...well, did what SNK did back in the day. As a result, even though the basic idea is the same, Sokaku does not sound at all respectful in English. Kind of a shame.
vs Sokaku
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| You use shura as well...? Stop, now! | Just what is that getup? |
I guess they just wanted to avoid having to translate around shura again...? The Japanese line is Sokaku telling 2P to stop, possibly because using shura is dangerous (as the ending shows), and the English is just him making fun of 2P's clothes. It's completely changed, and the only reason I can think of is the shura in the Japanese line.
...except they didn't do that for other win lines involving shura, so I really don't know what happened here.
vs Billy
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Weapons are useless against my shura! | Weapons cannot stop a god! |
Like here, see.
Translating "shura" as "god" isn't the worst thing you could do, though the theologies don't quite match up. Still, the concept of a god gets pretty blurry across the whole of human history, and it's a nice short word to fit in the space provided.
The problem is, of course, that SNK has never had Sokaku talk about gods before, and by dropping the "my", it makes Sokaku sound like he thinks he's a god, not that he captures and controls demigods. So a pretty standard bit of trashtalk turns into megalomania worthy of a JRPG boss.
Translating "shura" as "demon" wouldn't necessarily help, but I think it would make it a bit more obvious.
vs Geese
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Yours is no common evil! | You're one evil psycho. Like me! |
...or maybe the editor just thought Sokaku was a bad guy. Well, that's not new.
The difference is obvious here. The Japanese is a straightforward statement on how bad Geese is, the English is Sokaku cheerfully equating them. It would be a decent, if flippant, translation without the "Like me!" on the end, but since it's there, well...
vs Krauser
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| You are no ordinary man! | Your moves are tough! |
I suppose that works, but it's flippant, as usual.
It's funny that Krauser, sovereign of the darkside, is apparently not evil.
vs Laurence
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| The stench of blood awakens the shura! | Blood awakens the god Shura! |
Wait, now you're talking about shura? Goddamit!
So yeah, now I guess it's okay to just straight-up say shura in English? There is a concession to comprehensions where the English specifies "the god Shura", which makes it sound more like Shura is the name of a particular god, not a class of demigods. So that's not super accurate. Still, it's not something they ever did before, and I wonder why this line in particular. Did the editor just not get to it? They're all over Sokaku in general, but maybe this line slipped through.
Minor point: the Japanese is specific that it's the smell of blood that awakens the shura, while the English just says blood. A bit of dropped specificity, though it's not all that important.
vs the Jin brothers
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| If this keeps on, you will be devoured by the dragon's desire for battle! | Prepare to enter the serpent , pal! |
This is...misleading.
In Japanese, Sokaku is warning the Jins about their possession problems. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that "the dragon" refers to their ancestor's spirits (which are all named ____ Dragon), and so he's saying that if they don't get that fixed, they'll be lost to their ancestor's spirits, which just keep wanting to fight. It kind of goes along with the idea that it's the ancestor's spirits that know martial arts, not necessarily the current Jins themselves...but SNK was confused on that point so I'm not too sure about that.
It doesn't look like the translator/editor understood the context here, and just kind of winged it. The verb is "to be wrapped up in, to be engulfed", so you can see where "to enter" came in. The word in Japanese is very clearly "dragon", so I really don't know where "serpent" came from except that dragons are usually portrayed as looking pretty snake-like. I guess the rest was then rewritten around those assumptions.
vs Yamazaki
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| You seem to be one who has also seen hell! | It looks like you've seen Hell! |
This is basically the same, I'm just long-winded.
The English does drop the idea that Yamazaki has "also" seen hell, which is a bit of a shame.
vs Mary
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| My apologies...shura hate women. | Sorry , I have sassy chicks! |
Well, that's an awkward typo.
The English works around shura again by having Sokaku hate "sassy chicks", rather than shura hating women in general. It changes his character, but the English was fairly committed to Sokaku coming off more villainous than in Japanese.
I don't know if hating women is a common shura thing or not, I'm not that good on Buddhist/Hindu theology.
vs others
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Calm yourself, my shura! | Quiet! You stand before a god! |
By now you can probably see where this came from, but it ends up wildly different from the original.
In Japanese, Sokaku is telling his shura to calm down after the fight. It's a very straightforward line. In English, he's telling his opponent to be quiet, and is back to the JRPG boss megalomania.
Well, at least the lat one's consistent.