Mother 3 hype
by earthbound kid on 2006年04月21日 04:27 AM
@ Home / HelloWorldProject / ENTRY21 (edit, history)
My level of Japanese ability is a deeply held secret, even from myself.
People ask me sometimes, “Have you take a Japanese Language Proficiency test?” No. “Why not? You’re fluent, right?”
I dunno. I really, really don’t know. I guess I’m afraid to find out that I don’t actually speak Japanese at all.
The other day, a coworker said, “[Boy, I’ve lost some weight, eh?]”
Only Japanese doesn’t bother to use pronouns where it doesn’t need to, so it was more like, “[Boy, lost some weight, eh?]”
So, I figured she was talking about me not herself, and I brushed it off, as one should with compliments. Then I had to play it off when she said more, and it became clearer that she was talking about herself. Not agreeing with someone’s self-reported weight loss? Man, that’s gotta be impolite. This made me wonder, “Is this even an allowed topic in English? You can say, ‘You’ve lost some weight,’ but can you say, ‘I’ve lost some weight?’ That’s impolite, right? Isn’t it that you’re only allowed to say, ‘I gained some weight,’ not the reverse?”
The Japanese, of course, have no beef with point out people’s body sizes, though such a thing is considered quite impolite in English. This has put me in the middle of untranslatable conversations before.
Recently, I’ve been reading things like blogs by MoOog Yamamoto and Miho Hatori, but then I wonder, am I really reading these or is it all the work of my drag and drop dictionary software?
My favorite TV show right now is the Chinese conversation class on the publicly funded channel. I liked the premises of the first two seasons I saw — a Chinese girl is a nurse talking to a giant toy Giant Panda about Chinese grammar; the same Chinese girl is now in a bar and being hit on by a Japanese guy, who then has to run off to learn what she just said — but I haven’t been digging on this season’s theme — a business dude works at a magazine in China, but doesn’t know Chinese until his coworkers teach him. My favorite part of the show is how I can’t understand any of the Chinese, but I understand all of the Japanese without even thinking about it. I love when the Chinese word for something is unpronounceable, but the Japanese word for the same thing is something obviously stolen from English like, “passuporto.” Times like that make me glad I learned Japanese.
The other day, I was thinking, “it’s all translation.” All interpretations of anything are translations. If two people communicate, the interpretations that go into their heads as a result are translations of their partner’s words. Some interpretations are wrong, and some are better, but none is perfect. The reason is, no two people have the same brains, so no two people have the mappings of ideas inside of them, which is to say no two people have the exact same language in the strictest sense. So all ideas have to be mapped from one brain to another, which means translation. However, as we all know, perfect translation is necessarily impossible. A translation can be good or bad, adequate or inadequate, but the only perfect translation of all the possible nuances in a text is the original text itself.
So, MOTHER 3 is dropping the day after tomorrow, and I’m reading the hype online. Every week, they put up great teasers for the game, like:
こもちカンガルーザメ
おやの パワーのみなもとは
こどもからの おうえんだ。
てきながら あっぱれの
ちょっと いいはなし。
Joey-holding Sharkaroo
The source of the mother’s power
is the encouragement of the joey.
While they are monsters,
this is still a pretty admirable story.
Then for the last promotional item, they added this handwritten note from the creator of the series:
I read it, as well as I can, which is to say, who knows how well, then I looked at one of the English language fansites hyping the game and they had a link to some translation that said the creator wanted the game to be released to the world, but for now, just the Japanese version would drop. And I was like, huh? I don’t remember it saying anything like that. I worried for a moment, but sure enough, I was right. A few hours later, the site posted a translation that basically synchs up with my memory:
MOTHER 3 is a playground with plenty of room for your imagination to run free. The more you think about it, the greater MOTHER 3 will become. The more you feel it, the deeper it’ll become. The more fun you have, the more you’ll grow.
April 2006
→Shigesato Itoi
This is basically what it looked like in my head before.
I’m really encouraged by his message. He’s saying that the more you think about MOTHER 3, the deeper it becomes inside of you. This was really true of his last game. In the end of that, he had you literally praying for your characters to win a fight. I think the same process happens when I translate some texts. The thing about “the Joey-holding Sharkaroo admirably drawing strength from its child” really touches me in a way, but I think that the reason it does is because I had to put effort into understanding what was being said at all. This gets back to a basic truth of videogames in general: the harder the game is, the more rewarding it feels to beat it honestly.
So, here’s hoping that the text of MOTHER 3 will be the perfect blend of difficult but beatable and in so doing draw me into it. I’ll let y’all know. Expect reviews someday.