Overthinking the apocalypse

One of the biggest reliefs ever for me was to find out that native English speakers often can't make out the lyrics of songs either. That native English speakers also feel like modern TV is better watched with subtitles. In the same way, one of the biggest reliefs was finding out that native Japanese gamer also have no fucking clue what the hell Amakusa Shirō-Tokisada is mumbling on Samurai Shodown IV (=Ten-samu). The voice capabilities of the old videogames was quite crunchy, and recordings often only vaguely resembled the original sample. (Somebody could probably do a phonetics paper on this.)

Like when I was writing that piece on the mixed-region nature of Brazilian retro videogame culture, I wanted to talk about the iconic Rebecca from Double Dragon: The Movie: The Game, whose hissatsuwaza (specials) yells filled the air of many a dank cachaça watering hole countryside. But since the whole point of that piece is humblebragging about how we are bigger otakus than the gringos, I went into the Japanese Internet to double-check the name of her fireball—what was it again, 飛び剣 (tobiken, I thought, “flying dagger”)? Turns out it's supposed to be 紅刃拳. Kōjinken (Crimson blade fist)! I mean listen, kō- is fine but there's no way in heck that second syllable is jin (here, judge by yourself: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=5he325b3d5U&t=0m17s ).

Then I found this note on mugenwiki and lost it:

飛び道具。空中でも出せる。隙は大きいがガードさせてしまえばどうにでもなる。 空耳は「コーヒー券」など。

Fireball. Can be done mid-air. Leaves you wide open, but if you can force them to guard, you can work around that. Misheard as “Kōhīken” [coffee voucher] and others.

Kōhīken! It does sound just like that. Never unhearing that one ever again.

Niconico Mugen is a treasure for this kind of thing. You get transcriptions of what it sounded like to natives:

「ヒッチョッザーン！（飛蝶斬）」

It's supposed to be Hichōzan (Flying Butterfly Slash), but I wasn't imagining it when I thought she says it more like hittchoʔzan. I interpreted it to mean 飛っ中斬 (Hicchūzan, “Mid-Air Slash”), which turns out wasn't that far off from what J gamers heard. But then you have the funny misheards too:

空耳は「みちよちゃーん」「シャッチョさーん」「一休さーん」など。 Interpreted as Michiyo-chaan [name of a boy], Shatcho-saan [“Boss”, said in a tense way], Ikkyū-saan [name of a historical figure], etc.

And her super 胡蝶烈風殺 Kochō-Reppusatsu (Killer Butterfly Gale), which sounds more like “kachō-reppusa”, has the gloss of 課長轢死体 Kachō-rek'shi-ta' [the manager's traffic accident corpse]…

If even native speakers misheard those ADPCM samples, of course we did, too. The hadouken for us was “haduge” or “gaduge”; shōryūken was “Hollywood”; Guile’s Sonic Boom was “Alex Full”, and in all honesty I still think it sounds much more like Alex Full than Sonic Boom; and, most famously, Sagat’s Tiger Uppercut was “Tiger Robocop”, now a meme in the arcade nostalgia community.