I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.

The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.
So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.
It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)
so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"
so "Migar Zolom" is the same kind of "translator ran out of coffee" moment that gave us "Litagano Motscoud" in the Cave Story translation
To explain that one: Cave Story's original title is Dōkutsu Monogatari. At one point in the game you're given a password, which is just the name of the game written backwards in kana
Which comes out something like "ritaganomo tsukuudo".
The translator didn't realize it was the name backwards...
So they tried to translate or at least transliterate it, and ended up with "Litagano Motscoud"
The Nicalis port uses "yrotS evaC"
also, the optional location of the crashed Gelnika?

Gelnika is supposed to be "Guernica", as in the Spanish town bombed by the Nazis.
the remake hasn't gotten to the Gelnika yet, but there's a character who mentions the "Relnikha", so apparently the name is continuing to drift.
This kind of thing is why Aerith/Aeris name changed, but in the other direction: She's supposed to be named by transliterating "Earth" into katakana, resulting in "Earisu".
That then got translated back into english as "Aeris", later corrected to be closer to "earth"
Also the worst naming pun is almost in plain sight:
Barret, the guy with the machine gun arm, is named "Bullet"

Both the given name "Barret" and the projectile are "バレット" in Japanese.
also, Don Corneo's japanese name is ドン・コルネオ, or "Don Koruneo". "Koruneo" is pretty close to how you'd transliterate "Corleone"...
But yeah. it seems the main way characters were named in FF7 was:
1. They came up with a clever multilingual pun or reference
2. They didn't explain it to the translators
the worst one in FF7 is probably the item called a "Vagyrisk Claw"
which drops from an enemy called the "Bagrisk".
BOTH OF THOSE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE BASILISK

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Considering this year I don't have much in the way of game translation to discuss, publicly, I'd say this was a productive year for writing threads on largely neglected and forgotten Japanese games. So if you're looking to learn about some, here's what I wrote about in 2020!


2020 was another year where I talked a *lot* of shop about dating sim history. Much of it was actual dating sims, like in some threads below, but sometimes I went on adjacent tangents, like for the cool Kojipro-developed Tokimeki Memorial adventure games:


I also went down a whole new rabbit hole for Fuuraiki, an open-ended PS1/PS2 adventure game with a cult following about traveling around the island of Hokkaido that's set to real world photography. It's a unique tangent in galge well worth exploring:


I also took a quick jaunt into Michinoku Hitou Koi Monogatari, a spiritual predecessor to Fuuraiki that's about traveling around Tohoku against a backdrop of mahjong matches. It's a rough draft that would get much more refined later, but still worthwhile:


In terms of actual dating sims that I covered, the focus was mainly post-Amagami games released by Kadokawa such as Photo Kano. While I think these games have MANY flaws, they do offer key insight into the state of the genre during its decade-long decline:
Now that I have a little more time, I'd like to go into detail as to why this is such horseshit.

-39 Seconds- The implication that the PC release was of the quality standard they intended and that's extremely hard to believe. 1/many


-49 Seconds- Leadership Team is deeply sorry (not at fault), don't blame any specific teams (hold onto this one)

-1m42s- Describes a process of making the game look great on PC and then backsliding to "Old Gen" despite the game being announced before PS4/Xbox hardware was known.

-2m11s- Describes the old gen disk bandwith as "it is what it is" Considering the game got announced before those consoles even shipped, its absurd that the entire game was built so far beyond their possible constraints. Also, those consoles put out stuff like Tsushima late gen.

-2m19s- "-our testing did not show a big part of the issues
you experienced while playing the game" This is probably the worst part. Despite telling you not to blame any specific team, the test / QA team, somehow didn't discover the issues with the game.

You don't need to have worked in Dev or QA to know that the game was flying apart at every level (even on PC). The idea that the bug nightmare that ended up shipping seen for example here https://t.co/bgDkfQMVku went under the radar of a PROFESSIONAL QA TEAM is ridiculous.

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