Hey, it’s been a while. After numerous half-assed attempts at pushing out a new post these past few months, I’ve finally managed to see one all the way through to the end.

Having recently started on Jyaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun this season, I was brutally reminded that people who don’t know anything about fighting games should not be writing about fighting games. You can get away with fluffing a few details when dealing with most other genres, but not with fighting games. Any minor ambiguity or vagueness will immediately be spotted by the trained eye and trigger the raging fury of a thousand autists.

So for a breath of fresh air, I went to dust off the backlog and have a look at Hi Score Girl due in part to McDoogle’s eloquent recommendation on R/a/dio. The other part of course being its stellar reputation within the fighting game community. Our subs for today are courtesy of SonicBoom, which I believe is just a tag for this release and not an actual fansub group.

Under normal circumstances this would be a fair translation, but not here. The faceless spectator isn’t surprised that Yaguchi won the round, but rather that he managed to successfully input Guile’s super. Looks like the context from the dialogue prior to this that explains that the input in Super Turbo is especially difficult may have been missed. “He actually pulled it off!” or similar would be a more apt line.

I’m usually not one to point out issues with typesetting, but this really sticks out like a sore thumb. Come on, it’s a BD release. Take your time and do it right. Nobody’s holding their breath.

Remember what I said about fighting game autism? They’re light punches, not weak punches…

…which is an odd mistake to make, because later in the episode they correctly use “heavy punch”.

The inconsistency here is also interesting. In a previous episode, “Vega” was translated to “Dictator” (the appropriate international term), but it was left as “Vega” in this episode. It’s surprising that a batch release is riddled with inconsistencies—these are the kinds of things you’d be fixing up, if anything.

The original line here is an idiom about being helpless. I’m not sure if the translator was trying to be smart by trying to work in a Street Fighter joke here, but it just reads like they didn’t know the phrase and translated it literally. This one would be a lot better if they’d just gotten rid of the first half of the line.

Here’s my obligatory “too literal” nitpick for this blog. As usual, technically not “wrong”, but no one speaks like this in English. “I’m sure Ono wouldn’t have wanted a gift from this heartless loser anyway.”

The word used here is a lot closer to malignant/malevolent, so I’m not sure where “strange” came from. The very next line is about haunted locations too. Definitely a “strange” oversight.

And this is how you can tell that they don’t actually play fighting games. I’ve never heard anyone say “toss” instead of “throw” or “grab”. I don’t think it’s a Smash thing either, they probably say grabsies or something. It may have been an attempt to spice up the line a little bit, but this is exactly what I meant by not being able to fluff through fighting game terminology. The line isn’t even right, anyway. It’s not describing a single throw as a storm, it’s talking about her throwing repeatedly.

Twenty seconds later, we have exhibit two. Did someone really look at this line and think “yep, that’s a totally appropriate line here”? Sexual innuendo aside though, they also translated Spinning Piledriver correctly previously. I wish they’d just pick one and stick with it. “On the spot” is also a pretty odd way to describe tick throwing.

Final Fight doesn’t have stamina. It has health, though. The Japanese word used in games does indeed mean stamina, but this is almost universally referred to as “health” in the Western world. Rookie mistake.

There were numerous other lines I could’ve taken issue with, but I figured I’d keep it short so I could spend some time to talk about the excerpt above from the release description. I don’t doubt that this script is better than Netflix’s, but their claims are kind of misguided considering how many errors were left/introduced. If you had to “re-translate” lines, why not just translate it yourself in the first place?

It’s possible that a lot of the mistakes are just artifacts from Netflix’s script (an issue I’ve spoken about before), but I can’t help but antagonise a group conceited enough to blog like that on a release and name themselves “SonicBoom” despite the myriad translation and jargon errors in their own script. I’m not even a Street Fighter player, so there are definitely plenty of things I’ve missed too. My condolences to the actual Street Fighter players watching this release. The show itself is pretty cool, though.