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MarsDragon

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  1. This is really great! Stuff like this is super valuable to archive, so I'm glad you're taking this first step. ...though I have to admit to a slight ulterior motive here. See, a couple years ago after being a life-long Capcom fan I found out SNK was more than the half of Capcom vs SNK 2 I didn't understand and was actually really cool! I also noticed that their game translations had a really unique flavor, especially for the time. Sometimes weird, sometimes charming, sometimes nonsensical, but clearly trying to sound natural and American more than other Japanese-translated games of the time. I started to write up my own translations of various lines and compare them to the official ones, and eventually got enough together to throw together a site I called The Mad SNK Project (because I'm crazy to do it). If you want a quick look, check out Billy and Axel's Fatal Fury 2/Special pages, because they're both pretty nuts in their own ways. As the project progressed, I realised I wanted to get into manuals, because they was an entire hidden box of weirdness I never knew about. I started translating the character backgrounds out of the Garou Densetsu 3 manual with no knowledge of if they ever got translated into English, and then I dug up an FAQ that has what I think are probably the official English versions (they're a clear match for the Japanese, just with that unique flavor) but I can't verify anything. The FAQ is from almost 20 years ago and the author has long since vanished from the internet. Meanwhile his Art of Fighting 2 Character Background FAQ not only has what appear to be character manual blurbs, but completely different translations of the fighter copy than exist in the arcade flyer! That's also super weird and fascinating to me. If anyone has an English copy of Fatal Fury 3 or Art of Fighting 2, I'd be super grateful if you'd at least glance inside the manual and verify if the old FAQ is accurate. And looking at the Samurai Shodown II scans Gecko1993 already kindly provided, I can already see a few weird things. SamSho2 is already strange for having such broken English, and while I haven't given it an in-depth look yet, I've noticed a few actual mistranslations hanging around in its script. I rarely see what I'd call mistranslations out of SNK. More often there's a connecting thread where I can see that the translator or editor was trying to be funny and went a bit too far, or they just made something up out of whole cloth. SamSho2 has cases where it looks like there was an actual misinterpretation of the Japanese line that didn't get caught. But looking at the manual, that clearly done by a native speaker who wanted to make a lot of jokes - it has a lot of the same hallmarks of a "standard" SNK translation (constant "poke your eye out" jokes, "Wan Thatta Gotaway gem") but runs out of steam around Nakoruru. After that it turns straight and dry. I really wonder what happened there. I know cataloging old fighting game translations in obsessive detail isn't something most people are going to care about, but I've somehow made it my personal project for probably the next decade. These things just happen, I guess.
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