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| Look familiar? It's the same screen in both versions. |
Hi there. If you're reading this page, you probably know (and love, who doesn't?) a game called Chrono Trigger, which if I recall correctly was released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo, and again in 2001 for the Sony Playstation. Having made this assumption, I won't bore you with another review of the game's plot, and instead show you some things you may not have known about, from the game's original releases in Japan.
WARNING #1: Since I've already assumed my audience to have played this awesome game already, I will take not precautions to avoid spoiling the plot. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK! (Note that just because this page doesn't spoil anything doesn't mean the rest won't. I plan to write these until I finish the game, and it's best to get the warning over with first).
WARNING #2: The screen captures in this article, like the one at right, were brought to you by the magic of Emulation. If you happen to believe ROMs are evil, you might want to avoid reading this, as all of my screens are from the Japanese ROM image.
So what's so much different about the Japanese game that makes it worth this article? Truthfully, there isn't much; translation-wise, it wasn't a total fubar like Zero Wing, and it wasn't even as poorly handled as its contemporary, Final Fantasy VI. (had it been too bad, there might not be as many fans as there are today). Regardless, there are a whole lot of small changes that bug me to no end. They aren't huge, storyline-affecting things, just irritating name changes and the like.
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| "Crono's Mom"? Or "Jina"? Which sounds better? |
I should probably give a little bit of a background of how I know all this stuff. People ask me all the time "How do you know Japanese?" (Yes, I live around people this ignorant. Pity me). All I can tell them is "How does anyone learn any foreign language?"
See, I first played Chrono Trigger six years ago. I, like most, thought it was a great game, but at 12 I didn't much care where it came from. I did, however, see a TV advertisement for it that to this day I have never been able to find again. At the end of an impressive set of game scenes a voice stated "Chrono Trigger. From Squaresoft." followed by something in Japanese, which even now I don't know the meaning of, except that I think the last word might have been 'sugoi' perhaps. Regardless, the whole thing kind of associated CT with that language...
So later on, after I not only had a decent computer but had also discovered such things as 'anime' and decided to try teaching myself their original language to reduce my dependence on subtitle translations... One of the first things I did after learning enough reading skills was to download and play the original versions of some of my first and favorite games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV and VI, Mother 2, and so forth.
In fact, the whole "Jina" weirdness near the very beginning is one of the reasons I'm involved in this whole Committee thing in the first place.
So, what was I saying again? Right, Japanese stuff. I'm writing this, after all, to provide a bit of insight into the original Super Famicom release of this game, so I should get to that at some point. I suppose I should start at the beginning of the game, and the first thing you do (after picking Active vs Wait) is name your character. Would you believe even this part has controversy over it? Just the name, I mean.
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| These aren't nearly as confusing as they look. |
You see, the issue amounts to "Is it Crono or is it Chrono?" The problem comes from the ambiguous nature of the Japanese 'kana' symbols. Everything is written the way it sounds, in fact each symbol (with few exceptions) has only ONE way of being pronounced. Now "chrono" itself is what we call a word root in English - based on older languages, by itself it doesn't mean anything, but we know when we hear it in a word that it refers to -time-. For example, a fancy term for a clock is a 'chronometer' - that which measures time. An appropriate enough word for a game about time travel, in any case, but then we run into the strange part - they named the shujinkou (protagonist, that is) the exact same thing. The sound Chrono is spelled with three kana symbols, KU-RO-NO. But Crono is the same sound, and gets the same symbols. The question is, did they really mean to call him "Crono", with no H? ([no H] is a ba~d nihongo pun that I hope no one caught).
My theory is that the localizers, whose job it was to hack the game code to make room for longer names, ran out of room. See, all names in CT are spelled in three kana or less: KU-RO-NO, MA-A-RU, RU-K-KA, etc. So the game only allots space to store 3-character names. I'm sure they must have been pushing the limits of memory and screen space to even expand it to 5 letters for the North America release. To ask for one more, just for the sake of one silent letter in the name of an equally silent protagonist, was probably too much.
To summarize, the guy was in all likelyhood meant to be known as "Chrono". I see people slip up and spell it like that anyway on occasion. But in the minds of anyone who played the English version (myself included) he's "Crono" and will stay that way no matter what the purists might think.
Moving right along...
So we're in the game now, any more changes? Loads of 'em. Item names get changed all the time, mostly because of character space a la the Chrono issue, but you still have to wonder why a Potion becomes a Tonic or a Bronze Katana undergoes an almost alchemical transformation into a Steel Saber.
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| Refrigerator, oven, indoor plumbing; ah, the convenience of the 10th century AD... |
In terms of graphics, it's the same CT we already admire. Nothing different here, though I could have sworn I heard a few differences in some of the monster sounds. Could've been imagining it, though.
Currency is still called G, and still accepted anywhere in the space-time continuum regardless of era or nation.
As for dialogue, well as I said they *pretty much* nailed it; there's a rule of thumb among translators that if you can tell it's foreign, it wasn't done right. That's how a phrase like "Ii kagen okinasai!" from the screen above can lose its untranslatable nuances and be expressed as "Crono, wake up!" Nothing wrong with a little rearranging to make it sound right.
Now the names (of everything: people, places, items, miscellaneous *stuff*) are something else. It should be possible to make {ATENAnomizu} into "Water of Athena" or some abbreviation thereof, rather than changing it to "Revive"
Due to a tragic computer crash I experienced a few weeks ago, my saveram data for the SNES emulator pretty much vanished from existence. So I'll continue to add to this as I move through the game once again, noting the major differences as I see them.
Coming Soon: Coverage of the Great Bromide Debate of '03, and an investigation into How Dalton's Evil Crosses Time, Space, and Several Other Axes We Didn't Know About.
