Glitch City Laboratories Archives

Glitch City Laboratories closed on 1 September 2020 (announcement). This is an archived copy of a thread from Glitch City Laboratories Forums.

You can join Glitch City Research Institute to ask questions or discuss current developments.

You may also download the archive of this forum in .tar.gz, .sql.gz, or .sqlite.gz formats.

Pokémon Discussion

Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese - Page 1

Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2019-01-08 10:44:11
This is something I read on our affiliates at Legendary Star Blob 2 a long time ago but didn't properly look into myself.

It appears in the Japanese versions of Red/Green/Blue/Yellow, the Safari Zone warden spoke in broken Japanese; with their phonemes corrupted. This was a mystery for some time, but it appears someone named Momiji Aoyama suggested maybe that Team Rocket stole his Gold Teeth.

So at some point, the author of http://hakuda2.web.fc2.com/wario/poke1/k40.html came up with the following script:

大に歯とて！ってく！
く頼みま！は！
なに微にのは不そ･･･には頼ま！！

From the original;
ふぁへひふへほはひひへはほはへへひほは！ははふへへふへ！
ほひふはほひまふは！ はふははふぁほひ！

The gist is like: "This is terrible! Team Rocket have taken my dentures!  Help me! I'm depending on you! That idiot is in the Safari Zone somewhere! What? All right, that's fine, but I beg that you can help me."

There is more to this. It appears the game's story was altered at some point. In the original Japanese versions, due to an oversight, there is hidden normally unused text in the Safari Zone about Silph's Chief. Silph Chief is the Japanese name of the unused Chief Trainer class (who uses Scientist's sprite due to a technicality (it's not the real sprite)). One of these texts is "SILPH's manager is hiding in the SAFARI ZONE." (Japanese: の の どに くてだって!). For more information, see this thread.

Thoughts/does anyone have any further information?

I will try to translate the whole article and analyse it further, but it will take some time and my Japanese skills are only elementary-low intermediate with help, or maybe someone on pret/TCRF (such as GlitterBerri) or Legends of Localisation may want to look into it. I also want to do a video about this in depth at some point.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2019-01-08 12:00:31
Huh! That would have been quite the strange subplot indeed. I'll be internally theorizing for a while about what could have gone on between the Silph Chief and Giovanni that led to their disagreement.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2019-01-08 13:44:26

Huh! That would have been quite the strange subplot indeed. I'll be internally theorizing for a while about what could have gone on between the Silph Chief and Giovanni that led to their disagreement.


Yes :). It does make me wonder if a prototype version of Red/Green was ever released from a much earlier stage in development, like the G/S Space World 1997 demos how different it would be. If the G/S Space World being very different is a good example then it may have been a very different game, and it looks like the evidence (concept art, and leftover code like this) suggests that it was. I find this stuff so fascinating too.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Bert
Date: 2019-01-08 17:04:46
>Gold Teeth
>Nuggets are made of gold
>The final opponent on Nugget Bridge gives you a Nugget as an incentive to join Team Rocket
>A small, unused subplot involved Team Rocket stealing the warden's Gold Teeth
>Team Rocket stole his Gold Teeth to turn them into Nuggets using Silph's advanced technology, which only the Chief knows how to use, and boost their recruitment rate

Deepest lore.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2019-01-08 18:48:01

>Gold Teeth
>Nuggets are made of gold
>The final opponent on Nugget Bridge gives you a Nugget as an incentive to join Team Rocket
>A small, unused subplot involved Team Rocket stealing the warden's Gold Teeth
>Team Rocket stole his Gold Teeth to turn them into Nuggets using Silph's advanced technology, which only the Chief knows how to use, and boost their recruitment rate

Deepest lore.

This is gold!  :D

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2019-01-11 17:03:58
I guess it comes down to whether the translation from toothless-talk into Japanese is solid. And to indicate that, other people would need to come up with the same interpretation independently. (If someone has read this and thought "I suppose it could say that", that'll be what they see afterwards!)

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2019-01-12 06:01:31
That's very true. My only comment is はふぁほ (hafari hо~n)/Safari Zone seems too much of a coincidence for this to all be gibberish, but there are likely different ways to interpret the sentences/not all of it is referencing real Japanese.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: ThomasWinwood
Date: 2019-05-09 05:23:01
I read ひ as , which is a speech characteristic common among old men in Japanese fiction writing, rather than . If he has a Kansai accent then my interpretation loses a little strength - there's no other in his dialogue to compare, and I can't find his normal speech from after you give him his teeth to find out one way or the other. At any rate, ふへほは/ doesn't feel right - with the exception of ふぁへ/大 the prosody and vocalism is generally accurately represented, so I'd expect something like ほへほは.

That said, it's not like this dialogue is unused and leftover from previous builds of the game - it was used in the actual game and translated into English.


_WardenGibberishText1::
text "WARDEN: Hif fuff"
line "hefifoo!"

para "Ha lof ha feef ee"
line "hafahi ho. Heff"
cont "hee fwee!"
done

_WardenGibberishText2::
text "Ah howhee ho hoo!"
line "Eef ee hafahi ho!"
done


I hope this reading isn't controversial:
"This is terrible! I lost my teeth in [the] Safari Zone. Help me please!"
"I'm counting on you! It's in [the] Safari Zone!"

ふぁへひ and ははふへへふへ！ seem to map pretty simply onto "Hif feff hefifoo!" and "Heff hee fwee!"; is there any reason to believe that the rest of the Japanese differs that substantially in meaning from the English?

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Parzival
Date: 2019-05-09 06:58:28
Knowing little about Japanese aside from bits and pieces of general knowledge, probably not, but as dialects and letter choice change the meaning substantially despite technically being equivalent, that might matter here.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: ISSOtm
Date: 2019-05-09 10:27:57
For the second one, I'd rather have thought "In the Safari Zone"? It lines up better with the "ee", I think, but less so with the "Eef".
That said, overall this sounds (hah!) very plausible, gj :D

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2019-05-09 10:51:32

I read ひ as , which is a speech characteristic common among old men in Japanese fiction writing, rather than . If he has a Kansai accent then my interpretation loses a little strength - there's no other in his dialogue to compare, and I can't find his normal speech from after you give him his teeth to find out one way or the other. At any rate, ふへほは/ doesn't feel right - with the exception of ふぁへ/大 the prosody and vocalism is generally accurately represented, so I'd expect something like ほへほは.

That said, it's not like this dialogue is unused and leftover from previous builds of the game - it was used in the actual game and translated into English.


_WardenGibberishText1::
text "WARDEN: Hif fuff"
line "hefifoo!"

para "Ha lof ha feef ee"
line "hafahi ho. Heff"
cont "hee fwee!"
done

_WardenGibberishText2::
text "Ah howhee ho hoo!"
line "Eef ee hafahi ho!"
done


I hope this reading isn't controversial:
"This is terrible! I lost my teeth in [the] Safari Zone. Help me please!"
"I'm counting on you! It's in [the] Safari Zone!"

ふぁへひ and ははふへへふへ！ seem to map pretty simply onto "Hif feff hefifoo!" and "Heff hee fwee!"; is there any reason to believe that the rest of the Japanese differs that substantially in meaning from the English?


Thanks for your opinion and not just working on what I thought. I do have second thoughts now about my accuracy.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2019-05-10 15:08:37

"This is terrible! I lost my teeth in [the] Safari Zone. Help me please!"
"I'm counting on you! It's in [the] Safari Zone!"
Whoa. Finally that makes sense. As a native English speaker who first saw this text some crazily long time ago, I have never been able to decipher that. What do you make of the third one?


_WardenGibberishText3::
text "Ha? He ohay heh"
line "ha hoo ee haheh!"
done

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: ThomasWinwood
Date: 2019-05-14 08:49:03
I don't think I ever did work this one out. If I recall correctly it's what he says when you bring him back his teeth before putting them back in. He's probably telling you to hand them over, since that's what you do.

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2019-05-14 11:46:41
If you have the Gold Teeth, you instantly hand them over when you talk to him and he thanks you normally. This one appears when he asks you to find them "ee hafahi ho" but you answer "no".

Re: Safari Zone warden with no Gold Teeth originally spoke in broken Japanese

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2020-03-06 11:48:32
Hmm I wonder if anyone got confirmation. May have simply been my confirmation bias. I'm sorry for spreading possible misinformation.