"You must save she! Go now gaiaia Mt." Translation catastrophes
 

So, in days long past - mostly the 8 and 16 bit eras - games were sometimes localized... without too much quality control, to put it delicately. Now, all mention of Zero Wing aside, what are some of your favourite critical failures of the era? And I'm not just talking about Engrish here, but any crap that just did not make sense after localization.

The Breath of Fire games are absolutely terrible for this. See, they had this problem where there wasn't enough space for the item names, so they would get heavily abbreviated. This is how you ended up with such spectacular names as "MRBL3" (my friend theorized that it means miracle bottle. I always thought I was throwing marbles on the ground to make enemies trip) and "HelpBL." One of my favourite mess ups is in Breath of Fire 2. See, there's this character named Turbo, only the translation team was obviously made up of otaku, because what you get is Turbo in one scene, "Trubo" in most, and then "Torubo" in battle. I keep picturing these guys arguing over which is correct in Zoro/Zolo fashion. We're just lucky he didn't end up as Talubo or something.

Massive bonus points if you know where the quote in this thread's title is from.

Ive always been a fan of SNK.

"EXCREMENT! I am surounded!"

"I am the justice. Not you." was my background for years until I lost the file during a computer crash.

"This is was the darkened items won't appear" is another favorite of mine, I think from Star Ocean.

How come nobody's mentioned this yet?

"Main screen turn on!"

We were intentionally avoiding, it I think.

Spoony bard. That is all.

Because everyone already knows that one and has seen it seven billion times.

I hope it's at least what you mentioned.
 

I don't know what this is, but it looks neat. Too bad it's so small.

My memory's fuzzy, but I do remember the FF7 "He are really sick" line. And FF4's Spoony Bard, obviously.

The line is "This guy are sick", but you got the geist of it. :)

I'm gonna go with Siegfred/Siegfried/Siegfreid in FFVI. Or, on reflection, translating Final Fantasy 4 and 6 into Final Fantasy 2 and 3 is probably the greatest translation catastrophe this side of Swedish movie titles*. Imagine the accmulated man-hours that's been spent on clarifying what games you're talking about; how much the mistakes that have been made has cost in money and frustration.

*As an aside, Sweden has the dumbest numbskulls in existence translating the titles of movies. The chief example is Them, which was titled Spindlarna.

Back in the day the German translators of SNES RPGs would change dialogue, including dramatic dialogue, to corny and/or "topical" jokes, randomly insert themselves as NPCs and use roughly the same set of city names in every game.

The most infamous example is a line in Secret of Mana. You've been captured by Goblins who intend to cook you alive, but you escape when they leave you unattended for a minute to partake in their dance ritual. Except hereabouts they do not dance, they leave you because "their favourite soap opera's on." I was 11 years old when that game came out and presumably right in the middle of the target group for these jokes. They failed to amuse me.