The game is entirely in English.
They do not speak English.
Mario games should be played in Mario’s native language, which is Italian.
Like, you would think that a video game aimed at small children, would be available in the language that small children in the country it’s sold in would actually be able to understand, but apparently not? I guess their thinking is “why bother with localization when we can just make the parents translate all the text on screen for us”
It’s available in Japanese, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional)
Which does cover a pretty substantial share of the world’s population, yes, and it is a good thing that the game is available in more than just one or two or three languages, but it’s also like… By my measure, that doesn’t cover any of the Nordic countries, nor does it cover Greece, nor the former Yugoslavia, nor most countries of the former Eastern Bloc except Russia and Belarus, nor Mongolia, nor any country in Central, West, South, or Southeast Asia, nor the vast majority of Africa, nor a sizable part of Oceania and the Caribbean region, and that’s not even getting into microstates and minority languages.
And sure, in a lot of cases if oneself does not speak one of these 11 languages natively, one can still get by in one way or another — it’s a Mario game, so there’s next to no text that one absolutely must be able to read in order to play. But should one really have to “get by” when playing a game? Games like SMBW, I think could be great for helping people develop their reading skills, so why can’t these be reading skills in one’s own language?
You’re right.
For a game like this (without much dialogue) more languages should definitely be involved.
Nintendo has always been kind of stingy when it comes to translation. They’re getting better but it’s not nearly good enough.
This is why fan translations are important, but of course Nintendo is so much against romhacking and distribution that it impedes progress in that area.
Imagine if game companies saw a fan translation and were like “We’ll buy that and release it”. We’d have mother 3 in English by now and several other languages.
This is why I’m not a fan of such strict copyright laws.
Edit: sorry for the rant
I hated that happening as a kid, rarely do games get translated into Arabic, and never into Tamazight so I would get softlocked into a random place because I didn’t know English, for example I tried playing GTA Vice City before I learned english and I couldn’t finish the game because I kept getting stuck at the mission “cop land” because you had to steal a police vehicle and trap two cops into a garage marked on the mini map, something that you would only know if you spoke the language the game is in, unlike every mission before which had color markers and you could get through using trial and error.
One benefit of AI does seem to be the rise of fans using machine translation for things that never ever would’ve gotten it in the past. I’ve even seen some things that do the translation in realtime.
💀 they suck ass at translating, translation just like art and writing requires a proper human being with skills and culture knowledge to do, maybe it’ll make the job easier then a proper human being can do the bits it did wrong, but it can’t do it all
Depends on languages in my experience. You’re right though some suck ass, with that said it’s still better than not having them at all.
It’s not really necessary for a Mario game.
This is word for word exactly the first reply I expected to get when I posted this. The fact that they had fewer words to translate makes the fact that they didn’t bother translating them worse, not better.
Nintendo has never been great in this regard. They tend to rely on game design for accessibility
Clearly you’ve never heard the German super Mario Brothers song.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“Oh, you’re into pronouns, huh? Hmmm… Well, let me she/them titti— *tries for babies with the Grim Reaper*”
Reference 1: https://youtu.be/9ZSWOy1MsxU
Reference 2: https://youtu.be/WvdJmSqCmdk
