Game:

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes (2010)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 16:22

1,311 views

73

Yoshiaki's first stage in SB3: Utage, with English subtitles.

Much easier to translate than Matsunaga's story, that's for sure. No obscure Japanese trivia or phrases I needed to look up, Yoshiaki's story pretty much stands on its own merits, which I definitely appreciate. You can definitely see a few differences between JP Yoshiaki and EN Yoshiaki. JP Yoshiaki speaks pretty fast and sounds more shrill, while EN Yoshiaki tends to draw out his words more and sounds more noble. Ironically I think JP Yoshiaki fits more with the "weasel" motif than EN does.

Yoshiaki is known as the "Fox of Dewa" historically, and Basara plays that up quite a bit. In SB:SH however, this is dropped since they call him a "Weasel" and that's not something you refer to yourself with since it's pretty derogative. But JP Yoshiaki takes pride in being a fox, with some of his lines and even one of his R2s referencing it. That said, it only comes up once in this playthrough, so I just followed SB:SH's example and didn't address it. (I used the word "shrewd" in place of it.)

Yoshiaki also refers to himself as "素敵紳士" (suteki shinshi), which can be translated a few different ways, but I went with "magnificent gentleman". It's basically his catchphrase. In the dub, Yoshiaki doesn't say that same specific phrase every time he calls himself a gentleman, he'll use words like "amazing" or "wonderful", etc. It's more varied. Which I honestly prefer, because it makes the dialogue less stale. But I don't like changing the dialogue strictly because I think it sounds better, so I just kept using the same "magnificent gentleman" phrase over and over. Maybe if I was in charge of an official translation I'd do something like that, knowing that dub VAs would be saying the lines later. But with how quick Yoshiaki speaks, there's not a whole lot of time to add much flare to his lines before the text box disappears.

Going back to the fox thing, Yoshiaki makes an odd sound when the Drillatron sends him flying in the last cutscene. He says "KOOOOOOON", but I translated that as just a straight up yell. The reason he says "kon" is because that's the Japanese onomatopoeia for what a fox yelp sounds like. There's not really an English equivalent for that. I thought about subtitling that with "Yaaah-hoo-hoo-hoo-hooey!" (think Goofy's yell) since that would make it more whacky, which is what they were going for, but when you can so clearly hear what he's saying, I figured that'd be just as off-putting as if I'd left it "KOOOOOOON".

Speaking of the Drillatron, the kanji for it in JP is "角土竜" (which I assume is "tsuno mogura", but I haven't heard it said out loud) which is "horned mole". However Yoshiaki reads the kanji differently, calling it an "earth dragon" instead. The two kanji used for mole can be read separately as "earth" and "dragon". In SB:SH, I believe he just calls it his "most marvelous, most wonderful wonder" or something to that effect. I kept the long over-bloated name he has for it since that's a running gag of Yoshiaki's that'll come up quite a lot, and he's whacky enough you could see him calling something a dragon just to make it sound cooler.

You don't see it that often, but some of the lines in SB3:Utage have references in them. I have a list saved in my bookmark for the JP wiki whenever I notice one. There's quite a few Gundam ones, mostly from Muneshige, that I enjoy seeing since I'm a big Gundam fan. Most of them reference animes, but one I didn't expect to see was Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Yoshiaki actually says that line in this video, it's one of his random lines he can say in any stage. If I notice anymore, I'll point them out.

Also, I should have played this on a lower difficulty. I come close to dying a few times in this stage lol. This is the same difficulty I played Matsunaga's story on, Ultimate (Hard in SB:SH), but I forgot Matsunaga had a lot more levels since I played Unification Mode with him, but haven't for anyone else. So it was a lot harder for Yoshiaki's story when he was low in levels and is definitely a worse fighter than Matsunaga. Yoshiaki's fighting style requires you to chain a bunch of his attacks together to cancel out of his post-attack animations and not leave yourself vulnerable. Several of his moves have timing mechanics too. And it had been so long since I last played him, I remembered none of it.

Alright, I think that's everything I wanted to mention in this part, and I'm running out of text space anyways. Let me know what you think.

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