The game was notorious for multiple instances of Engrish, such as "I never thought I'd be frying over a jungle."
Given the fairly simple gameplay, the English version is understandable for teens and older players, but young children may be confused by the significant Engrish evident in the translation.
A typically hefty Neo Geo ROM at 346 Mb, the game makes extensive use of pseudo-3D prerendered sprites, brief anime and CGI cutscenes (mostly during the intro sequence), and frequent Engrish voice samples and captions.
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One of the mangled translations in the game, "You fail it! Your skill is not enough, see you next time, bye-bye!", has become a famous Internet catchphrase (see Engrish), often abbreviated to FAIL.
The American release, Castle Shikigami 2, was known for its Engrish dialogue, produced as a result of overly literal translation combined with stilted and generally unemotional voice acting.
The Engrish spawned due to bad translations and an intent to rhyme in a verse form similar to Dr. Seuss' anapestic tetrameter.
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The instruction manual contains a popular Engrish that is recognized by many gamers, "As is Chester Cheetah way, is one-person play."
In April 2008, a souvenir stand selling unlicensed Cubs apparel sold a t-shirt bearing the Cubs cartoon bear wearing over-sized Harry Caray-style glasses encircled by the phrase "Horry Kow" (an Engrish play on Caray's "Holy Cow!" catchphrase) in cartoonish Asian script below.
The magazine praised the Amiga version's graphics and audio, but criticized the lengthy load times, poor play balance when starting with new characters, and errors in the translation.
The name of the group is taken from a t-shirt sold in Japan bearing the inadvertently nonsensical English phrase (a popular fashion at the time).
This type of nonsensical English is often derisively referred to as "Engrish" or "Japlish".
The "Starion" name is claimed by Mitsubishi to be a contraction of "Star of Orion", although an urban legend claims that it was intended to be stallion, as a result of an "Engrish" mistranslation.
However, the game maintains an English title and subtitle, and English appears throughout the game, notably in the end screen's incorrectly spelled "congraturation!"
Most in-game conversations have relatively good spelling; however many item names suffer from Engrish.
The game is renowned for having some of the most popular bits of Engrish in the history of video games, even considering SNK's history of questionable translation.
Upon the completion of each level, the game displays the Engrish message “Congraturation! You Success!”.
This introductory scene was translated by Sega of Europe to English from Japanese rather poorly for the European release (a phenomenon dubbed Engrish), resulting in dialogue such as "Somebody set up us the bomb", "All your base are belong to us", and "You have no chance to survive make your time".
Engrish |
"Ken Lee", an Engrish cover of "Without You" by Badfinger; Nilsson; and Mariah Carey, sung by Valentina Hasan on Bulgarian Music Idol