I read what I could make out, but still don't know what game he was talking about. What is "Shadowland" supposed to be?
Youkai Douchuuki
I haven't heard of that alias before. Was he also selling The Incredible Ziria 2 and Overhauled Man 3?
It looks like it came from this (
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9502):
And then the Wiki article got named by it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Land_(Video_Game)OK, yeah, confirmed it, the US arcade version displays that "Shadowland" text at the top of the title screen:
So just for my curiosity, I took the raw Japanese, 妖怪道中記, and ran it through some online translation sites:
1) "Monster Road record" (translate.google.com)
2) "A ghost travel diary" (others)
3) And when you use
WWWJDIC (
what my criminal translating-partner DeuceBag used to translate Ys games), you get this:
妖怪 【ようかい】 (n) ghost; apparition; phantom; spectre; specter; demon; monster; goblin; (P); ED
道中記 【どうちゅうき】 (n) travel journal; ED
I'd have to look at the game for context, but can I assume that the enemies may be generalized as monsters ?? (Post-looking at that youtube video, I guess so.)
If so, I think "Monster Diary," or better yet, "Monster Diaries" would be an appropriate literal English translation. My guess at least. Eh, I guess "journal" is more accurate, not quite synonymous with "diary," so "Monster Journal" then ?? The plural form with "diaries" seems better to me as a game title, but yeah...
"Shadow land" can work, I guess, but that's what's called "taking liberties." Ghostland would sound lame, too generic-ish. If "Zombie Diaries" could work based on the enemies, I think that would be pretty good marketing-wise. I dunno, but yeah, I thought I'd dig into what it's actually supposed to be - the creators intent is simply something like "Monster Diaries/Journal."
Anyway, what I see happened here is that since the arcade version was localized for English-speaking markets by somebody (
looks like Namco themselves), and "Shadowland" was chosen as some kind of English titling (
a bit of liberty, for marketing probably) giving it official weight, its use was carried over to the console ports that were never localized (
like the PCE version).
