Japanese Zelda 1 is VERY Different - Region Break

I always thought it was really cool that the Lost Woods was in pretty much every single Zelda game but a little fact that I had no idea about was that the Lost Woods dates back to the original Legend of Zelda and I mean you could see the inspiration that goes in the future games just by looking at the forest maze but in the US version the only character that ever confirms the name of the maze is this old woman who says it's the forest maze however in the Japanese version if translated more literally that it in fact translates to Lost Woods see in Japanese it says mayoi nomuri and last minute Eddie here I never expect this to be the case but just a quadruple check I also looked for the map that wasn't included with my physical copy of the Legend of Zelda and there is one accurate translation right here on the map where there It Is Lost Woods but anyways that's one of many things that we're gonna be looking at today welcome to my YouTube series it's called region break and it's a sister series on this channel where we look at all the differences between the same game and try to contrast every single little difference that you can find between the two strangely one of the things I personally found is that when you defeat Ganon at the end of the game he turns into death dust but between the two versions and those two versions being the famicom disc version and the original release of the North American version you can see a couple of pixels in ganon's ashes that are different colors in the US version it looks like there's some pixels that match the palette of Link's skin and honestly this may have been an intentional change from the Japanese version where it seems as though those same pixels match the palette of Link's tunic which then Blends in a little too well with a pile of Ash the same effect happens when link interacts with NPCs like for example Zelda at the very end of the game most people recognize her as wearing a red dress but take my word for it if you somehow managed to beat the game with a green tunic her dress would then be green as well anyways speaking of Princess Ella that meets the end of the game here and the first line of text you see is pretty much identical and so obviously if you were to read the US side it says thanks link you're the hero of Hyrule however there's a subsequent text that reads out for the NES version and says finally peace returns to Hyrule this ends the story and the Japanese version is relatively the same just not word for word it can be interpreted a little differently on the legends of localization website it says until peace returns to Hyrule thus ends this Tale one of the weirder changes between the two is that Lincoln Zelda disappear in the Japanese version but on the US version they managed to keep them on the screen and those of you that beat the game might remember that all the now famous developers that worked on the original Legend Zelda had weird aliases what some people thought was mistranslations in truth these are pseudonyms that people use back in the NES days to prevent other companies from Talent seeking so you can see between the two versions they're identical well almost identical you might also notice that the font is completely different between the two versions for some reason on the famicom disc version the font is a lot thinner and maybe to make it more legible on Old School television screens they swapped it over to fatter font for the US version but if you guys have any other theories feel free to just let me know in the comments section funny enough it should be stated also that just like in the US Japan got a re-release of The Legend of Zelda as well that's more closely related to the US release of The Legend of Zelda and one of those relations that they share between the two is that they both have that fat font one massive difference between the famicom disc version and the family computer cart version is that the book of magic and the Bible Yes you heard me right the Bible was in the original Legend of Zelda are one in the same item just changed between the two versions but as you can see here this change was first made in the US version but one change that was not made in the US version that the family computer version shares exclusively is that the number one is placed at the end of The Legend of Zelda on the title screen this was because this came out after Zelda 2 and Nintendo wanted retailers to make it very clear and distinct that if you're gonna pick up the Legend of Zelda 1 and not two that you know for sure that that's what you're picking up and it should be said that this change was not made for the us re-release but there is one massive change between the US version and the original famicom disc version that tiny font in the upper left hand corner says the legend of for the US version whereas Japan was ahead of its time apparently and was already kicking off the series with a subtitle that we see so frequently now in the US today starting off with the Hyrule fantasy and that subtitle even works itself over into the physical material which there are a ton of differences between the two there as well in the US as Hasbro did a line of dioramas featuring link with his wooden sword attacking gibdo for example but as you're going to see here over on the Japanese side of things a lot more of their merchandise for chibi style the most bizarre of which being Link in underwear with fangs and winking but it's that chibi style that has persevered for about decades and even has more modern merch sets exclusive to Japan like the replica of the box art link that was featured dominantly in the family computer cart version of Zelda one I actually got one of those myself from body.japan but if you were looking for something a little more retro you could definitely find it over there which by the way if you didn't know buys a service website that lets you go over onto Japanese auction sites and does a couple of things on your behalf to make it even possible to buy this stuff like for example they convert your US Dollars into Yen they also let the seller of these items ship the products over to their warehouse where by themselves will then ship the product internationally whereas most of these sellers normally wouldn't and honestly one of the things you may never think to pick up as a fan of a certain game franchise is players guides but over in Japan they've had a long history of players guides that oftentimes have really interesting artwork that would display really well in a collection and honestly if any of the stuff on the screen seems interesting to you I'll leave a direct link to buy so that you can also get an extra 2000 Yen towards your purchase and also big thank you by her being a continued sponsor for the show Regent break anyways by using by I picked up the famicom disc version of the game as you saw earlier in the episode so let's take a look at some of the material inside let's start by going back to the famicom cart version and this yellow bubble here it says action adventure giving the customer the idea of what genre this game is and then on the back in case you didn't believe me about why they changed the name to the Legend of Zelda 1. here's what all the text here says by the way was translated by Quentin just a long time found the show who was generous with his time so thank you Quinton appreciate it anyways with his translation the black font says the disc version of The Legend of Zelda is back here on famicom cassette and the smaller paragraph that's in the white box says the Legend of Zelda was the first game released on the famicom disc system in 1986. since then it's been supported by many fans spawning sequels such as the adventure of link and The Legend of Zelda for the super famicom The Legend of Zelda 1 is a port of the first game in the series to a ROM cartridge if you do not have a disc system or if you played the Super famicom version and you're interested in the previous release please give it a try so quite literally the bad backsplash of this box is all about just talking about the legacy of The Legend of Zelda it doesn't even seem to talk about the game itself in any capacity meanwhile the disk system version has none of that but that's just because there's nothing featured on the back of the case but the manual does have some unique artwork I'm actually going to try to save a ton of your time and just talk about the stuff that's different between all three versions and of course the famicom disc version has unique famicom disc artwork how to take care of your famicom disk and also features exclusive stickers which in my case fortunately was never used which allows you to see all the unique artwork that Japanese players could have pasted onto their famicom disk and a lot of this artwork that's in the manual gets reused in the US manual what's most bizarre is that there's like three different art styles being used here and the same can be said for the US version as well but from those crudely drawn version of Link there is some exclusive famicom disc artwork like this one right here where he's riding on the disc and another one that involves copying data and so it shows two links something that's exclusive to the famicom disc version is that they wrote out the names of the enemies in English and for the most part they kept it really faithful even things you'd think wouldn't be faithful but the two changes between this version and the US version said Dart nuk became dark nut and the boss testy tart got changed I mean I can't imagine why oh but you know what if you had any guesses to why that would be the case then the US version did not make it that much better deciding to change the name to manhandler dude I'm just trying to run a clean show here what is this all right moving on to Legends all the one we can see a green famicom cassette it comes with a Japanese map similar to the one that's in the US the story synopsis now has a plain fuzzy looking background whereas in the US and the famicom disc version they have a unique artwork of Hyrule there's also a couple of unique pieces of art of link that looks a little bit better than the crudely drawn link that I showed earlier but most surprisingly is all three versions have a depiction of what you're looking at when you see each map of each dungeon and in this version it's written out in English when in the famicom disc version it was exclusively Japanese so anyways the Japanese interpretation of all these names is Eagle Moon manjik snake lizard Dragon demon line Death Mountain and then there's stuff in these manuals where there are no differences it's just odd trivia like for example the famous swapping of ours and L's in Japanese language was something that the Legend of Zelda series also experienced where in both the US and the Japanese manuals Zoras are known as zolas and speaking of Zoras they're one of the most strikingly different Sprites between the two versions in game if you take a look here the most immediate thing that you'll notice is that the Zora is in the Japanese version do not have a black outline that's something that got changed for the US version then subsequently the Zelda 1 version the end of up on famicom cassette also the mouths are really different in the Japanese version Zora's mouth is pretty much closed but to make more sense in the US version the mouth is wide open so it can shoot the ball at you and the thing that's probably most Lost in Translation here is that it becomes apparent that when you look at the Japanese Sprite that the blue ring around the Sprite is supposed to be a water ripple effect with its head poking out and causing a disturbance on the surface of the water whereas in the US version it always kind of just looked like that the Zora had a fat neck which now we know is not the case now let's tackle one of the other five senses and talk about the Pole's voice if I had to guess I think that this is probably the most well-known fact that you're going to see in this episode and if you still didn't know please let me know I'm always fascinated to find out that what I consider common knowledge isn't quite that common but in the Japanese version of the game the game uses family computer controllers which are actually wired into the system and the second player has a very interesting feature that the US never got it's a little microphone that the player can speak in to and The Legend of Zelda took advantage of this feature by making it the Pole's Voice's weakness when players would speak into this microphone it would kill all pole voice on screen instantaneously now probably the Lesser known fact and you can dunk on me in the comments if you'd like but I did not know this to compensate for the fact that the US does not have a microphone the weakness of the Pole's voice is simply an arrow shooting an arrow at a pulse voice will kill it in one hit now it doesn't kill all the pull voices on screen sadly but it's still so much better than having to hit it so many times that it goes into the double digits which by the way shame on me because this old man in level 5 says the secret power is said to be in the arrow which is meant for the pull voices which is a great segue for our next topic translation differences because in Japanese he says there are some creatures that are weak against sound obviously both were referring to the Pole's voice which that's super interesting but now let's do a pivot over to the character select screen one interesting difference between the Japanese and the English version is that elimination mode in English is referred to as kill mode in all Japanese version which is interesting for both versions I guess they didn't want to use the term delete maybe it's supposed to be like an immersion thing where you're literally removing the life of Link permanently I've never thought about it like that before and the translation differences don't even end there starting off one translated by our good friend Quentin yet again at the end of the demo scroll I noticed that the Triforce dialogue that rests above the Japanese version looks a lot longer than it should and so when translated it actually says the hidden Triforce of wisdom also the paper that link is holding up in the Japanese version has more damage around the corners than it does in the US version probably so they could fit more characters onto that canvas also in Dungeon 1 the old man says the eastmost peninsula is the secret in the US version this is completely different than what it is in the Japanese version where he says you can't use arrows if you run out of money one that's pretty close but not quite the same is when you go to collect a heart piece or some medicine from the old man he says take any one you want in the US version and in the Japanese version it says I'll give you whichever you want same idea the famous this line of it's a secret to everybody in the US version translates a little more accurately to something like now keep this a secret from everyone sound let's talk about sound now surprisingly a lot is very similar but because the original Legend of Zelda was on a famicom disc there's an extra sound channel that the US version never had and so a lot of the sound fonts for certain things are completely different here's a couple quick examples let's start with the death noise [Music] you even the bosses sound completely different here's a couple of different bosses for you and how they stack up against each other foreign let's talk about one of the most iconic themes of all time the title screen of the game femcom disk version sounds pretty different one of the key differences is the sound of a large Bell that perpetually gets banged throughout the song here give it a listen [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] here's the US version I'm just going to play a little bit of it just so you can hear just how different it is [Music] [Music] thank you here's a couple of shorter themes like the flute [Music] and now here's that little mystery jingle and here's when you grab an item and here's when you grab an inventory item and here's the differences between the ending themes [Music] and with that said I just wanted to quickly say thank you to the legends of localization the website owner has his own book I recommend you click the link in the video description so you can pick up a copy for yourself if you'd like to own a more comprehensive look at every single little detail big thank you to Legends of localization for their website though for that public resource if you feel like I've earned your sub please hit subscribe it helps my video show up a little more often on your home page new videos every single Friday with my co-host snipey and with that said I'm gonna let the Japanese version play itself out thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you

Channel: Shesez

Views: 272,965

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Id: bieAKgV4TFs

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022