The Treehouse really seems to have a younger, hipper vibe these days. I don't know if I would've ever imagined the term "adorbs" popping up in a Zelda game. And the Smash 4 Trophy descriptions are fairly irreverent, as well.

It seems to me that either the Treehouse is hiring younger folks or consciously shooting for a youthful sort of feel. It's possible that this feel is limited to franchises with certain target audiences. It's also possible that the original Japanese versions themselves are just getting more whimsical. I dunno. What do you guys think?

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I think I have noticed. The trophy descriptions in Kirby and the Rainbow Curse are amazing. Smash 4's trophies are more miss than hit, though. And I have to question whether it's a "youth movement" when they're making references to The Offspring hits from 20 years ago.


Of course, maybe it's not all that new or different after all.

Haven't they been pretty wacky for awhile, though? I remember stuff like this in Thousand Year Door and that was over a decade back.

@kriswright
Yeah, I was about to come in here and say pretty much the same thing. I remember the Swedish Club Nintendo having an interview with Nate Bihldorff back in the early 2000's where he talked about many of the localizations taking on a more 'modern' tone around that time.

EDIT: Although, what is actually considered modern, or youthful or hip or whatever is undergoing constant change, so in that respect I'm sure the translations/localizations these days differ from what we got a few years ago.

@kriswright@r_hjort

Yup. You're like the people thinking that Miley Cyrus invented twerking, Anand.

Yeah, the Treehouse has never been overly formal or stodgy. But irreverence seems to be the norm now, and the language seems to be aiming younger. Again, maybe that's just a function of a shift in tone of the original software, but I'm hard-pressed to remember the last straight-faced Treehouse translation.

Other M, maybe?

@Jargon
Didn't she? On a serious note, I refuse to watch that video, no matter how many people talk about it. I will never google Two Girls, 1 Cup, and I will never google that.

There might be some changes, but don't they have some/mostly new staff now? If they've had staff changes then it's kind of unavoidable for that to result in some differences for how scripts are written. And yeah, without knowing the original Japanese scripts, it's tough to say what gets altered in translation.

I remember hearing long ago that Sakurai himself wrote the trophy descriptions, though since it was long ago then that would have been for Melee and not the newer games. I looked it up just now, and I saw several people saying that the trophy descriptions in Smash Wii U/3DS were written by Akihito Toda, who was one of the writers for the Mother/Earthbound series. I couldn't find the source for this, but if it's true then it would make sense why so many of the descriptions are pretty out there. So I don't think most of those descriptions are just something the Treehouse team made up, but rather it was them doing their best to keep the spirit of the original Japanese meanings intact.