While the Pokémon TCG is always going to have occasional misprints and translation issues, the problems that we saw in the Wizards of the Coast Era were truly special. It was a time when any random nobody with a Japanese-English dictionary could get a job as a translator, because demand for quality translators was suddenly very high and supply was very, very low.
On top of that, Wizards ruled that all cards had to be played as printed, regardless of how egregious the errors were. As an added bonus, their rulings were frequently horribly wrong, since they just hired judges from Magic the Gathering who applied knowledge from a completely unrelated game to Pokémon.
It would be disingenuous to call this a "dark time" for the game, since the whole world was still in its honeymoon period with the franchise. But let's take a moment to laugh at some of the most extreme mistakes in those formative years.
Would it surprise you to hear that Vileplume is not weak to fighting and never has been? Well, it might surprise some unsuspecting 90's kid who pulled the non-holographic version from Team Rocket.
That's right; only specifically the non-holo version featured the error. So whether you need to be more afraid of Hitmonchan or Magmar entirely depends on which version of Dark Vileplume you roll up to the table with.
Clefairy and Clefable were famously printed with text that says the exact opposite of what it should say. According to the card you don't copy "anything else required in order to use that attack, such as discarding Energy cards."
This is a blatant lie. The Japanese version explicitly states that you do copy everything required except energy costs, meaning you absolutely are supposed to respect any discard costs associated with the card.
My favorite piece of trivia about these cards is that Pojo Magazine explicitly made a comment about how we could "look forward to this being corrected when Clefable is released" since the two cards were released separately.
In one of the stupidest rulings of the era, a Wizards judge ruled that any effects that activate when the 'mon enters play (such as Dark Crobat) are unaffected by Muk's ability to TURN OFF ALL POWERS.
Why? Their logic was that the ability entering play "takes priority." This is based on mechanics in Magic the Gathering, where the newest card effect activates first...except that an interaction like this wouldn't even work in that game, since Muk clearly isn't a freaking counterspell.
This idiot really was firing on all cylinders, huh?
This is one of my personal favorite mistranslations. Apparently Poison Gas, the move literally named Poison Gas that actually exists in the mainline games and famously inflicts the poison status ailment as its only effect...puts the target to sleep.
Listen, if you can't guess what the problem is here, then you could've had a promising career as a translator for Wizards of the Coast. Let's just put it that way and move on.
Pluspower is supposed to raise all damage that the attached 'mon does with attacks, not just to the defending 'mon. This means that if it does any recoil damage to itself (in Japan), that recoil damage will be boosted by 10.
To be fair, this one may have been an intentional change. It's unintuitive game design for a card to have an easily missable and forgettable negative effect like that, since the question of recoil won't come up every time you use the card. These kinds of "fine print" downsides should generally be avoided in game design, so I think we actually benefitted from this one.
I adore this particular mistranslation because of how obvious it is. "If tails, put damage counters on that Pokémon." How many damage counters? Your guess is as good as mine. This one was fixed in later printings, at least, but I bet judges absolutely loved running into this card at tournaments.
I sincerely hope that some well-meaning child brought their carefully constructed Rocket's Minefield Gym deck to their local tournament, excited at the prospect of putting as many damage counters on the board as their little heart could count.
Obviously, this is a rare example of a card that literally couldn't be "played as printed" since it doesn't make any damn sense.
You may remember me briefly complaining about this card here. This is actually a pretty solid tech card in Japan, where Energy Support attaches energy to your bench instead of just putting it in your hand.
This would have been an awesome support card for aggressive psychic decks, even if that's not normally what the type is known for. But sadly, all we got is the nerfed version that performs a weirdly limited Energy Search. Hooray.
This one's a little nitpicky, but you know all those cards that explicitly state things like "a Basic OR a Baby" Pokémon? Yeah, well...that distinction was essentially pointless. Most of those cards never mentioned babies and never needed to. It was just a known fact of the game that all Babies were also Basics.
The really weird thing about this is that they went out of their way to print that Babies "count as Basic Bokémon" on every English Baby card, so why would they need to go the extra step on other cards...?
Brock's Ninetales was subject to a very weird ruling that if it got hit by a Devolution Spray that only the Ninetales would devolve. The Evolution card attached to it just...stays in place somehow?
There's no logical reason that the Evolution would just magically exist when Shapeshift is no longer on the board, so it probably won't surprise you to learn that this is absolutely not how the card is meant to work.
This one is obvious enough that you might be able to guess it yourself if you just read it closely. Go on. See if you can catch the problem.
No, really.
Did you notice that Double Claw seems weirdly weak for the energy cost? Wait...why is there a PLUS symbol next to the attack instead of a MULTIPLICATION symbol?
Aha! That, dear reader, is where the stupidity is hidden. It's supposed to do 20 damage and flip two coins to do up to 40 more damage. This one especially hurts, because Scizor is a very cool card that did nothing to deserve this.
Then there are all the Unown cards that reduce damage taken from a certain type. If you're familiar with how the Unown archetype worked at the time, it might seem weird that a few of them just randomly support any 'mon.
Well, that's the problem. They're only supposed to reduce damage from their respective types to cards named Unown.
To be fair, they're actually a lot more powerful in our version of the game, but they stray pretty far from the original intent.
But of course we have to end this list of mistakes with the one you've all been waiting for. The most famous mistranslation in the history of the game. The most broken card in the entire WotC era due entirely to this one mistranslation.
A card whose entire legacy and impact only exist explicitly because of how badly Wizards mucked it up.
As I've mentioned in other posts, Slowking is only supposed to disrupt your opponent's Trainer Cards when it's in the Active position. This has HUGE meta-defining implications.
When played as the developers intended, it's an okay-ish card at best that has to gum up your Active spot to do its job. But under WotC supervision? A coin flip per benched Slowking for every single Trainer Card they want to play. Dear Arceus.
This is not an extensive list and I could have easily spent another three hours digging up more mistranslations and rulings nightmares from the 90s and early '00s. Discard costs that were never supposed to exist. Type symbols that were obviously wrong. Weird word choices.
The era was a smorgasbord of weird mistakes and misunderstandings, but it was also a different time. Good Japanese to English translators weren't as plentiful nor as easy to find as they are today, especially since you had to actually make phone calls one at a time instead of just scouring the internet for bilingual folks looking for work.
And to be fair, it's not like the TCG was the only place experiencing some growing pains at the time. An entire generation will never forget how much Brock loves his "jelly-filled donuts."
There was some jank. There were some issues. A few cards were heavily buffed or heavily nerfed by seemingly minor errors. It's amazing how one missing sentence can completely warp a metagame. But all in all, I do think they mostly did what they could with the resources available to them.
I sincerely doubt that the decision-makers at Wizards of the Coast woke up in the morning thinking about how they could sabotage one of the most profitable business opportunities they had ever been given and damage their reputation.
Sure, many of these mistakes (and many, many more) may have been avoidable, but instead of judging them, I think it's more productive to look back fondly at that quirky era of crappy translations and weird cultural differences that shaped us, and just laugh at how stupid it all was.
No comments:
Post a Comment