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With the release of Super Mario Party rapidly approaching, Nintendo's new entry in the hit
Mario Party series, now was felt as a good time to take a look back at some way the series
has been altered in the West when brought over from Japan.
To begin we'll be taking a look at the first entry in the series, Mario Party for the Nintendo
64.
The first game has an interesting difference between the music for two of the minigames
- these being Balloon Burst and Musical Mushroom.
The Japanese and European versions use the track “Move to the Mambo" for both of these
minigames.
For some reason though, the US version doesn't feature this track at all and instead uses
two different songs.
Here's the US track for “Musical Mushroom"…
And here's Balloon Burst's…
This wasn’t the only change made to the original game though.
Another curious change can be spotted when either Luigi or Wario lose a minigame.
In the original Japanese release, the characters would exclaim "Oh my god” upon losing, as
shown here…
Outside of Japan though, these lines were altered due to concern over the characters
making religious references…
Interestingly, while many players believe Wario says, “D’oh, I missed,” this isn’t
true.
He’s actually speaking German and says “So ein mist,” which can be roughly translated
as “Aw, darn!”
In 2014, a YouTuber posted a video covering this in hopes of clearing up the confusion,
which ended up getting commented on by none other than, Thomas Spindler, himself - who
was Nintendo of Europe's German translator and Wario’s voice actor at the time.
Spindler stated, to quote, "The concept behind Wario was that of a German character and those
responsible for the voice-overs at Nintendo back then intended him to speak German.
I hope that this resolves the issue once and for all."
Moving on to Mario Party 2, which received its own share of changes as well.
For instance, Professor Fungi, known as simply Dr. Toad in Japan, originally smoked a tobacco
pipe.
Over in the West though, the Professor is always depicted pipe-less.
A big change was also made to the ending cutscene of Western Land, which featured realistic
guns and even showed Bowser getting shot.
First up is the Japanese version…
The English version turned the guns bright yellow, added harmless corks flying out of
them and removed the gun shot sounds and smoke effects.
Mario Party 3 faced its own handful of changes too.
For example, Donkey Kong’s start screen reads “Donkey Start” in the Japanese version
of the game, but this got simplified to “DK Start” in the overseas releases.
Another change was made to the item mini-games.
If a player fails to win any item the announcer will say, “Miss!” in the Japanese release.
On the other hand, the international releases replaced this with, “Game Over!”
Curiously, the “Miss!” line can still be found within the game’s Sound Room voice
test across every version of the game whereas the “Game Over” line is nowhere to be
found.
Furthermore, in the European version of Mario Party 3 a couple of mini-games, including
“Baby Bowser Broadside” and “Puddle Paddle,” had their times reduced from 30,
as seen in the Japanese and North American versions, to 20.
This may seem like an odd change, but this was actually deliberately done due to European
copies of the game running at the slower 50hz rather than 60hz, as was common at the time.
In a nutshell, this meant that the European version ran around 17.5% slower than the North
American and Japanese versions of the game.
Therefore, while the timer may read 20, each minigame’s real-time length lasts roughly
as long as their North American and Japanese counterparts.
Moving on, Mario Party 6, which had an interesting change over in Europe to the game's Endurance
Alley.
For the European versions, 4 minigames were removed - these being “Pitfall,” “Same
is Lame,” “Trick or Tree,” and “Trap Ease Artist”.
This was presumably done in the name of fairness, as each of these mini-games are heavily based
on luck and the Endurance Alley challenges players to win 100 mini-games in a row.
Another change was made to the “Garden Grab” mini-game which originally had players plucking
a giant turnip out of the ground in the Japanese release while the US and European releases
changed it into a giant carrot instead.
Brighton and Twila also originally had voice clips in the Japanese version, which were
mysteriously removed from the western releases.
On the flip side, in Japan Mario Party 6 uses the same female announcer featured in all
versions of Mario Party 4 and 5, meanwhile the international versions introduce a new
male one in her place.
Listen for yourself: Lastly, let’s wrap things up with Mario
Party 8 which actually ended up causing quite a stir in the UK.
This was due to the fact that upon the game’s release in the region on July 13th, 2007 it
contained the line, “Magikoopa magic!
Turn the train spastic!
Make this ticket tragic!”
While this went virtually unnoticed in North America, the term spastic is seen as an offensive
slur in the UK, which Damon Rose, editor of the BBC disability website "Ouch!", called,
“synonymous with useless incompetence, the type you see in disabled people portrayed
badly on TV.”
Nintendo immediately recalled the game that very same day, releasing an official statement
saying, to quote, “Unfortunately we have discovered that a small number of [Mario Party
8 copies] contain the wrong version of the disk due to an assembly error.
We have therefore decided to recall all copies of the game from UK retailers so that this
mistake can be corrected.”
Ultimately, when game was rereleased in the UK three weeks later, the line was altered
to replace “spastic” with “erratic” in its place.
It's speculated that this event may have led Nintendo of Europe to be much more cautious
with their European releases.
For example, they replaced Croco’s mention of the word “bugger” from Super Mario
RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars with “pest” when the game was finally released in Europe
via the Wii’s Virtual Console the following year.
This was because, again, "bugger" is seen as an offensive term in the UK
But that's all we have time for today.
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