The 'Shroom:Issue 208/De Millenniumpoort, or a Girl Talking about a Localization
De Millenniumpoort, or a Girl Talking about a Localization
Written by: Catydoll409 (talk)
With the release of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake on Switch, I was absolutely ecstatic to learn that there was a new Dutch localization. I can imagine, to the average person (especially Dutch speaking person) why that would be strange- perplexing, even. Why am I so excited? Well, for a couple reasons, but I’ll try to explain:
1) Nintendo of Europe translating games into Dutch is a relatively new phenomenon. Nintendo was so excited about the Dutch localization for Breath of the Wild, they made a short video about it! Watch it here. It’s pretty cute.
The earliest notable Nintendo game that I can think of with Dutch translation would be Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia, released on May 19th, 2017, to give context to how “new” this is. As a side note, Fire Emblem’s next mainline game Three Houses, did not receive a Dutch localization. So I’m not sure what’s going on there.
2) I get to learn! Yes, I’m actually not a native Dutch speaker. I’ve been actively learning the Dutch language for about 3 years now. Sure, maybe it’s not the best way to learn a language, but you gain a surprising amount of useful vocabulary from dialogue-heavy games.
So I’m going to take you through the first hour or two of The Thousand-Year Door in the Dutch localization. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it), a lot of the script is very 1:1 with the English version. For example, the intro movie explaining the backstory of Boevechem [Rogueport], is almost a verbatim translation from the English release.
As a side note, all the major characters and almost all enemy names (minus any color words, like “Green Fuzzy”) have not been altered. I presume this is because Dutch speakers have been calling Goombas “Goombas” and Koopas “Koopas” since the beginning of time, so it’d be a big ask to suddenly start expecting people to call them something else. Still a little disappointing- I would have loved to see some terrible Dutch puns in here somewhere.
Anyway, we start our story with Mario entering Boevechem. Here we meet Goombella.
She’s being accosted by the kruistronauten (an excellent name if I’ve ever heard one) and their luitenant, Knerp.
A cute quirk to Goombella’s voice in the NL version is that she often says “te gek!”, which makes her sound very much like a teenage girl (comparable to her valley girl-ness in the English version). Mario rescues Goombella from Knerp and the two escape into the city.
In Dutch, Goombella attends the Universiteit van Goomvoorde, because I guess the localizers didn’t get the memo they were supposed to do a riff on an existing school.
After this, Toadsworth arrives and tells Mario that he should go find Princess Peach, who wandered off while the ship they were on was refuelling here.
This is very hard to explain in English, but I greatly enjoy the “poeh poeh” that Toadsworth does as he walks away. Very very Dutch.
From here we go see Professor Defranck. His name is a play on a Belgium expression which has the meaning of someone finally realizing something “the franc [penny] has dropped”. Would not have gotten the pun without this translation, despite the fact that upon further research “the penny [suddenly/finally] dropped” is apparently a British expression! That’s what I get for being American.
After talking to Defranck about our schatkaart, we head into Ondergronds Boevechem.
The encounter with the Goombas is basically exactly the same as in EN, as in the Goombas were so clearly hitting on Goombella before but are now talking conspiracy theories (?). But I just enjoy Goombella’s dialogue no matter what language she’s speaking.
Here we see Goombella’s commands, or “Acties”, are Kopstoot and Tipgever. Mario’s commands for the record are “Springen”, “Hamer”, “Voorwerpen”, and “Tactieken”.
Highlighting “Voorwerpen” here (see the linebreak) since Dutch words are always hilariously long (which comes from being Germanic, naturally).
Upon meeting the vreemde kist, it speaks, much like in English, with older-timey words and a threatening tone.
Going to the Millenniumpoort, this cutscene also plays out pretty similarly to its English counterpart. Mario learns a Superactie, Zoetekauw.
Now we head back to Defranck’s. He tells us that the first juweelster is in Bloesemwoude.
We skip the Superactie tutorial from Defranck, get the Krachtklap penning from him too, skip another tutorial about penningen.
Before we enter the pipe, we’re briefly stopped by de knokcoach, who wants to teach us about knokken.
I like Goombella’s line at the end.
Finally, after all this, we head back into the ondergrond and fight our first boss, the Blooper! Naturally it’s still a Blooper, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get excellent dialogue translations from both the Blooper and Goombella.
Since that wraps up the prologue, I figure that’s more than enough rambling about Dutch translations for now. I do want to point out something funny from a bit later in the game.
During Hoofdstuk 2, when Vivian is being yelled at by Beldam for losing the sketch of Mario, Beldam says this:
Now what’s this about birthdays? This is basically like when your parent says “I’m gonna kill you when I get home/over there/etc”. She’s basically implying it’s going to be a long time before her birthday because… y’know.
To keep with how Vivian responded to Beldam in ENG (“I hate being punished…”, if I recall correctly), however, she says this in response, which is both hysterical and kind of adorable.
Now… I never really answered the question I posed earlier, not fully anyway. Why do I care about this? And for that matter why am I learning Dutch?
Well to answer that is simple, The Thousand-Year Door is one of my wife’s favorite video games. We’ve been together since we were teenagers in a long distance relationship, and 5 years ago I moved to the Netherlands to be with her. Vivian is one of her favorite characters in gaming, having always had a softspot for her even before she came out in 2021, and we were 'ecstatic' for this remake when it was announced. We were, naturally, over the moon that the remake restored Vivian’s identity and overall was just a fantastic remaster of one of the best games pretty much ever.
So to honor her, and this game that I love so much, I wanted to write this column.
