Reaching the Queen's Chambers…

Porn fans out there know the value of a good name, and the history of the quality name – a catchy pun or a good parody can increase visibility and sales and get exposure just through chuckles and random google hits. The good folks at Kitty Media (aka Media Blasters) are experts at this, though we certainly had a journey of our own to work out a name for “Conquering the Queen.”

In Japanese, this game is known as ‘Mashou no Nie,’ which roughly translates to ‘Sacrifice to the Demon General.’ This makes sense, given the content and the magical nature of Vincent’s powers and position. However, that’s more of a mouthful in English, and while there’s plenty of sexual sacrifice, it’s not like he’s murdering young virgins and having his way with the corpses – there’s no necrophilia here.

When this project first landed on my proverbial desk, we were going with  ‘The Queen and Princess Are Your Reward’ as the working title. Eventually this became “Queen and Princess” (your big targets, plus long titles are reminiscent of some of our early days…) However, it appeared that this would also be an inferior attempt, and as the game entered retranslation – one of the few remaining titles to have required such – we began to brainstorm new titles between the translator, Kouryuu, and myself.

Personally, I wanted to go with a more medieval inspired title, one that would pay tribute to Arthurian legend and medieval lit in general. The candidate? ‘Sir Vincent and the Pork Sword’. This came from a recurring phallic reference in the translation, plus a play on  ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’ Unfortunately, profanity in the actual title was discouraged, or we could’ve also had ‘The Once and Future Fuck.’ Various other titles went back and forth, and we’d have to have Kouryuu dig through his chat logs for examples, and that means 30 fewer minutes for him to translate Deardrops.

Indeed, the reason we didn’t use ‘Sir Vincent and the Pork Sword’ is because Kouryuu objected: he found it a bit too crude, and the use of ‘pork sword’ in the title to be a bit wrong for the image we wanted to show: this is a darker game and not a comedic sex romp. So what’s a guy to do?

Well, in our case, we decided to turn to the standard tricks – puns, catchphrases, alliteration, etc. Conquering and Queen start on hard consonants, putting them together gets the point of the game across, and it implies that things are less than polite in some of the relations. So, we’re off conquering the queen indeed.

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10 Comments

  1. “The Queen and Princess Are Your Rewards” is a hilariously Japanese title. You can almost imagine the queen and princess coaching a high school baseball team based on Drucker’s Management while they’re at it.

  2. Interesting and glad you ended up with this title.

  3. I must admit I do kind of object to just arbitrarily making up a new game name entirely, especially one that isn’t the same ‘theme’ as the original title. Mangagamer took some flack over this in the past, as it directly gives the impression that Mangagamer doesn’t respect a valid translation. Not to mention the name changes weren’t well done, the name change of ‘Which girl should I chose?’ was such a poor change that the new title was never seen again beyond the sale page (and betrays the theme of the game by giving the player the wrong impression of the game). The game shows its original name HinataBokko in the download file, activation and in game. You might even think you downloaded the wrong product. :p

    To me anyways, brainstorming completely new titles betrays the role of translator. In this case however, I think that the name you chose fits the game well enough and am happy with the result. I admit that the original title is a bit awkward in English as they sometimes are, so some workshopping isn’t a bad approach. I don’t think I could have accepted pork sword as a real game title though. ^^;

  4. The Once and Future Fuck would have been an awesome title, too bad you couldn’t go with it.

    “Whoso Pusheth in his Sword of Pork into this Queen and Princess, is Rightwise Made King Apparent of Katusha.”

  5. I really wanted to play “The Queen and Princess as your Rewards”, but ah well. 🙁

  6. I… Know nothing about this. I’ll sponge up more info as time goes on. Good to know your working on lots of stuff though. I see that sometimes when you translate stuff titles don’t cross over language barriers very well so changing it is common practice. Well I don’t really understand it but it happens so….. yeah.

  7. I’ve been looking forward to this title for a long time now and am looking forward to its release. I can’t begin to imagine when I will have time to play it, though 🙂

    About the name: vast improvement over the first one.

  8. figures the rape game would come out before the other three

  9. This kinda game isn’t really towards my tastes, but I won’t judge others who enjoy it.

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