The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, has a few odds and ends that have stuck in my head since I first played it. One in particular is the quest for the game’s fourth and final bottle. If you’re unaware, the quest involves finding a locked chest in the Dark World, then bringing it several screens away to the master of unlocking in the Light World.
One thing always bothered me though: how the heck are you supposed to know to bring the chest to this guy?! As it turns out, this solution is hinted at pretty strongly throughout the game, but even more so in Japanese. For starters, one of the fortune teller’s hints attempts to set the player on the right path.
Unfortunately, this hint is pretty obtuse. The biggest problem is it’s not immediately apparent what a “gossip shop” is. In fact, there is only an uneasy consensus among us English-speaking LttP players. Across message boards, fansites, and wikis, there are two common assumptions:
To understand why these explanations are not correct, we’ll have to start by comparing the fortune teller’s dialogue in both Japanese and English:
| Japanese | Official English | Direct Translation |
|---|---|---|
| くるまによ～んくるまによ～ん 宝箱のことは闇世界の洞くつ に住む、じょうほう屋にきけ～ | Abracadabra alakazam! The gossip shop in the Dark World has treasure for the asking… | Cro-Magniyooon, Cro-Magniyooon… For treasure chest matters, ask the tipster that lives in a cave in the Dark World… |
Right off the bat, we can see that the official localization completely left out the detail about living in a cave, which automatically rules out both of the above theories. It also refers more explicitly to treasure chests, which can help clue you in that it’s related to the locked chest in the Dark World version of the blacksmith’s workshop.
The confusion largely boils down to the mistranslation of a single word: じょうほう屋 (jōhōya). The first part, jōhō, equates to something like “information” in English. The term would be ordinarily written as 情報, but Link to the Past is a children’s game, and these kanji are taught in the fifth grade. The writers likely opted for the easier-to-read hiragana characters for this reason.
Regardless, the specific problem in this phrase is the kanji 屋 (ya). The most common English equivalent for this kanji is ‘shop’, but it can also mean something like ‘dealer’, ‘merchant’, or ‘seller’. Given that the dialogue also mentions “living” in the Dark World, I think it’s safe to say the latter definitions are the correct ones.
So, who is the mysterious tipster the hint is referring to? Well, throughout Link to the Past, you will find individuals who will offer information for Rupees. These are where we’ll find our “gossip shop”, and the one the hint is referring to is located northeast of the Ice Palace. Let’s take a look:
| Japanese | Official English | Direct Translation |
|---|---|---|
| なあ、あんた20ルピーほど めぐんでくれたら、いい話を きかせてやるぜ…。 | Hey! I’ll tell you a profitable story if you pay me 20 Rupees. | Hey, if you give me, say, 20 Rupees, I’ll let you hear a nice story, heh…. |
| [After paying] へへっ、ありがとよっ。 じつはな、表の世界じゃおれも 盗賊だったんだよ…。 | Heh heh. Thank you. To tell you the truth, I used to be a thief in the Light World… | Heh heh, thanks, I guess. To tell you the truth, in the surface world I was also a thief…. |
| その時のなかまで、つかまるの をこわがって、逃げたやつがい るんだ。 | Some of my fellow thieves went into hiding because they were afraid of being caught. | (Regarding) one of my associates from that time, he was afraid of being arrested, and is now a fugitive. |
| やつは、カギあけの名人だった んだが、今は盗賊だった事を かくそうとしてるらしいぜ…。 | One of them was a master locksmith, but now he is hiding the fact that he was a thief… | That guy, he was a master of lock-picking, but now it seems he’s trying to hide the fact he was a thief, heh…. |
| へんなおじさんのふりをしてな ヘッヘッヘ…。 | …by pretending to be a strange middle-aged guy! Ha ha ha… | By acting like a strange, middle- aged man, heh heh heh…. |
Aside from some minor changes, it looks like Owsen and Yamada pretty much got this one dead on! In particular, I found it noteworthy that they correctly localized おじさん (ojisan) to ‘middle-aged man’ instead of ‘uncle,’ as some localizations of the time might have.
Anyway, this informant gives us a pretty clear indication that if we want to find a guy who can open our eternally-locked bottle chest, we’ll need to find someone pretending to be a “strange, middle-aged man.” At this point, the player would have been required to pass by the man near the desert, but not necessarily interact with him. One more exchange points us in the right direction:
Perfect! Both texts direct the player to investigate the entrance to the Desert of Mystery to get our man. If you’ve played LttP, you may remember that he’s completely silent, unless you bring him a chest or mess with his sign. That being the case, you’d think there’s not anything interesting with his dialogue, but there were actually pretty big changes! Let’s take a look:
| Japanese | Official English | Direct Translation |
|---|---|---|
| [Sign] 私に、話しかけないで。 私は、へんなおじさんです。 立札をぬいたりしないで下さい | Pay no attention to the average middle-aged man standing by this sign. Leave him alone! | Don’t talk to me. I am a strange middle-aged man. As for this sign, please don’t remove it or anything |
| [After Removing Sign] どうして…………… | Why did you take my sign? It says plain as day to just leave me alone! Sheeesh! | Why…………… |
In this case, we can see that the dialogue actually underwent quite a bit of rewriting. They completely rewrote the last sentence of the sign to be about the man, instead. The man was also rewritten to be much more indignant when his sign was removed, while the Japanese text was only a single word. This is commonly referred to as “punching up” dialogue in localization, as Japanese can sometimes sound very flat when translated directly. In this case, it certainly did make the man more memorable, so I can’t argue with it too much.
Unfortunately, the localization team did make an outright error with this dialogue, in translating へん (hen)—meaning ‘strange’ or ‘suspicious’—as ‘average.’ It’s possible to read the rewritten text as suspicious in its own right, but the change is compounded by the fact the storyteller explicitly states that his former associate is “pretending to be a strange middle-aged guy,” which could lead to English-speaking players having some confusion as to whether or not the player has found the right person. Still, combining the two hints we got from the thieves makes it pretty likely that this is the right guy, overall.
So, with all this in mind, what happened? My best guess is that the localization team probably assumed ‘shop’ was the correct definition, and didn’t think too hard about it. This happens somewhat frequently in localization, since they’re often working with little-to-no context, and don’t always have time to thoroughly investigate every little line of dialogue. It also would’ve been a bit difficult to concisely convey all the information in the hint, since Japanese is significantly more information-dense than English.
As for players’ assumption that the Dark World version of the blacksmiths’ house was, itself, the Gossip Shop, I think that was most likely fueled by the fact that once the chest is unlocked, the flag for this hint is cleared, and the fortune teller stops giving it. It’s a natural assumption that once the hint goes away, you must’ve found what it was referring to, after all!
Do you know of any other hints that might have gotten lost in localization? Let me know, below, and maybe I’ll look into them! Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter if you want to know when I post new articles! And if it’s your first time to the site, you can find a list of all articles on this page, sorted by the series they’re about.
The translation to the word “average” probably wasn’t an error, it was rewritten/punched up to invoke the trope of suspiciously specific denial. It’s a common joke for someone who has untoward motivations or backstory to vehemently deny it, even when nobody brings it up. To me, this seems like a clear example of that. To most english speakers, this would make the man seem more suspicious than even just calling him suspicious directly on the sign, so I think it was a decent change.
I think it definitely makes him seem suspicious! But it being at odds with the other thief’s hint that he’s acting “strange” does still make it at least a consistency error, in my eyes. Maybe I should make that a little clearer in the article text, since I’ve had a few people give this kind of feedback….
I agree. I think saying “don’t mind me, I’m just an average middle-aged man” is pretty conspicuous and, dare I say, strange. It fits in line with someone else saying that he acts like a strange middle-aged man.
I don’t remember if I figured this out of my own when I played the game but I did use a guide to 100% it regardless.
(Great article btw <3)