I came across an August 14, 2025 article in Automation West titled Developer accidentally names game ‘Crap Dungeon’ on Japanese Steam store in apparent localization mishap. I quote article author Kei Aiuchi for the details:
Italian developer Fix-a-Bug recently announced a release date for their roguelike dungeon-crawler titled The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles … Ahead of launch, the title has garnered much attention among Japanese gamers due to a baffling mishap – the name “Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles” somehow ended up being localized as “Crap Dungeon” for Japanese Steam users.
Kei Aiuchi (Automation West)
The article offers more details about the translation failure:
The unflattering misnomer “Kuso Dungeon” (jp:クソダンジョン, lit: [sh—y]/crappy dungeon) suddenly appeared on the store page on August 8…
Kei Aiuchi (Automation West)
The localization mishap accrued to the game’s benefit, according to a subsequent October 29, 2025 report in Automation West. This second article, authored by Amber V, quoted the developer of The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicle, Paolo Nicoletti, regarding the error:
It was a completely unintentional accident, but it ended up bringing the game lots of attention.
Paolo Nicoletti (via Automation West)
Mr. Nicoletti emphasized that the localization error was just that, completely unintentional, and the fact that it helped the game gain attention among Japanese Steam gamers was a mishap having a coincidental good outcome. I suspect that some people may be suspicious. Perhaps the team behind The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicle went with a comically bad mistranslation of the title to generate buzz about their game with Japanese customers. But for reasons I now turn the page to discuss, I am not suspicious at all.
I have written many articles about a visual novel called May Sky. May Sky is the 2008 English-language localization of a 2005 freeware Japanese visual novel called Gogatsu no Sora in Japanese. The English May Sky was localized from the installable NScripter release of Gogatsu no Sora. However, Gogatsu no Sora was first released as an Adobe Flash game. Having already reviewed May Sky and started working on what would be a four-part analysis of its story, I thought it would be fun to look at the original Adobe Flash release of Gogatsu no Sora, which is somewhat surprisingly still online. This required me to visit the Japanese website.
Unlike the NScripter release of Gogatsu no Sora, neither the Flash version nor the Japanese website were localized into English. As I noted in my article on the Flash Gogatsu no Sora, the lack of website localization was a small impediment to my project:
I ran into an obvious issue: The whole site is in Japanese and as I always remind readers … I cannot read Japanese.
Nicholas A. Ferrell
But we have technology. Technology breaks down barriers between languages. Perhaps we needed translators like the expert team at Insani to localize Gogatsu no Sora back in 2008, but I wrote this in the brave new era of 2024!
Fortunately we have Google Translate which, notwithstanding its limitations, usually does well enough to allow me to navigate a webpage like this and find what I am looking for.
Nicholas A. Ferrell
So how did Google Translate perform?
The first thing I noticed is that Google Translate appears to translate Gogatsu no Sora as Distraction of garbage, which I imagine from having read Insani’s localization and supporting materials is probably not the best translation of the name.
Nicholas A. Ferrell
Perhaps we still need the human translators after all.
Again noting that I do not know Japanese, it seems obvious to me that Google Translate hit a snag with Gogatsu no Sora, which is rendered as ごがつのそら。in the original. Now I cannot read these characters, but I have seen “sora” in other Japanese contexts refer to sky and I can only imagine that gogatsu refers to May. The English name makes sense in the context of May Sky: The main story is set entirely in a certain month of May and May and the sky are both topics of discussion between the two main characters. Speaking of the main characters, Haruki Mizoguchi and Minori Kamiake, their flaws are a central point of the novel, but to call them garbage would be unduly harsh. Thus, taken together, I suspect that the Japanese characters have different potential meanings and that choosing the correct meaning requires understanding them in context. It appears that Google Translate utterly failed at understanding what the characters were intended to mean in context.
(I note that I tried using Google Translate on a small Adobe Flash May Sky novel which is not included in the localization and appears to be an epilogue of sorts to the main piece. That too had the garbage problem, so it appears to go beyond the title in isolation.)
Having seen how Google Translate struggled with the title of May Sky, I found myself not being suspicious about the unintended nature of the mistranslation of the title of “Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles” into Japanese (note I do not know which language the team translated from or what they used). I assume that the team ran the title and in-game text through a machine translation tool and, not having any Japanese-language expertise themselves, went with the result until they were alerted to the issue by Japanese gamers . . . perhaps after said Japanese gamers were done laughing.
While the story of Crazy Hyper Dungeon Chronicles has a happy ending, there is a cautionary aspect to it. Firstly, that story, combined with my experience using Google Translate on the Gogatsu no Sora website, highlights the fallibility of these machine translation tools, perhaps exacerbated when translating between two languages which have little in common. Secondly, one reason I do not promote an easy translation option for The New Leaf Journal is because I can only be responsible for what I write, which is in English. I know from Google Search Console that some international visitors have used Google Translate to read my articles. I think that is very neat and I hope that Google Translate does well enough in those cases for people to gain something from my articles, but I would be reluctant to bundle Google Translate or similar into my site because it is entirely possible, if not likely, that it may in one instance or another, make a hash out of something I write. Were someone to ask why I wrote something in a translation that I did not in fact write in English, I would be unable to answer on account of the fact that I would have no idea why Google Translate or something similar translated what I wrote however it translated it, much less whether the person raising the question is correctly interpreting the translation. Thus, I wash my hands of the translation issue and leave it to the end-readers.
Of course, webmasters of small sites like mine and the vast majority of Indie game developers do not have access to the services of skilled translators, so the only available solutions in many cases for non-native speakers to enjoy an article or game are imperfect. Having made it a habit of mine to offer unsolicited advice to Steam, I think it would be a good idea for Steam to highlight prominently when a game was entirely or largely machine translated to distinguish such efforts from games that are localized by a human being who is fluent in the two languages at issue.
