Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s latest die-athon, may be a critical smash hit, but not all versions of the game have been created equal, it seems. One player has noticed that the Portuguese-Brazilian language version of the game seemingly misses out a lot of key lore information, meaning that players who speak the language aren’t getting the same experience as the rest of the world.
In a Reddit thread, user ‘PicossauroRex’ details the problem, which is to do with armour and spell descriptions, one of the only ways to gather lore about the game’s wider world and history. “This issue at hand is not about mistranslation, the game translation is great, a few missteps here and there, but very good overall,” they say in the post. What is the problem is the actual size of the translated descriptions.
PicossauroRex highlights some of the differences between the English language equipment descriptions and the Portuguese-Brazilian equipment descriptions. For example, Hoslow’s Helm has a three-paragraph description in English, which tells the player what the item looks like and dives into its lore and background information, but the PT-BR description is a mere seven words that translate to “Heavy helm, inherited from the Hoslow,” according to PicossauroRex.
This is the case for spells, too. The Incantation called Elden Stars also has a three-paragraph description that talks about crucial background lore about the Erdtree and Greater Will in the English version; the PT-BR description is again a few mere words that describe the Incantations functions, but contains nothing about the lore of the item. PicossauroRex translates the description as: “Shoots a light ray that divides itself upon reaching a enemy.” The difference in description length is significant.
“In most cases, specially with spells, huge pieces of lore information are missing,” PicossauroRex continues. “Since 80% of the game story can only be learned through item descriptions this is a big oversight from [the] FromSoftware localisation team.” The user states that they had to stop posting image comparisons after hitting Reddit’s 20-images-per-post limit. Curiously, they report that weapon and general item descriptions aren’t plagued with this problem, only armour and spells.
According to Steam, Elden Ring has been localised into 14 different languages, including two variations of Chinese, Thai, Korean, most European languages, and more. So it will be interesting to see whether this issue crops up in any of the other non-English localisations.