Inspired by @Count Cannoli 's Crygor fan thread: a thread for friends to talk about/admire/draw/speculate on/existentially ponder WarioWare's resident tiny alien-kitten-man-thing.
Orbulon has always been my favorite & it's been exciting to meet more fans here on these forums & share the silly joy of loving such a niche series
By the way, the part of your translation of Orbulon's Made in Wario diary that said "I also wanted to go to school" inspired me to make this.View attachment 5817
Colour me surprised about the same thing. Would have thought the name would be unique enough not to 'clash' with anything else.
Either way, I'm also kind of curious how popular Orbulon is. I mean, he's always had fans, and as a character in the WarioWare series, he's generally been received positively, but it's surprising how much more love he's gotten in the last few days or so. Seems to be approaching the same level as Mona, 9-Volt or Ashley.
Hahahah his face in the second panel is priceless!! God I really wish Ashley & Orbulon could interact more. Loner teenage witch who secretly pines for friends, teaming up with awkward, overly polite alien who also... not-so-secretly pines for friends.. they had such potential. </3
Either way, I'm also kind of curious how popular Orbulon is. I mean, he's always had fans, and as a character in the WarioWare series, he's generally been received positively, but it's surprising how much more love he's gotten in the last few days or so. Seems to be approaching the same level as Mona, 9-Volt or Ashley.
I wonder the same... I played Ware first back in 2005 with Touched, & I remember being sad that I never saw anything about Orbulon on the internet like the other characters.
I only just recently got back into Ware, but I haven't managed to shake my affection for him in the meantime :') Still one of my favorite fictional characters ever, & it's fun to see the fans come out of the woodwork at last -- if only here on Wario Forums
For those who might be interested, I wanted to write a post to share some little, character-relevant things in his diary entries that I thought were cool. Disclaimer that I am, myself, only an intermediate learner of Japanese, and thus invite others more fluent than I to correct me in the event of mistranslations or misinterpretations!
Placed in a spoiler tag because I got long-winded :(
Zannen-desu. A polite form of apology, and the one that Orbulon uses the most often. This is notable because it's not typical to beginning speakers of Japanese, who are more likely to use the phrase "Sumimasen" ("Excuse me") or "Gomen-nasai" ("I'm sorry", polite form) to apologize. However, Orbulon chooses to use this less typical but equally polite form, "Zannen-desu", a rough literal translation of which is, "I am regretful [about it]." As opposed to the beginner equivalents, "zannen-desu" has an overtone of empathy, typically used in situations where a speaker is expressing regret for another person's misfortune that may not necessarily be their own. I'm not sure what the "canonical" explanation for this is, or why he prefers it, but it's notable because it feels deliberate on the part of the writers; despite probably being encouraged to use "gomenasai" in his Japanese courses, Orbulon chooses to use this more "empathetic" apology instead.
As is in line with people learning beginner Japanese, Orbulon adds the "-san" honorific to everyone's name. In most places this is appropriate, but in some other places, it sticks out like a sore thumb -- most notably, as the only character who addresses Dr. Crygor as "Mr. Crygor". But the constant use of the "-san" honorific also serves to characterize him as an outsider; where 9-Volt & 18-Volt speak to one another with no honorifics, and Jimmy & Wario speak in casual, familiar Japanese, Orbulon refers to everyone with a "Miss" or "Mister", regardless of status or relation -- even going so far as to tack the honorific onto 9-Volt's pet's name.
On that note: for as far as I've read into other character diaries, Orbulon's is one of the only ones that makes relatively common use of the passive voice: "it seems"/"it appears that"/etc. To my knowledge, the other character that does this with a same, notable frequency is Dr. Crygor... an interesting in-character explanation possibly being that Dr. Crygor is a scientist and is thus inclined to treat all of his observations, even non-scientific ones, as hypotheses ("It appears that...") rather than absolute statements of truth. As the Japanese variant of Orbulon is characterized as more insecure (to the point of pulling an all-nighter to play video games for fear of looking stupid, or feeling queasy at the thought of not having a cold) and mildly passive-aggressive (what do you do when someone you're mad at comes to visit your house? Ignore them the entire time lmao), Orbulon's use of this passive tone may indicate either an unwillingness to speak assertively, or a distrust of his own senses. This serves to make the entry where he admits that he hasn't had enough sleep, & is abruptly direct in his request for people to steer clear of him, starkly different in tone from the rest of the entries, to a heightened comedic effect. Moral of the story don't catch Orbulon on a day when he hasn't slept.
Nipongo. Despite his growing vocabulary over the course of the entries, Orbulon insists on making this typo every. single. time. What he means to say is Nihongo, the Japanese word for "Japanese language". The closest English equivalent to this typo could perhaps be "Jappanese" -- or for a Western US release, something like "American-lish". I don't know what it is about this word that perplexes him, but this doesn't even get better in later games lol.
If you, like Younger Me, attempted to put Orbulon's diary -- or anything "written" by Orbulon for that matter -- through Google Translate, you may have noticed that he... seems to talk about "death" a lot, among other nonsensical, repetitive things. This is because for some reason, Orbulon thinks that all verb conjugations in Japanese should be done in Katakana, a character system reserved for non-native Japanese words, instead of Hiragana, the character system intended for words of Japanese origin. The supposed...uh...obsession with death that Google Translate!Orbulon has is, in actuality, Google Translate seeing the word "desu" ("to be") written in Katakana, and translating it into the closest phonetic English equivalent. Sadly, this is another set of typos that Orbulon does not overcome with time lol RIP in pieces, spaceman.
For those who might be interested, I wanted to write a post to share some little, character-relevant things in his diary entries that I thought were cool. Disclaimer that I am, myself, only an intermediate learner of Japanese, and thus invite others more fluent than I to correct me in the event of mistranslations or misinterpretations!
Placed in a spoiler tag because I got long-winded :(
Zannen-desu. A polite form of apology, and the one that Orbulon uses the most often. This is notable because it's not typical to beginning speakers of Japanese, who are more likely to use the phrase "Sumimasen" ("Excuse me") or "Gomen-nasai" ("I'm sorry", polite form) to apologize. However, Orbulon chooses to use this less typical but equally polite form, "Zannen-desu", a rough literal translation of which is, "I am regretful [about it]." As opposed to the beginner equivalents, "zannen-desu" has an overtone of empathy, typically used in situations where a speaker is expressing regret for another person's misfortune that may not necessarily be their own. I'm not sure what the "canonical" explanation for this is, or why he prefers it, but it's notable because it feels deliberate on the part of the writers; despite probably being encouraged to use "gomenasai" in his Japanese courses, Orbulon chooses to use this more "empathetic" apology instead.
As is in line with people learning beginner Japanese, Orbulon adds the "-san" honorific to everyone's name. In most places this is appropriate, but in some other places, it sticks out like a sore thumb -- most notably, as the only character who addresses Dr. Crygor as "Mr. Crygor". But the constant use of the "-san" honorific also serves to characterize him as an outsider; where 9-Volt & 18-Volt speak to one another with no honorifics, and Jimmy & Wario speak in casual, familiar Japanese, Orbulon refers to everyone with a "Miss" or "Mister", regardless of status or relation -- even going so far as to tack the honorific onto 9-Volt's pet's name.
On that note: for as far as I've read into other character diaries, Orbulon's is one of the only ones that makes relatively common use of the passive voice: "it seems"/"it appears that"/etc. To my knowledge, the other character that does this with a same, notable frequency is Dr. Crygor... an interesting in-character explanation possibly being that Dr. Crygor is a scientist and is thus inclined to treat his all of his observations, even non-scientific ones, as hypothesis ("It appears that...") rather than absolute statements of truth. As the Japanese variant of Orbulon is characterized as more insecure (to the point of pulling an all-nighter to play video games for fear of looking stupid, or feeling queasy at the thought of not having a cold) and mildly passive-aggressive (what do you do when someone you're mad at comes to visit your house? Ignore them the entire time lmao), Orbulon's use of this passive tone may indicate either an unwillingness to speak assertively, or a distrust of his own senses. This serves to make the entry where he admits that he hasn't had enough sleep, & is somewhat direct in his request for people to steer clear of him, starkly different in tone from the rest of the entries, to a heightened comedic effect. Moral of the story don't catch Orbulon on a day when he hasn't slept.
Nipongo. Despite his growing vocabulary over the course of the entries, Orbulon insists on making this typo every. single. time. What he means to say is Nihongo, the Japanese word for "Japanese language". The closest English equivalent to this typo could perhaps be "Jappanese" -- or for a Western US release, something like "American-lish". I don't know what it is about this word that perplexes him, but this doesn't even get better in later games lol.
If you, like Younger Me, attempted to put Orbulon's diary -- or anything "written" by Orbulon for that matter -- through Google Translate, you may have noticed that he... seems to talk about "death" a lot, among other nonsensical, repetitive things. This is because for some reason, Orbulon thinks that all verb conjugations in Japanese should be done in Katakana, a character system reserved for non-native Japanese words, instead of Hiragana, the character system intended for words of Japanese origin. The supposed...uh...obsession with death that Google Translate!Orbulon has is, in actuality, Google Translate seeing the word "desu" ("to be") written in Katakana, and translating it into the closest phonetic English equivalent. Sadly, this is another set of typos that Orbulon does not overcome with time lol RIP in pieces, spaceman.
Very very interesting...now I honestly want to see a sort of analysis of the way all the different characters write. Some are pretty obvious like Kat & Ana's usage of only kana due to being children but I'm sure a lot of the others are a lot more nuanced.
