It’s amazing what sticks in your brain so many years later. I say that as a guy who has made a whole website about the stuff that sticks in my brain, but today, I finally had the occasion to look something up that I remember seeing years ago and had just never investigated.
I speak of the most obscure monster in Chrono Trigger: Yodu De. I think it’s entirely possible to make it through the game without ever seeing this monster’s name on screen, to say nothing of seeing it at all, and unless I’m mistaken, it’s not named at all in the Nintendo DS re-release. Yodu De appears in the prison towers that Crono escapes from after he’s wrongly convicted of kidnapping, but confusingly, it’s more or less an alternate form of a more common enemy — Blue Shield in the original localization, and Sentry in every subsequent one. Certain stances of this enemy will show that there’s actually a black, shadowy creature hiding behind the shield. If you put the battle menu cursor on this enemy while this animation frame is showing, the game will sub out the regular name for Yodu De’s. Because it’s relatively hard spot — I only noticed it the one time — it’s not well-documented online today. Many online listings of Chrono Trigger enemies skip Yodu De altogether, and some profiles for the regular version make no mention of the alternate name.
Left to right: the shield version, the Yodu De version and an example of how the dark background of the prison tower area can make the Yodu De version hard to spot.
What’s more, when I encountered the name onscreen back in the day, I couldn’t even make out the sprite of the little creature hiding behind the shield. I imagine the background of this particular battle was dark enough that I couldn’t even see what I was supposed to be looking at. All this time, I just assumed that this weird, alternate name was some kind of translation error — like the monsters Japanese name was something like ヨードゥデー or Yōdudē, and this was just rendered more or less straightforwardly.
It’s not. In Japan, the Blue Shield version of the monster is called えいへい or Eihei — “guard,” and I’m guessing why it’s called Sentry in all subsequent versions of Chrono Trigger. I’m not seeing that the original Japanese has a special, specific name for the little guy hiding behind the shield, because it makes more sense to just think they’re one and the same, regardless of which perspective you’re seeing. That said, the two versions actually have different stats. The Blue Shield version has extremely high defense, for example, while the Yodu De version has a very low one — and that makes sense, because one version is literally a shield meant to absorb attacks and the other one is the guy behind the shield, with his soft bits exposed. Unless the Yodu De version has a name in the original Japanese that I’m just not seeing, I’m guessing that Ted Woolsey just slipped this localization choice in as a joke. And as the blogger Prince Watercress points out, the name is probably just a play on “yo dude,” which is what you might say to this little fella if you saw his face poking out.
There is a yellow palette swap of this monster that appears in the Black Omen area. The original Super NES localization uses two names — Incognito for when it’s in shield mode and Peeping Doom for when you can see the little guy peering out at you — but the Nintendo DS version of the game just calls both versions Shieldsman. I could be misremembering, but I feel like in my experience it was easier to spot the guy in back with the palette swap. This could be a matter of the background making it easier to see the second form, but I was surprised to learn all these years later that the original, blue version of the monster had one as well.
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That would be it for this post, but I actually stumbled across something else in researching this matter — and it’s vaguely smutty! The Chrono Wiki has a page listing all the name changes in the Nintendo DS port of the game. Apparently the snake-bodied female monster called Naga-ette in the original version of the game is just Naga in the re-release.
That’s all well and good, but reading its profile reminded me of a certain key item related to these creatures: the Naga-ette Bromide, which you can give to an old man NPC in exchange for a magic capsule. I actually never quite understood what this was supposed to be, even after I played through Lunar this past year and saw that bromides exist in this game for the female characters. The name makes it sound like some kind of medicine or something, but it’s actually a different kind of chemical thing: a photograph, especially one of a woman. In Japan, ブロマイド or buromaido refers a picture of a celebrity or model or something thereabouts. The term comes from the fact that early photo prints were made using silver bromide, and the terminology lingered in Japan long after different photographic techniques were used. And today, the term is often used specifically as a shorthand the way English might use the term pin-up.
So what this means is that the old man who wants the Naga-ette Bromide in Chrono Trigger isn’t looking for medicine or anything. The implication is that he’s horny for a racy photo of a snake lady. This would seem to violate Nintendo’s policy against anything racy. I assume that Ted Woolsey knew enough about Japanese culture to understand the reference but assumed it would fly over the heads of most western gamers.