Naming When It Comes to Ports

[Time Turner]

I made a proposal about more-or-less preventing ports from taking priority when it comes to names. For the most part, it went great! But then Walkazo and LinkTheLefty made some good points about what the proposal wanted to do, so it got cancelled. Instead, we're here to discuss stuff on a case-by-case basis, including the policies of how we're going to deal with this stuff. Currently, the focus is on the names of the SMB3 Lands (see Walkazo's largest comment for a complete run-down on it), and Spiked Gloomba. I'll get the ball rolling by saying that the Gloomba should, without a doubt, have its name changed back to Spiky Gloomba, as it was in TTYD, and not Spiked Gloomba, as it was in PM1.

 

[Walkazo]

Yeah, Spiked Gloomba should be moved back to "Spiky Gloomba": no sense potentially flip-flopping articles like this as one game, then another, gets re-released with the original names left unchanged for authenticity / laziness.



To summarize the very long proposal comments, the SMB3 names are much more complicated in that there were essentially two sets of names right out of the gate - starting with the original Japanese version where the manual had names like "Desert Land" and "Dark Land", while the in-game credits had unique things. Then the original English version (North America-only) also had the manual saying "__ Land" and the in-game credits translating the creative Japanese names (poorly, in the case of "Kuppa Castle"), but a second English version released in NA and internationally made the game consistent with the manual. The cartoons also used the "__ Land" names for the most part, whereas SMAS went with the "creative" names for one reason or another (although a couple names were tweaked slightly), with SMA4 following suit and SMASLE remaining unchanged from the original (afaik). But then the VC version of SMB3 went back to the "__ Land" names, however, unlike the TTYD Gloomba (or even the preservation of the original SMAS "creative" names in SMASLE), it's not simply them not going through and updating names for one reason or another, but probably an active choice given how messy the name stuff was. Either set of names would have been authentic to an NES SMB3, but the "__ Land" was the better choice since it was consistent with the International release, and to support the idea that these are the names Nintendo stands by, a trophy in SSB4 specifically mentions "Pipe Land" (not "Pipe Maze").

tldr: Nintendo is stupid when it comes to keeping names straight, but overall, "__ Land" names are more common and consistent when considering manuals, different versions and tie-in media, and are probably more well-known and more commonly searched for too, so we should stick with them.

 

[LeftyGreenMario]

I do agree that case-by-case is a better situation to go by, as I did demonstrate concerns and confusion about applying such a broad rule especially to the Lands proposal. I would've changed my vote as well in response to LinktheLefty's input, but I was waiting to see any more interesting comments being brought up, maybe to counter the input.

I'm not invested nor too knowledgeable about the specifics of naming, though, just throwing that out there just in case I might look like I'm pretending to know what the hell I'm talking about.

I still think it's dumb that an enemy that's renamed in Thousand-Year Door gets the previous name in a later port and then gets its article renamed because of the port.