“Horsebirds” Now “Chocopo”

Square Enix has renamed Final Fantasy XIV’s “Horsebirds” to “Chocopo” – this along with a slew of other spelling mistakes has solidified the suspicions of Japanese players that the game was made in China.

After making good its promise to remove “pseudo-Chinese” names, Square Enix seems once again to have inflamed the situation – the sloppy spelling mistakes introduced during the patch are being interpreted as evidence the job was not handled by native Japanese speakers.

“Chocobo” is misspelt “Chocopo”

Just whether this is any improvement over the previous “horsebird” is hard to judge.

More examples:

“Physical Bonus” is misspelt “Physical Ponus”

“Telepo” is misspelt “Telebo”

“Support Desk” is misspelt “Subbort Desk”

In all cases the errors are caused by confusing the dots and circles which turn syllables like “ho” (ホ) into “bo” (ボ) and “po” (ポ). Most Japanese seem to consider it “absolutely impossible” for a native speaker to have made such an incredibly basic error, let alone so many times.

Such bizarre and blatant errors seem to indicate not only a lack of proof-reading but also a curious lack of familiarity with the Japanese language, again prompting speculation that the game may be suffering from “China quality.”

2ch’s digest of FF14 oddities also includes duplicate player listings and a server with a grand total of 9 players logged in, 45 minutes after launch:

These and other incidents have all been very widely reported on the Japanese Internet, creating a major PR disaster amongst the very people who were the core audience for the previous game – speculation is now not just confined to whether the Final Fantasy series will suffer an untimely end with XIV, but also whether Square Enix itself is in good condition.