Especially amid titles from times when audio and visual were a good bit less refined, it could be hard to decipher what characters from fighting games like SNK’s Samurai Shodown or King of Fighters were yelling out during the heat of battle. This was especially true when they were yelling Japanese, leading to some very peculiar-sounding catch phrases that, if we’re honest, we still don’t know the true meaning of to this very day.
Thankfully YouTuber and fluent Japanese speaker Mrs. Eats is helping out with her latest video. Mrs. Eats goes through some of SNK characters’ most iconic lines to tell us what they’re actually saying, and in the case of poster boy Terry Bogard’s iconic “are you okay?,” she reveals the odd backstory behind it.
Even as recently as Street Fighter 4, I know my local scene would often yell “can of Sprite!” whenever a Cammy cried “cannon spike!,” nodding to the fact that the English was often hard to understand and the Japanese sometimes sounded like nonsensical English phrases.
One of the first characters Mrs. E takes a look and listen at is Mai Shiranui. For a long while fans of Mai have heard something akin to “me bouncy” during her win screen (the fact that Mai is obviously well-endowed and animated to indeed be, quite bouncy, doesn’t do us any favors here) but it turns out that she’s actually just being especially patriotic.
We’ll let Mrs. Eats tell you exactly what Mai and the rest of the characters in the video, which include the likes of Iori, Haomaru, Galford, and SamSho announcer Kuroko.
Check out the full video below (the historical bit about Terry’s most memorable catch phrase takes place near the end, by the way) and then let us know in the comments what kinds of mis-translated and/or misunderstood phrases you’ve been known to shout with your friends while playing fighting games.
If you enjoyed what you saw and heard here then be sure to check out Mrs. Eats’ video on the same subject from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.