Blurry Japanese magazine scans are often a source of new info about eagerly anticipated games. Games like Pokémon X/Y. That is, unless the scans are totally fake.
Earlier this month, what's supposedly (apparently?) a "leaked" image from a Japanese magazine popped up on YouTube. To date, the video has been viewed over 50,000 times, and the leak showed two new Pocket Monsters. Let's have a look at what seals this scan as bunk: the Japanese text.
Often, when people want to create fakes, they use foreign lingo to mask the fakes—to help sell the phony as real. Doing so, however, can make it easier to spot what's real and what clearly isn't.
This supposed leaked scan has phrases that sound awkward or wrong in Japanese: "もうすぐポケモン..." ("Very soon, Poké:mon"), "ポケモンXとYに10月に発見！" ("Detect Pokémon X and Y in October!), and perhaps my favorite, "ポケモンは何ですか？" ("What is Pokémon?") Seriously, what is Pokémon?
Even the character names would never fly in Japanese. One Pokémon in the scan is called "Amutsu", which sounds a little too close to the Japanese word "omutsu" (おむつ), which means diapers. No way would Pokémon's creators call a Pocket Monster "Amutsu". If they did, within minutes, Japanese kids would be calling that character "diaper".
There are other errors, too, such as writing "omomi" (重み) to mean "weight". "Omomi" means "weight" as in "emphasis" or "importance". That's right, the scan lists the new character's vitals as "Height" and then "Emphasis".
"The fuck is this Japanese," wrote a commenter on 2ch, Japan's biggest bulletin board. "The Japanese in this is so strange," wrote another. That commenter is correct. It really is strange.
Internet sleuths on 2ch think that whoever created this fake has created other slick-looking Pokémon fakes in the past, also with strange Japanese. Elsewhere in that same 2ch thread, people talked about putting these scans into correct Japanese to troll people on Twitter—something that they did with baloney Pikachu images last month.
ポケモンXYの新ポケモンｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗ [暇人速報]
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.