Since this is only tangentially related to fighting games, I was hesitant to post it into the fighting game corner, but the general discussion thread’s info box clearly said to post fighting game stuff into the fighting game corner, so I hope this goes here.
I know the special attacks of Ryu are Hadoken, Shoryuken, and Tatsumaki Senpukyaku, but if you play (Super) Street Fighter II on the SNES, he seems to not be shouting “Tatsumaki Senpukyaku” when he does his attack. The other two are clearly understandable, but the last one sounds more like sap-sap-sap-sadoken to me. Does anyone know what he says?
Makes sense to me. I doubt anybody can say that in a studio without sounding ridiculous, or not 100% accurate. It’s the same reason why it sounds like ALLLLLLL-YOU-CAN whenever they do an uppercut, or why Honda says HOOOT-HOIT instead of Dosukoi.
That and the fact that they were recording these to be replayed on more primitive hardware, and thus the recordings are going to be grainier than the VA’s recorded by default.
That makes sense. It’s weird, I never had problems understanding shoryuken or dosukoi, only the tatsumaki and the spinning bird kick.
Good times XD I recently saw on Youtube that there’s even a ZX Spectrum version of the game, and I got the Amiga version off of eBay recently for really cheap (less than US$10) and the SNES sound files are really better compared to Amiga, I think.
Okay. So. Ryu shouts Tatsumaki senpu kyaku. But it has to do with how Japanese translates into our alphabet. Vowels are often, but not always, used transitionally especially "U"s. Almost like a breath. Their use is very subtle to western ears so it sounds like Tatsmak senpu kyak. And senpu is sometimes spelled as senpuu, and pronounced sen-pyou
Actual reason: Audio quality wasn’t very high in the 90s. This, plus bit crushing effect from compression from various downsized ports of the game, made it sound very different and almost unintelligible to lots of people.