Indie Game Gets ‘The Best Accidental Marketing’ in Japan After Title Mistranslated to ‘Sh***y Dungeon’

When they realized their mistake, Nicoletti says, “Everyone was cracking up, and honestly, I also laughed a lot about it. It was completely unintentional.” However the mishap did not flush the rogue-lite dungeon crawler down the toilet, rather, “It ended up bringing the game a lot of attention and the number of Wishlists soared.” Nicoletti said the name change was “the best accidental marketing” the developer could have hoped for.

According to an earlier report by Automaton Japan, the Japanese language Steam page for The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles was named Shitty Dungeon back on August 8. By August 13, Japanese speaking users had begun discussing the topic on X and had reported it on the official Discord server.

It’s still not clear how or why this mistranslation happened, but it’s worth noting that the pre-release Japanese language demo of the game had some awkward machine translations when it was picked for Tokyo Game Show’s ‘Selected Indie 80’ in September. The developers announced that these issues would be fixed in the full release, and it appears the ‘shitty dungeon incident’ occurred around this time.

This amusing mistake made the indie game stand out from the crowd of new Steam releases. It soon became a topic of discussion on Japanese social media. According to Nicoletti, this contributed to an increase in Wishlist numbers for the then-unreleased game. After all, a title that seems to proudly proclaim it’s bad can make people curious as to whether that’s really the case.

However, the quality of the game did not stink after all, and The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles currently has a ‘Mostly Positive’ rating on Steam. Reviewers have been praising its funny dialogue, satisfying gameplay loop and the overall care put into its development.

Japanese speaking commenters on X have also praised the demo and the full game for being surprisingly better than its initial Japanese title suggested. “Humor that lives up to the name,” and “great, detailed pixel art,” are among the plaudits given to the indie title. One Japanese language review on Steam noted that, “Despite the title Shitty Dungeon making me think it was a joke, it is actually quite well made.” The reviewer said that because they’d made a blind buy, “It wasn’t quite what I expected but the combat system is pretty interesting.” They also praised the game’s balance between humorous dialogue and tense combat.

Although good localizations are preferable, translation errors have produced some weirdly memorable dialogue over the years. If it hadn’t been for mistranslation, such lines would never have become so iconic. Lines like Zero Wing’s “All your base are belong to us,” and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets,” have endured beyond their source games to become well-known memes.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.