>>38102811With this history of Game Freak having no say in the Chinese market, and the product being in the hands of the bootleggers, the result was a complete clusterfuck. 4 different names for the franchise as a whole exist in China, maybe more. First, 宠物小精灵 (small creature pets), then 神奇宝贝 (mystical babies), then finally the current official name decided by Game Freak, 精灵宝可梦 (精灵 is creature and 宝可梦 reads Baokemeng, a transliteration of Pokemon), concurrently the video games were usually named 口袋妖怪 (pocket monsters), which is what I always thought the name was. Along with these bootlegged games came multiple names for each pokemon. Since the Japanese pokemon names never use the Chinese characters/Kanji, there's no hard name for anything; some are translated phonetically from English, some from Japanese, some have new names. ~2016 GF finally took control and rolled out official names for everything. Imagine you, as a pokemon fan were suddenly told Mankey is now called Monkman.
That's a brief history of Pokemon in China. A few game boys floated down to Hong Kong and Taiwan, but mostly this is what you got. Make a cheap knock-off, sell a few thousand copies, and move on. The Chinese way is like this: the boss comes in to his computer repair shop. He tells the staff he heard about this pikachu thing, and the kids seem to love it, so we’re going to make a pikachu. The thought might cross the minds of the staff that “none of us have ever made a game before and we don’t know where to even begin”, but nobody will say it because you don’t want to look like an idiot. So you say “aye aye, sir!”, and get to work.
