Warning: This story will will be pretty mature in themes and speech. Proceed with caution. Will edit warnings when they happen in-story.
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Introduction
The world of Pokemon shouldn't need a lot of explanation. Get thrown into the region of your game, collect your starter, challenge the gym leaders, stop an evil crime organization, become champion and Pokemon master. Or, you know, anything that Ash Ketchum is not doing at any given time, especially the last few bits.
However, in the midst of the Pokemon games that have been released all over the world, there is one certain bootleg that this story will be about. A bootleg of Pokemon Crystal, shoddily translated from Japanese to Chinese and then to English, was discovered somewhere in the far east and was thus named "Vietnamese Crystal". It gained fame mostly for its translation, which was so bad, it actually broke the game at certain points (or any point, really).
What prompted me to create the following piece of writing was the inherent lewd and sometimes downright scary nature of the awful translation, ranging from "[Player] found a Potion! [Player] put the Potion into his/her bag" becoming "[Player] DRUG! BAG FUCK" to the renaming of several healing items into "drugs" as the example shows. After quite a bit of thinking, I threw together a concept and ran with it. I have already completed this story somewhere else, but I wanted to do it justice with a re-write of the entire thing.
This is the result. The names for Pokemon, cities, NPCs and mostly everything else will be changed to how they are named within the bootleg, with footnotes explaining their origin.
This story will follow the main protagonists Baba (Kris) and Deku (Silver) on their journey through this world, presented in a first perspective kind of way. Occasionally, like in the upcoming prologue, other characters will speak. Who is speaking during a specific chapter will always be apparent by the subtitle of the chapter.
This story is loosely based on TwitchPlaysPokemon's 9 month long "one-input-at-a-time" run of Vietnamese Crystal that happened during 2015. There is absolutely zero knowledge of TPP required to enjoy this story, however.
I also took slight liberties with the in-game canon, for example:
- Giovanni is not Silver's father, but grandfather.
- Clair and Lance are siblings instead of cousins.
- Anime!Bill is a thing who is not the same thing as Ingame!Bill.
To get you started, I shall provide a short glossary of the terms which will appear in the following prologue:
- The names for Tohjo, Johto and Kanto are changed to Chengdu, Shangdao and Guandong respectively.
- Pokemon are named Elfs now.
- The Elite 4 are now named the Four Emperors.
- Likewise, Pokemon Trainers are called Elf Coaches now.
- Red is now named Sho, and the then member of the Elite 4 Lance now wears the very fancy name Wangdalu, or being affectionately shortened to "Du".
- Team Rocket also received a new title, that being Missile Bomb.
- Dragonites are now called Guail, Blastoises Guiki.
- Yifuji is Clair, and Jialun is Karen.
Should you have any issue with these translations, I will provide a mouseover translation of the terms in every story if it appears.
With that out of the way, let us begin. If you wish to immerse yourself in the horrifying translation of this bootleg beforehand (And I recommend doing that), consult the TVTropes page of Vietnamese Crystal and the Let's Play of DeliciousCinnamon on Youtube.