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WiiU

Miiverse Home Screen Dubbed WaraWara Plaza

by Neal Ronaghan - November 7, 2012, 4:16 pm EST
Total comments: 8 Source: (Description), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZIpfOEb_80

Adding another Japanese term to Nintendo lore in other regions.

The main screen of Miiverse, featuring Miis lingering around icons of games and applications, will be called WaraWara Plaza in all regions, according to recent Nintendo Directs.

At E3 2012, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revealed the area was called Mii WaraWara during development because of, as Nintendo of America's Bill Trinen put it, "how the crowd of Mii characters murmured and moved about." 

Trinen further elaborated, saying that "You seemed to like the name so we decided to keep it."

The Miiverse and the WaraWara Plaza will be available on the Wii U, most likely courtesy of a day one patch that will also add the eShop and other online functionality.

Talkback

Chocobo_RiderNovember 10, 2012

Between "Wii U" and "WaraWara Plaza" I think Nintendo may be testing the limits of ... what's the word.... soft-sounding terminology?

... I do like the name though.

Mop it upNovember 11, 2012

Nintendo have never been good with titles and names, but they have been particularly bad at it lately.

PlugabugzNovember 12, 2012

The point of the name Wii was a name which any language can pronounce easily. So "WaraWara Plaza" makes perfect sense, then.

CericNovember 12, 2012

Quote from: Plugabugz

The point of the name Wii was a name which any language can pronounce easily. So "WaraWara Plaza" makes perfect sense, then.

That no languages can pronounce it correctly.

Ian SaneNovember 13, 2012

"WaraWara" sounds like some doing a Muppets impression and getting it wrong.

So it's another dumb Engrish name that a Japanese person with no knowledge of the English language is insisting be used worldwide.  Eh, nothing new.  No one who isn't turned off by "Wii U" is going to have this be their breaking point.

I find it funny how onomatopoeia differs depending on the country.  I would never describe a crowd noise as going "WaraWara".  Now in this case the crowd is speaking a different language so that might sound different.  But something like a cat's meow?  No way Japanese cats meow differently than American cats but the words to describe the sound are different.  Huh?

OblivionNovember 13, 2012

Are you really bitching about language differences?

I don't think he's bitching as much as taking note of the interesting differences between the languages.

Ian SaneNovember 13, 2012

It's more of a funny observation.  It's just weird and interesting that different languages would have different words to replicate a sound that is the same for all languages.  A cat's meow and a dog's bark sound the same worldwide so you would assume that anybody trying to impersonate that sound would do it virtually the same regardless of their language.  And yet that is not the case, which is interesting and also seemingly illogical.

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