Disaster Report: Vroom in the Night Sky (Switch)

Back when I took a look at Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King, I noted how that simple game’s release in the first year of the Nintendo Switch’s life managed to propel it to unexpected sales and popularity. Just something about being able to take a quality game device on the go or plug it in your T.V. when at home really seemed to resonate with the gaming public, and people were hungry for games for a system that wasn’t getting them quickly enough.

 

However, that game came out in December of 2017 when the Switch was released on March 3rd of that year. If a game could receive a huge bump by being released a whole human gestation period after a console’s release, imagine the attention a game could receive if it came out at the very same time the console released. That seems to be what Vroom in the Night Sky was banking on when it released on the same day as the Switch in Japan and Europe, although it was a bit slower to make it to the United States where it released on April 5th instead. Around the same time you could be exploring an innovative approach to open worlds in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, racing futuristic vehicles in Fast RMX, and trimming paper characters to solve puzzles in Snipperclips, you could spot a little game about magical girls “racing” beside these titles on the Nintendo eShop, and for 10 bucks, it no doubt slithered its way into the system memory of many unsuspecting Switch owners.

Vroom on the Night Sky may have been there when the gates were just opened, but it quite clearly wasn’t ready when it came to its game design, translation, or pretty much any of the features you would hope to find in a video game you intend to play. It’s a game where little thought was put into making its core systems exciting or, well, work properly at all, and its entire design speaks of a title that was rushed to market just to capitalize on the fact people would be looking for games for a new system.

 

The funny thing is though, it did get an “improvement patch” down the line after many of its problems were discovered by the gaming public… and that is the version I have played. And if you’re new here and didn’t glean that the article title “Disaster Report” is a rather negative way to describe a look at a video game, then allow me to tell you now that not only did the update fail to fix many of the game’s issues, it has actually been noted to have worsened the game in many areas including the English translation.

 

While I would love to dive straight into the most egregious cases of poorly translated English for a quick and easy laugh, there is a fair bit of context to go over for what this game even is, and it has plenty of its own awful decisions to stupefy us before we get to the juicy dialogue problems.

 

MAGICAL FLYING THROUGH RINGS

If you ask most people what the problem is with Superman 64, they’ll tell you that flying through a bunch of rings is its main fault. While this is clearly the common opinion thanks to people who don’t play too deep into the game giving snap judgments of something clearly awful, the ring flying is hardly the game’s worst problem and flying through rings can actually be found in some decent and even high quality titles. Pilotwings uses rings to guide your aerial flight since the main challenge is learning how to control the various forms of flight featured in the title, and even beloved classics like Star Fox 64 have Silver Rings you can fly through to get health with their placement meant to encourage breaking from the most effective combat and navigation paths for a quick reward. The fact is, aerial flight has so many dimensions it can move through that sometimes you need to draw a player’s attention to an area or encourage skillful maneuvering with something big they can fly through, and placing floating rings in the sky is an effective and clear form of game design.

 

The reason I bring this all up is because Vroom in the Night Sky is the perfect example of how not to use aerial rings in a flying focused game.

Entering a level in Vroom in the Night Sky, you are given one goal to successfully complete it: fly trough all the Key Stars to open the Magical Gate. The Key Stars are, as you might have guessed, large floating rings, and as soon as you rev up the scooter your magical girl is using to fly through the sky, you’ll notice it’s actually not too hard to maneuver. In fact, one of the best things I can say about the experience is that the flight is fairly responsive when you’re on something simple like the default bike or one of the higher end vehicles you can purchase. There are some that don’t fly well, the Car being one, and while you might think she would be in the car driving it, she’s instead riding atop it and guiding it through the air. While strange vehicle use like riding atop a Magical Airliner are a strange feature of this game, we can’t afford to get sidetracked so early on. The point is, we must fly our Magical Bike or its stand-ins through a set amount of Key Stars to open up the way out of the level.

 

Thing is, the levels are often fairly open and don’t ask for much from the player to pass through those gates. There may be trees, forests, buildings, or inexplicably hovering planes in the level’s design, but not only does the game stick these around without much consideration for how they’ll impact the gameplay, but most of the gates are high in the air where you can easily pass through them without any risk of crashing into a wall. Crashing just slows you down a bit anyway, and if you focus solely on the gates, you can clear most of the levels in less than a minute, your speed of completion mostly tied to the speed of your vehicle rather than any test of your abilities as a player.

What this basically means is each level of Vroom in the Night Sky lacks any form of challenge. Perhaps the most difficult one is Night Sky of Chaos, a level where the game just sort of throws in pieces from every other level and has them float around with no rhyme or reason. In this mishmash level you do run the risk of randomly bumping into something, mostly because you didn’t expect that skyscraper to start levitating.

Conversely, “the Sky” which the game notes “It is a Sky. It is a completely Sky.” is just a large open space in the air with some planes hovering around causing no trouble. Unlocking some stages does require beating others in a certain amount of time, but once you find this out, you can achieve the times with ease so long as you use a vehicle with the right speed for it, and considering I accidentally unlocked the potentially best vehicle (the previously mentioned airliner) while playing the game normally and potentially even slower than a normal player as I tried to get good screenshots or note game features, it won’t be difficult for most players to quickly invalidate any issue with getting good level scores.

 

MAGICAL MANEUVERS AND MECHANICS

Before you head into the game’s stages which aren’t arranged in any story order and feature no plot connections to make it feel like a narrative is unfolding, you might want to head over to the Driving School. Driving School is the game’s tutorial and literally the only place where you will ever have any need or incentive for performing many of the actions your magical girl is capable of executing with her Magical Bike. It should be noted that this is not a racing game by any stretch of the imagination unless you consider getting better times for going through Key Stars a race, but your lone little lady flying through the moonlight sky never has any need for anything resembling the defensive driving or advanced movement techniques she is capable of executing.

First, we should note the Magical Bike’s Magical Speedometer and Magical Gasoline Meter, mostly for their silly names but also because if you overuse your boost and run out of Magical Gasoline, you will need to go to the Magical Gas Station to refuel. Unless you overuse the boost which is only likely to happen if you forget these mechanics exist, you’ll never run out of the fuel needed to fly about, and the Magical Gas Station the game tells you “is somewhere in the night sky” is actually usually a symbol on the ground with a large orange pillar of light extending out of it you can sit in to refuel. Refueling isn’t really important when most levels can be beat in a minute or two even with liberal boosting, but what’s more amusing the game refers to even such mundane things with the adjective Magical, and we’re definitely not done seeing that term appended to most every action our leading lady is capable of taking with her bike.

 

If you barely avoid crashing into an object (read: easily brush past the side of it intentionally because you were actually at no risk of crashing) then you will get Magical Thrilling points. Magical Heavy Breaking is just braking your vehicle without releasing the gas, Magical High Speed is your boost which can be used to Magical Dash & Getting ☆ if you do it through a Key Star, Magical Turn is a turn, and the Somersault is referred to as… just a Somersault for whatever reason, but you can do Magical Collision Avoidance by somersaulting before you make contact with a wall you have to be driving right towards to trigger the maneuver. The distinctly magic free Somersault has no use since there’s no reason to ever be in a situation that demands it and it’s more likely to trigger by mistake while trying to move vertically through the sky, and a strange maneuver called Magical Trampoline exists where you can bounce off certain edges to be sent flying off into the sky while flipping which is disorienting on the rare occasion this similarly pointless ability might trigger by accident.

 

Some of these moves charitably referred to as Magical are useful for the game’s secondary but not entirely important task of collecting Stardust. Not only do points for pulling off tricks gather this special material, but the levels have plenty of little Stardust shards floating around the air you can grab.  The best vehicles are unlocked through good flying, but if you want to purchase the plethora of bikes that are objectively worse and sometimes not even priced properly to match how bad they are, you can gather Stardust to go to the shop. With such names as “Magical offroad X250”, “Magical Naked 1300MAX”, and “Magical Big Scooter 600”, these vehicles are the only thing you can use your Stardust on and there are far more bikes to buy than you can reasonably do so even going out of your way to get thousands during a level visit. The best maneuvers for getting a lot of stardust quickly are also the simpler ones to execute like Magical Turning, so even if you wanted to pull off the special tricks to try and tally up points, it’s often smarter just to slide around the air like a car preparing to veer off the road rather than doing some last minute somersault to get a paltry Stardust sum.

 

However, your stardust collection may go awry, because there’s someone else vrooming around this night sky who wants Stardust too… despite the fact her programming is so broken she’s entirely irrelevant and unable to even grab it.

 

MAGICAL RIVALRY

Vroom in the Night Sky does a very poor job introducing or contextualizing its world and characters, but there are in fact four people involved in this seemingly pointless quest to fly around the sky collecting crystals and passing through rings. Cochin the fairy introduces himself to the player when the game first boots up and quickly prepares them for the mess of poorly translated English they’ll experience with the phrase “Are you the first time to play this game?”. The game’s website contains a manual with a brief description of the characters though, so let me introduce you to our leading lady and only playable character Luna.

Tsukie, or Luna as she prefers to be called while a Magical Girl, is not an ordinary girl where everywhere despite what the profile says. Here she is able to fly all sorts of vehicles, with the game actually being a little playful with the unlockable ones such as Luna laying out across a bench she can fly or holding onto an old-fashioned biplane as she easily maneuvers through the air. The scooters and magic broom seem practically mundane compared to the unlockables that are almost always superior in stats as well.

 

While you are doing your fairly straightforward task of going through gates though, you might find the action suddenly interrupted by the arrival of another Magical Girl…

Teruko, or Shining Star, is sort of a villain in that she hits the scene angrily and, as the profile says, is unilaterally rivalized to Tsukie which sounds pretty scary despite not making sense. Teruko will fly in from the sides of the boxed in regions of sky that make up the game’s stages and just sort of fly around like an insect that has neither food to land on or a window to escape through. The game insists she’s trying to collect Stardust just like you, but after tailing her and watching her movements for a while I never saw such a thing occur. You can fire Magical Rockets at her that may or may not hit despite homing in and not really being dodged much by Teruko, and when the rockets do decide they want to finally hit she’ll scream out “Screw you!” or, surprisingly, the much harsher “Damn it!”.

Our fourth character of this incredibly tiny cast is so unimportant that I would never mention him if this wasn’t a teardown of a terrible game due to how irrelevant he is. Teruko isn’t alone in the night sky as she has her own fairy tagging along to presumably give her her own magical girl powers…

I literally forgot Service existed before I saw him again on the website in my post-play research, mainly because, despite my playtime and combing through screenshots of the game, I never saw him say anything once. Sometimes his character portrait is beside an ellipsis, so he takes being taciturn to a new level where he outright says nothing rather than being a fairy of few words.

 

Perhaps Service’s silence is why Teruko is such a terrible driver. Outside of the Driving School mission where you need to shoot her down, you could get away with ignoring her entirely and there would be no impact on your level completion or Stardust count. She never seems to attack, and sometimes she responds to you chasing her by divebombing into a wall or object as if they didn’t exist. At one point in the desert level she slammed face first into a cactus and got stuck on it for a while, not because it was spiky, but because the physics collision meant part of her model was passing through it and thus an obnoxious jackhammer sound was inescapably loud until she finally jostled free a few minutes later.

Despite there being no risk in her presence and not adding anything to the gameplay side of things, I won’t say Teruko’s presence is entirely pointless. Her back and forth with Tsukie has some of the game’s best dialogue, not because there’s any depth or intentional humor to them, but because of how the odd translation choices lead to incomprehensible exchanges such as…

 

Teruko getting upset by a cliff she’s not near:

And an exchange where the two girls yell at each other and Cochin oddly enough says “They’re best friends.” in response:

But it is perhaps time to stop dancing around the big problem with Vroom in the Night Sky since I’ve already indulged in sharing it quite a few times already…

 

MAGICAL TRANSLATION PROBLEMS

Vroom in the Night Sky is a deeply flawed game almost because there’s so little going on in it to even engage with. Flying through rings is so straightforward and the Stardust collection is boring and tedious if you actually want to be able to afford bikes that you won’t even need due to how the unlock system works. However, that alone would make Vroom in the Night Sky an abysmally boring game not even worth really going in-depth about, but then we hit on the way the game’s original Japanese was translated to English.

 

Now keep in mind this isn’t a case of me picking on an earnest effort to bring a game from one country to another. I’ve overlooked small language errors in games because the minor flubs don’t really hurt the overall experience. Some really old games that barely had any story at all featured bad translations but they had solid gameplay to back them up as well. Usually, so long as there isn’t a quality story being damaged by the issues in translation or the game fails to communicate its controls or pertinent data properly, you can brush by the few little quirks in converting a game from one language to another.

 

But when an entire game is almost entirely composed of improper translations, it goes from something you can forgive to an integral part of its identity. Besides, it seems quite clear that whatever person responsible for translating the game didn’t put much love into it, because not only do they not get mentioned in the single screen of game credits for their role, but it seems like much of the grammatical errors or odd vocabulary choices match up pretty well with using a machine translation service such as typing things into Google Translate.

 

Too quote every instance of such problems would be a daunting task, and thankfully, someone else online already compiled almost every instance of translation problems that can be found in Vroom in the Night Sky. However, if you don’t want to load 200 images and flick through them regardless of how hilariously bad the wording might be, I did collect a batch from my time with the game that does a better job showing off the exact form that this slapdash translation effort has taken.

This opener image has one of my favorite recurring lines from Cochin, that being “That’s how it is” that he seems to dismiss much of Luna’s observations and concerns with. Of course, “never been fall over” is meant to be something closer to “I have never fallen off” in reference to her riding a vehicle, but even that seems too short for the tiny text boxes the game uses and crams into the bottom left corner. At least the game is so slow and easy you can always make the time to look over and read those little chats.

As Luna observes, the polygonal object before here is meant to be a tree, although her description of the forest as “only tree..” ignores the mountains that similarly aren’t doing much to keep her from that ring ahead. However, we get another instance of Cochin’s de facto catchphrase, so I couldn’t pass up this mostly mundane translation error.

I guess since the game takes place at night it feels the need to warn you against driving while sleepy, but Cochin’s phrasing is another case of twisting that into an unusual statement that maybe shouldn’t have been appearing in the Driving School where any statement might be interpreted as a tip instead of a little comment.

 

The bike store in general is packed with vehicle descriptions that mess up in a multitude of ways beyond having odd names for the vehicles, so here is a selection of some of my favorites…

Oddly ominous phrases like “No bad night sky will suffer” mean nothing but sound wonderful. Almost every bike is said to be “manipulated” by the magical girl rider rather than simple using words like “drive”, and the grandiose description of a bike that can feel the universe is followed by the confused statement that girls with experience can’t handle that particular bike. “Hung off!” is a delightful mistranslation until the game oddly corrects it by saying “Hang on!” is the proper Japanese phrase, making Hung Off!’s presence even more puzzling. And of course, the unintentional innuendos of any badly done translation come through with the admiration of a big naked-type Magical Bike.

 

Stage Select unsurprisingly is no better when it comes to communicating things properly, although Night Sky of the Quiet Desert has some unintentional poetry with the line “It is a cold and quiet desert night sky that will freeze your heart.” that balances out the nonsense of Night Sky of the Factory Section’s contradictory description “It is another state of a noisy factory all the time. It is a very calm night sky.” It should also be noted that even the configuration menu isn’t safe from this, as it describes its highest controller vibration setting with the evocative but tonally inconsistent term “Violent.” It should be noted that the controller does rumble a fair bit when just having your vehicle active, but it’s just a constantly dull rumble in your hands that isn’t so violent it will numb your hands but still adds nothing to the experience. This is despite the fact the game’s website tries to boast about using the Switch’s HD Rumble, but it should be noted the game description and trailer try to brag about a Fantastic feeling, Speedy feeling, and Realistic feeling that certainly don’t come across in your flying automobiles and quick turning jet planes that don’t even feel that zippy at their maximum stats.

 

Now, if you turn your attention back to the start of this review, you might remember something that will feel even wilder in retrospect. This game I have described to you is not the rushed out version that people who bought the game in March and April of 2017 saw. No, this is the game as it is four years after the initial release and after a corrective patch was already sent out. This is the version the developers leave sitting on the Nintendo eShop, and it should be noted many of the grammatical errors weren’t even present in the original release of the game and the attempts at retranslating the title after the initial backlash lead to this game’s current state. In fact, the original release didn’t have many typos beyond their spelling of cough as “coff”, but the updated grammar patch sure did!

Not only does Cochin now tell Luna to “say smoething”, but Luna asks “What’s inside the tnak?” when looking at a gas tank (which evokes the reply “There is some Magical Gas in the tank” from Cochin before he quickly says “It’s a lie”), and the proper spelling of “radar” in the original release was oddly enough changed to “rader”. While not a typo, the game does change Teruko from saying “I love factories! Shining star!” to the incredibly odd phrase “It’s me! ‘I Loves factory’!” to which Luna surprisingly says “I know…”.

 

The problems with the writing are so thorough that we could spend all night just vrooming through the game script and pointing out flaws both mundane and hilarious, but by now it should certainly be clear that Vroom in the Night Sky’s loveless adaptation into English is perhaps its highlight. The actual action is so dull and easy that it would certainly not be as fascinating a failure without its terrible translation, so perhaps we should be thankful it at least added some spice to this garbage to make it go down easier.

 

MAGICAL CONCLUSION

Vroom in the Night Sky finds itself in the unusual situation where its terrible translation and sometimes incomprehensible English are its most entertaining aspect. However, once the novelty of such hilarious errors begins to fade, you’re left with an awful action game where the important goals are too straightforward and easy and the single form of opposition the game concocted is an enemy that isn’t even functional. With pointless maneuvers rather than meaningful challenges and tedious Stardust grinding if you want to unlock the bikes that are inferior over the options you can more easily acquire, Vroom in the Night Sky feels like a confused mess even after the patch meant to fix its initially rushed design.

 

However, while it did first squeeze its way in alongside better games at the Switch’s launch window to earn undue attention, perhaps its infamy might buoy its reputation these days. It was gifted to me because of its reputation after all and it’s earning one of my longer write-ups despite the fact there are plenty of atrocious games out there that won’t receive this degree of attention on my site. As the Switch got more games in a wider spread of genres it was inevitable that Vroom in the Night Sky’s exploitative release and lack of care and polish would mean it would fade from the public eye even if the Nintendo eShop already didn’t already have a problem with discovering interesting games, but by achieving infamy, Vroom in the Night Sky has legs beyond that first year on a fledgling system. Of course, making a good game people want to play would have made it more appealing, and while there is a heavy need for a full script doctoring so things make sense, it’s easy to imagine an entertaining game where you are flying through difficult aerial obstacle courses while being pestered by another magical girl. However, there are no true obstacle courses here and the other girl present during play flies around with less purpose than a dust mote on the wind, so the task of flying through rings even puts Superman 64’s hyperbolic reputation to shame. Admittedly Vroom in the Night Sky has better flight controls than Superman, but at least he did much more in that game than just pass through Key Stars that were placed with no intention of challenging the player.

 

Vroom in the Night Sky’s mistranslation makes for a good laugh in screenshots and video form, but lest we forget the word “game” comes after “video” in describing what this experience is, there is an intensely boring tax to seeing the word spaghetti on show. Between this review and the link to LegendsofLocalization.com earlier you’ve already had someone else suffer through the bland material to do the gold panning for you, although gold should probably be swapped out for a less valuable mineral like quartz considering you could probably take a random stretch of Japanese and get an equally silly set of badly translated phrases out of it if you fed it through Google Translate similar to what POISOFT likely did.

 

With its clear intentions of earning easy sales through trickery rather than making a game people will actually enjoy playing, it might be best to just admit “That’s how it is” and move on. To put it in terms Vroom in the Night Sky would understand, it’s a video game best described as a Magical Time Waste & Wasting $.