“Retched” in Devil May Cry

Was checking the back of #DMC’s PS2 case and noticed the word under one of the screen captures.

At first I thought it was “wretched”, but suspecting of a potential mistake like that being too obvious to pass, I still went to check. Apparently it’s Old English for “vomited”? Curious choice of word if so.

Tangentially, these old cases are being interesting to check imo, to see how titles tried to be relevant back then.

  • MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Retch, meaning to vomit, is still a word in use nowadays, just infrequently. As the other commenter said, it’s definitely a spelling error.

  • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
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    2 months ago

    Retch is still a word in modern English usage, but yes this is absolutely just an error and it’s meant to be “wretched”.

  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 months ago

    It’s 100% a mistake. “Wretched souls” is a phrase with a lot of history, going back to Shakespeare at the very least. I’m guessing they didn’t catch it because retched is also a word, even though that use is grammatically incorrect (unless they were souls that’d been vomited up).

    • Auster@thebrainbin.orgOP
      0·
      2 months ago

      Makes me think, maybe I’m getting gritty aesthetics of DMC mixed with the nasty aesthetics of the 2013 reboot, being several years since I played either, and because of that it wouldn’t sound as off.

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Its possible they meant “vomited souls,” or that the translation of what was given to them translated to that*, but it is much more plausible that they made a spelling mistake.

    *It is common in Japanese media to depict a person’s “soul” leaving their body through the mouth, thus “vomited soul” may be correct depending on the original material provided, if this box art text was written originally in Japanese before being translated or sent for English box printing.