raocow's talkhaus

Yep.

Up until shortly before the LP started, we actually had this level name as "Horse Road". It wasn't until I browsed through a Japanese website that listed all of the level names written in kanji (でっていう洞) that I realized it was supposed to be "cavern" (洞) instead of "road" (道). The confusion comes from the fact that both of these words are pronounced 'dou', and if you only ever saw it written phonetically (in kana どう, as it is for the level names in game), you would never be sure which it is. Now, "road" is by far the more common of the two, which is why we went with that initially. But, the name in kanji on the website made it absolutely sure that it was indeed meant to be read as "cavern", which does make sense when you look at the level in retrospect. Some of the Japanese comments on this level expressed a similar sentiment of intial confusion at the level name, saying stuff like "All this time I thought it said 'Detteiu Road'". One commentor even went for a third option, saying that they thought it was "Detteiu Temple" (でっていう堂) instead.

Shockingly, this was a case where Oyster of all people almost had it closer than us, as he had "And Then There Was a Hole", and 'hole' is arguably kind of close to 'cave'. Even a broken clock huh.
(Also, don't ask me why he always put "Detteiu" as "And then there was a". I really don't know, but it apparently inspired a level name in ASMT, so that's a plus.)

We lifted this translation straight from lion's document, since it was fine as it was. In turn I'm pretty sure he got it from this quote in the 2009 VIP4 LP:

"Well, apparently it's not 'Temple of Homing', but something like 'Super-Homing' or 'Uber-Homing' or 'Banana-Bologna-Homing Sandwich'..."

I was really tempted to switch it out for that last one, but eh.

It seems obvious to me that it's supposed to refer to the fact that the main gimmick enemies in this stage home in on you. Of course, if Homing was actually the one who made this level then that would make sense as on top of that. The original mistranslation was because the name was "tera-homing". 'Tera' is the same word as in 'terabyte', and it means pretty much what the current translation puts it as, basically "a lot" or "super". It comes up quite a lot in VIP speak. The thing is there's also a Japanese word pronounced 'tera' (or 寺 in kanji) which means 'temple', typically a Buddhist one. Still, if that was what it meant then the translation "Temple of Homing" wouldn't make any grammatical sense, because there's no possessive in there, and the noun order would make it translate more like "Temple Homing". All of this, and the fact that Japanese has a lot of homophones anyway, makes me strongly think that temples weren't on the author's mind when they named this level.

I also heard that somebody thought it was supposed to be FF9's "Terraforming" spell (which was mistranslated as "Terra Homing" in the original game's English version), but just look at the level and tell me with that translating it like that would capture the intent of the name better for those not already familiar with Japanese internet slang, since that spell does not actually involve anything that homes. It's one of those cases where they might have modeled the name to be similar, but what they were trying to say with it was something completely different. Kind of similar to the First Step level I guess.

His name for: "A Walk"

I don't even...