Do you remember the mysterious swirly language dotted around Super Mario Sunshine‘s Isle Delfino? Probably not, and that’s okay — this is a 20-year-old game, after all. But that hasn’t stopped one YouTuber from the channel 2CPhoenix from digging in a little further. Yes, if you hadn’t guessed by now, the language has been translated.
This was no easy feet. The ‘Dolphic’ language (as dubbed by 2CPhoenix) is pretty hard to come by across Isle Delfino. It can only be found in three Sunshine levels where it is often blown up to the point of illegibility, or obscured by some other object. In short, you’re not going to pick it up just by being immersed in the island’s culture.
And so, 2CPhoenix made a cipher. Having established one ‘Dolphic’ word by cross-referencing it with Pinna Park’s in-game brochure map, the quest to find the other letters of the alphabet was underway.
In the above video, you can watch the YouTuber’s linguistic odyssey. From the humble beginnings of five letter translations to decoding the entire alphabet, 2CPhoenix unpacks just about every example of ‘Dolphic’ in the game and brings it around to English, Italian and even Japanese.
Who’s going to be the first to get a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ Dolphic tattoo, then?
Do you remember the mysterious swirly language dotted around Super Mario Sunshine‘s Isle Delfino? Probably not, and that’s okay — this is a 20-year-old game, after all. But that hasn’t stopped one YouTuber from the channel 2CPhoenix from digging in a little further. Yes, if you hadn’t guessed by now, the language has been translated.
This was no easy feet. The ‘Dolphic’ language (as dubbed by 2CPhoenix) is pretty hard to come by across Isle Delfino. It can only be found in three Sunshine levels where it is often blown up to the point of illegibility, or obscured by some other object. In short, you’re not going to pick it up just by being immersed in the island’s culture.
And so, 2CPhoenix made a cipher. Having established one ‘Dolphic’ word by cross-referencing it with Pinna Park’s in-game brochure map, the quest to find the other letters of the alphabet was underway.
In the above video, you can watch the YouTuber’s linguistic odyssey. From the humble beginnings of five letter translations to decoding the entire alphabet, 2CPhoenix unpacks just about every example of ‘Dolphic’ in the game and brings it around to English, Italian and even Japanese.
Who’s going to be the first to get a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ Dolphic tattoo, then?
