Link’s Awakening Script Comparison: Key Cavern and Animal Village

The owl hint in the dungeon is more straightforward in English.
The Japanese is roughly, “Attack the hard-shelled black monster(s) from the inside.”

The Switch version adds a tip about long-jumping with the Pegasus Boots upon getting them to ensure players know about this ability, instead of relying solely on the dungeon hint.

Speaking of owl/dungeon hints, the original GB ones generally tend to be more cryptic than the ones added on GBC (in both languages).

In Japanese, the boss makes slime-like sound effects (ぷよよん (puyoyo-n)) and has something of a lisp. Also, on J Switch he gets an extra hint about shaking the walls. This hint doesn’t seem to exist in any other version or language.

The boss is named デグゾル (degu zoru) in Japanese, literally “Big Zol” (since we’ve deduced that “degu” basically equals “big”), with “Zol” being the standard term for slime enemies. Interestingly, old online English materials call the boss “Slime Eyes,” perhaps because it splits in two.

In E the owl says “inhabitants” plural, but it seems likely that he’s actually referring only to the one centipede monster who drops the key. Japanese doesn’t always distinguish between singular and plural, so it can be easy to get confused without more context.

In Japanese, Mamasha’s line is slightly different, roughly saying “It looks like my husband got lost, just as he promised. I wonder if someone might bring him food and save him?”

Grandma Yahoo’s line is also ever so slightly different in Japanese, roughly “I’m doing great. But I might’ve overdone it a little.”
In English this is simplified to “I worked too hard”, possibly to save space.

In English, Ulrira’s line is a little more fun. (J is just roughly “My hints have gotten pretty blatant.”)

In Japanese, Tarin offers to share some honey with you, whereas in English he just asks for the stick.

The rabbit by the entrance of Animal Village is much more vague in Japanese, just saying “On a day like today we really need… THAT.”

The rabbit inside the house doesn’t say anything about a walrus in Japanese, simply using アイツ (aitsu) which is like “they” or “that person”.

Schule Donavitch has an “English” flair in Japanese, using “Me” (ミー) as his personal pronoun.

Once again, the thing inside the Dream Shrine is censored out in Japanese and referred to as “something good” in English.

The bear’s “rik’m rak’m” line is a cool turn of phrase in English. In Japanese, he basically swears (こんちくしょう (konchikushou)).

“That’s a crying shame!” is another nice touch. Once again, he sort of swears in Japanese, though this time it’s cut off a bit (キショー(kishou)).

When getting the pineapple, the Japanese text reads “It’s sour, but delicious! It’s delicious, but sour!” It kind of feels like it’s referencing something, but I couldn’t turn up anything, so maybe they were just having fun with it.

Once again, E has a nice touch with “tub of goo”. In J GB/C the bear says へんなヤツ (hennna yatsu = weird person), similarly to the rabbit who also doesn’t say “walrus” at all. The J Switch version updates this text to “giant walrus,” possibly to make it slightly clearer to the player.