Elden Ring Fortnite Messages Meme Confuses Japanese Players

You’ve obviously noticed the Fortnite joke messages in Elden Ring, non-English speakers have noticed as well, and they aren’t laughing.

Elden Ring has been out for a week and its players are still exploring the Lands Between, discovering new secrets, and sometimes embarking on pointless expeditions because of other players.

Just like past FromSoftware games, Elden Ring has a special Message system. Players can leave messages for each other by using predetermined words. It feels slightly similar to the notebooks that used to be in arcades in Japan, where players could document secrets and leave tips for each other.

Many Engish-speaking Elden Ring players have been using the words “Fort” and “Night” together to make a Fortnite pun; The problem is, all messages are shared with all regions of the game, and these messages are machine translated to the player’s native language.

Elden Ring Japanese fans are confused due to “Fort, Night” message meme

As pointed out by @DistantValhalla, Japanese Elden Ring players were initially confused by the “Fort, Night” messages all around Elden Ring‘s world, due to the joke being lost in translation.

@ETC_Only, a player of the Japanese version of Elden Ring, explained in a viral tweet how they spent quite a lot of time looking for some special event triggered at night inside forts, only to finally get the joke and realize it was a pointless effort.

Japanese players aren’t the only ones getting confused as well, because the Fort Night messages are machine translated into all other languages Elden Ring is available in.

Elden Ring grass messages explained

Inversely, in Japanese internet slang, “lol” is written as “w” as a shortened version of “warau 笑う/ laughing”. Because “w” looks like cartoonish grass, the kanji for grass “草” ended up becoming net slang for “lol”.

Whenever Japanese Elden Ring fans spot something funny, they’ll leave a “草” message, which is in turn automatically translated by the game into “grass” instead of “lol”. That’s why you randomly see so many “grass” messages in the game.

@DistantValhalla is a prolific Japanese games translator who most notably translated Steins;Gate. Be sure to follow him for more cool knowledge about Japanese games.

It’s quite interesting that one of the many limits of machine translation was exposed this way. What do you all think? Tell me in the comments below!