Oni matrix: Difference between revisions

In 2014, I finally decided to give this a more thorough look than I did in 2011, since no one else had broken down the image character by character and actually shown their work. I revisited the binary sequences in 2017. My translation can be summed up as:

#Oni! / a dark future

Previous to this, no one seems to have noticed the "good cop" in "good cop, bad cop", nor decoded any of the binary sequences. Details below, for the dedicated.

Additionally, out of the horizontal 21-column sequence, there are six duplicate columns. I have lettered the 15 unique columns with the letters A to O. Also, some of the 15 columns have duplicated sequences of characters. This leaves, by my count, [[seven]] unique phrases, when all is said and done. Notwithstanding that I don't actually know Japanese, I've painstakingly identified the characters, and under "Character transcription" below, I reproduce them as text (handy for anyone else's translation efforts), and then in "Detailed translation", I discuss their meaning as far as I can ascertain it and attempt to decode the binary sequences.

|oni 4 kurai i sho-rai 9 oni

|1 ka-ko no a-ru onna 5 oni

|shin-rai ni atai-su-ru hito i-na-i 5

|3 fu-ru ko-n-ta-ku-to a-ku-shi-yo-n

|ka 2892

|0 kurai i sho-rai 9 oni ka-ko no

|i-i kei-kan 22 waru-i kei-kan

|10 ka 10 se 1

|3 bu-ra-mu 3 ko-ru-ta-na 1

|fu-ru ko-n-ta-ku-to a-ku-shi-yo-n 1

|17 oni 4 kurai i sho-rai

|ko-ru-ta-na wa kuru ru yo 37

|i sho-rai 9 oni ka-ko no a-ru onna

|0 nu 5 sa 5 re 1

|2 fu-ru ko-n-ta-ku-to a-ku-shi-yo-n

Now here is a translation, partly based off the efforts of those who came before me.

|鬼 / 暗い将来

|oni / kurai i shorai

|oni / dark future

|The first character in the first column is the kanji for "oni". It shows up in seemingly random places in a few columns. Besides that, we have the phrase that has already been translated as "dark future". This is obviously the beginning of Oni's tagline, "A dark future...".  

|過去のある女

|kako no aru onna

|the past of a certain woman

|This phrase is a bit odd, because it's clearly supposed to be "an uncertain past...", but it's not. I've chosen to render it as literally as I can since it's clear that even a liberal translation cannot arrive at "uncertain past". It's strange that "uncertain" became "certain", and somehow the character for "woman" got in there too. In any case, the "certain woman" with an "uncertain past" was the [[Oni/Early Story|Early Story]] Konoko, who did not recall her past and eventually found out that Griffin had wiped her memory.

|信頼に値する人いない

|shinrai ni atai suru hito inai

|no one worthy of trust

|ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン

|furu kontakuto akushiyon

|full contact action

|This is an amusing transliteration into katakana of one of Oni's [[wikipedia:Unique selling proposition|USPs]].

|"ka 2892" is obviously nonsensical. 2892 is not a number connected to Oni; 2032 is, but that would be 11111110000 in binary, which is not at all similar. It could very well be that the katakana "ka" and the binary are just random filler. I do think it's interesting to note that the 13 digits can be broken into four pieces and then the resulting numbers be converted to letters. For instance, breaking it down as 010-1101-001-100 yields 2-13-1-4, which would be b-m-a-d in the Roman alphabet. It almost makes one think they were spelling "blam", a phrase that occurs in kana form in column I. Moreover, the leading "ka" would make it "kablam". However, I just can't find a way to derive b-l-a-m from this binary.

|暗い将来 / 鬼過去の

|kurai i shorai / oni ka-ko no

|dark future / demons of the past

|While the first phrase is reused from A, the second part is intriguing. Is it just a misplaced "oni" kanji next to a broken part of the phrase "kako no aru onna" from B? Is this a lucky accident like [[Konoko#Name|Konoko's name]], or was this an intentional formulation?

|The first part of this phrase has been missed until now. "Warui keikan" is definitely "a bad cop", but it actually was intended to be read as part of the American expression "good cop, bad cop", which is found in the game's [[Oni/Early_Story|early story]]. Also interesting is that the binary wedged between the phrase is longer than the other binary sequences besides E and L, and that it comes out to 22, which is close to the age of 23 that was intended for Konoko in the early story, according to [[:Image:Unit_viewer-Konoko_2.jpg|this image]].

|9 ka 9 se

|I have omitted the "01" after the "se" because I think it's simply another "01010" that's cut off. "9 ka 9 se" is probably gibberish filler like E probably is, but I took a couple different approaches to trying to translate it. One was to try to piece together a word from the syllables "ka" and "se", as well as from all the free-floating syllables in the text, as found in E, H, and N: ka, se, nu, sa, re. When that failed to turn up anything useful, I read the number 9 as it is pronounced in Japanese, "kyu". Oddly, one reading of "kyuka kyuse" could be liberally interpreted as "leaving one's former name". I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, as it seems far too clever compared to the fairly naive use of Japanese in the rest of the matrix.

|ブラム / コルタナ

|buramu / korutana

|ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン

|furu kontakuto akushiyon

|full contact action

|Though paired with a different (probably random) number this time, 3 instead of 1, this is a duplicate of D.

|鬼 / 暗い将来

|oni / kurai i shorai

|oni / dark future

|As already caught by demos_kratos, this is a fuller reference to Cortana than the one in I. There seems to be a superfluous "ru" in there, but maybe I just don't understand enough about Japanese syntax. I don't see a significance in the 37, but since I am not very familiar with Halo, and the number is unusually long, I am including it. It's probably just padding, though.

|い将来 / 鬼過去のある女

|i sho-rai / oni kako no aru onna

|???

|At first this seems to be a random mishmash of the phrases from A and B to serve as filler, but, like F, there seems to be a potential meaning to the phrase "oni kako no aru onna", which could be translated loosely as "the haunted past of a certain woman". Possibly just a coincidence.

|0ヌ0101サ0101レ01

|0 nu 5 sa 5 re 1

|This seems to be more kana-plus-numbers gibberish like in E and H. I brought it into my decoding efforts on H, and also considered reading this phrase using the pronunciation for 5, "go", but came up empty-handed.

|ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン