Oni matrix

Original with transparency.

Against white background for easier reading at full size.

The Oni matrix is a visual element that was used in artwork for Oni's promotional material. It appeared in Oni's 1999 trailer a few months after the release of The Matrix, a movie with a well-known Japanese influence, which made use of a thematic element consisting of green characters (mostly numbers and kana) scrolling down the screen (as seen in the last few seconds of the trailer). The Oni matrix likewise consists of numbers and symbols, though it only uses 0s and 1s for numbers and it uses all three of Japan's scripts: kanji, katakana and hiragana. It would be clear just from looking at it that Oni's matrix image was inspired by The Matrix, even if the actual file name of the promotional image didn't say "matrix" in it.

The Oni matrix is found in the trailer, the notepads, a mousepad, various box art, etc. Below are some translations of its text.

Dave's translation

In 1999, well before Oni came out, "Dave" on the original Oni Central Forum posted this breakdown of what he could decipher from the background of his Oni notepad. Either Dave was not familiar with Oni's tagline ("A dark future... an uncertain past... no one left to trust."), or he intentionally chose to give a naive translation of the phrases taken from the tagline when he encountered them, perhaps to point out the weaknesses in the Japanese used by Bungie.

“	I don't know if this has been covered before, but perhaps this is of interest. I got out my Oni notepad tonight (the freebie from the Action Sack) and the faint Kanji (Japanese characters) caught my eye. Behind the image of Konoko there are faint vertical lines of Japanese text faintly visable. Faintly is the operating word here. There are several words seperated by ones and zeros in each line. After squinting at these line for a while, I managed to translate a couple of them. Now these lines repeat, both within the "sentence" and also across the page. So while there looks like there are about 20 lines or so, there are only six unique "sentences" that I can pick out. They are: shinrai ni atai suru hito inai (there is no one I can trust) kiki (this is the Oni kanji repeated twice) ... kurai shorai (dark future) kako no aru onna (a woman with a past) furu kontakuto akushon (full contact action) buramu (blam) korutana (cortana) warui keikan (bad cop)	„

demos_kratos' translation

In 2011, demos_kratos responded to Dave's translation when I posted it on the wiki for the first time. He may have been more focused on the existing translation by Dave than on going over the original image character by character, but he did discover that there was more to the appearance of "Cortana" than just the name.

“	One thing I can say for sure - They don't know Japanese. Or at least they didn't when the promo was made. First: While being literally correct it is way too complicated for such an easy phrase. I'd say shinyou dekiru hito ga nai. Third: The translation is incorrect but I think Bungie meant exactly what translator said. kako no aru onna means "a certain woman of the past" when a woman with a past would be kako ga aru onna or kako wo motsu onna. Fourth: If you look more closely you will see that there is a phrase korutana wa kuru yo which means Cortana is coming. Fifth: It is correct, but the word "keikan" is rarely used in Japan. They use "keiji". I'm just pointing that out.	„

Iritscen's translation

Summary

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:

1. Oni! / a dark future
2. the past of a certain woman
3. no one worthy of trust
4. full contact action
5. good cop, bad cop
6. Blam / Cortana
7. Cortana is coming

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.

Image analysis

There are 42 columns and about 28 rows in the image (that's seven-tastic!). It is not contiguous writing from column to column like the old Japanese style of writing vertically right to left; each column is unconnected to its neighbors. The sequence of columns repeats halfway through, and each column repeats a string twice from top to bottom. So only one-quarter of the image is unique. Here's a masked image that shows the unique portion of the image.

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.

Character transcription

A	B	C	D	E
鬼0100暗い将来1001鬼	01過去のある女0101鬼	信頼に値する人いない0101	11ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン	カ0101101001100
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
F	G	H	I	J
00暗い将来1001鬼過去の	良い警官010110悪い警官	01010カ01010セ01	011ブラム011コルタナ1	ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン01
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
K	L	M	N	O
10001鬼0100暗い将来	コルタナは来るよ100101	い将来1001鬼過去のある女	0ヌ0101サ0101レ01	10ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン
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

Detailed translation

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

A

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...".

B

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 Early Story Konoko, who did not recall her past and eventually found out that Griffin had wiped her memory.

C

信頼に値する人いない

shinrai ni atai suru hito inai

no one worthy of trust

As demos_kratos noted, the Japanese seems very stilted here. A literal translation would be "trust with worthy someone not", or when rendered more nicely, "No one worthy of trust". This is obviously intended as the end of Oni's tagline, "No one left to trust".

D

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 USPs.

E

カ0101101001100

ka 2892

???

"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.

F

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's name, or was this an intentional formulation?

G

良い警官010110悪い警官

ii keikan 22 warui keikan

good cop 22 bad cop

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 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 this image.

H

01010カ01010セ

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.

I

ブラム / コルタナ

buramu / korutana

Blam / Cortana

Besides being a trademark Bungie phrase (also see the sidebox on Blame! for the same kana), "Blam!" was the code name for Halo, which is the game with the AI companion Cortana. I suppose this was a case of a little marketing cross-pollination.

J

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.

K

鬼 / 暗い将来

oni / kurai i shorai

oni / dark future

Though paired with different (probably random) numbers this time, 17 and 4 instead of 4 and 9, this is a duplicate of A.

L

コルタナは来るよ100101

korutana wa kuru ru yo 37

Cortana is coming! 37

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.

M

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.

N

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.

O

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, 2 instead of 1 or 3, this is a duplicate of D and J. They should have translated more of the game's USPs!