After hours of research, I've compiled a definitive chart of what every dog every single Pikmin 4 NPC's name references. This time, I also added their original Japanese names in comparison to their English localized ones, as some of the breeds aren't entirely clear in the latter. I cross-referenced Pikipedia and Yuatoa Game Labo to formulate the best guesses between the two languages, so I hope this satisfies curious onlookers!
Special conundrum: Wolfgang.
So you would think Wolfgang would be an easy character to do this for, right. Obviously the wolf's in there, that's it, right? Except it's not because his name in Japanese isn't anything close to Wolfgang. It's Airu. As in Ireland. So all leads in Japanese led to Irish dogs, but all leads in English led to wolves and wolfdogs. And I have no idea why this translation discrepancy is so ridiculously gigantic that it blows all the rest of the names I was having issues with out of the water.
But I came to the conclusion that obviously the translation team would have the knowledge, they would choose something that still references the original concept especially on a theme as universal as dogs, so with that idea I came to this 3am guess: he's an Irish wolfhound.
Probably no one cares about this character, and I don't either. But this is my informed speculation conspiracy corkboard theory on his dogsona. Please leave your thoughts below and let me know how you feel about the doggy dog world of Pikmin 4.
✅ The Ocean™️
✅ Neat animals
✅ Learning about neat animals
✅ Chill games
✅ Participating in community science
✅ Participating in community science by playing a chill game while looking at and learning about neat animals that live in the ocean so we can train artificial intelligence to help us find and identify more neat animals in the ocean
ALTWe've been hard at work on a new mobile game with our fronds @mbari-blog and Ocean Vision AI to do just that—but we need YOUR kelp help!
