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The Mystery of "L'Renouille"

Many people have wondered about the etymology of "L'Renouille," the capital of Highland. This seemingly French-sounding word has repeatedly been hammered as having no possible meaning in French. For years we were clueless, but about a year ago there was a breakthrough.

Raww Le Klueze, who's well known for his distaste of Suikoden translation has located the guy who translated Suikoden 2's NTSC version. This dude explained to Raww and myself that Konami barely gave him any background info of the game nor was he able to play the game. He had six weeks to translate everything using a rag-tag team of translators. Basically, there was no time to ensure a quality translation.

What this tells me is that the choice of the word "L'Renouille" was quite arbitrary, and was likely done based on an assumption that the original Japanese version "L'Renouille" simply sounded French-like to whomever that translated the name.

The original Japanese spelling is ルルノイエ, which corresponds to something like "ru ru no ee eh" or "lu lu no ee eh." For years I haven't been able to associate this word with anything else... but recently I realized that there's a strong possibility this word has been borrowed from Cthulhu Mythology, specifically, from the "city of R'lyeh" as explained within many of H. P. Lovecraft's work.

This city described as being non-Euclidian in its architecture and the sleeping place of the "Great Cthulhu" is spelled as ルルイエ in Japanese... which corresponds to "ru ru ee eh" or "lu lu ee eh." The fact L'Renouille and R'lyeh are both places where a powerful being sleeps to be awakened to unleash great destruction is uncanny. It's also a fact that Yoshitaka Murayama is a fan of western fantasy, including Cthulhu (he borrowed Souleater from the Elric Sagas).

There's no proof per se, but to me it seems likely that the name has been borrowed. The R'lyeh name has been borrowed by other Japanese media, such as in anime as well-- so apparently its nothing new.

Suikoden seems to borrow a number of other elements from Cthulhu when you look at it long enough. The "fish people" are a dead-ringer to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by Lovecraft.

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Written by Vextor
February 6, 2008