Translation mishap leads to hilarious fruit-summoning necromancer in fighting game deckbuilder Ivion

If you’ve played a fantasy game in the past, you’ll know what a necromancer looks like. Black clothes, dangling skulls, glowing green magic – the type of attire that wouldn’t look too out of place at a heavy metal concert.

You can imagine the surprise, then, when the artist for upcoming deckbuilder Ivion returned to the game’s designers with the most epic berry-summoning sorcerer we’ve ever seen.

It turns out that the English-speaking creators had sent off the commission and description for the Bramble Smash card, not predicting that the word ‘bramble’ would be mistranslated by the Russian illustrator as meaning the berries of the shrub rather than its thorny branches – a mistake blamed on Google’s image search, which returned a picture of the fruit first when consulted.

Although not quite what Ivion’s creators expected, the impressive image proved so popular among those awaiting the game’s now-live Kickstarter campaign that a full-sized poster of the newly-dubbed ‘Berrymancer’ is being offered among the backer rewards for $25 on its own, or as part of the $80 top-tier bundle with the game.

Ivion itself is dubbed as a mixture of fighting games and deckbuilders, with each deck representing a character comprised of two different classes attempting to defeat their rival in one-on-one combat or in teams of two.

There’s the ability to affect the game’s environment as cards are laid down in a four-by-four layout, requiring extra effort to overcome as characters travel around the grid.

Ivion will be out in December if it reaches its $19,000 target – it’s currently at just under $12,000 with 23 days left to go.