English in Japanese Games

[Marspants]

So I turned on Legend of Zelda for FDS and I noticed that the whole intro is in English. This isn't anything new because I've seen various endings of Japanese Famicom games in full English. Why is this? Wouldn't an average Japanese person playing this have no idea what it's saying? I can't seem to find any info regarding this.

[CRTGAMER]

It is strange. Perhaps for the wider audience across different countries. Developer probably figured opening and closing sequences wouldn't matter for the average gamer and stuck to English font.

[BoringSupreez]

I noticed the same thing with the Japanese soundtrack for Sonic CD. Most of the lyrics are in English, which is odd. Good for me, though.

[GSZX1337]

From what I've heard, English is required in Japanese High Schools so they probably know what's being said. As for the English in Famicom RPGs, I read on a forum (is it this one?) that having the text in English would take up less space than Kanji.

[Erik_Twice]

From what I've heard, English is required in Japanese High Schools so they probably know what's being said.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

God ,no. The Japanese are horrid at speaking English. The reason why they use English is because...well it's cool. They also use a lot of gratuitous German and sometimes some Spanish too but they are rarer.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... ousEnglish

. What's odd is that Japanese consumer products have English not because it saves money on international sales, it's because it just looks cool. Japanese stereos have "Volume", "Bass" and "Treble" labels while they could've used the Japanese words for those. This can be extended to other "exotic" languages, but English is the most common. It's roughly the same reason why Western kids tattoo themselves with "Asian" signs (with about the same level of grammatic and syntactic success). It should be noted that Gratuitous English is more ubiquitous, however.

[BoringSupreez]

From what I've heard, English is required in Japanese High Schools so they probably know what's being said.

Um, NO.
http://www.engrish.com/

[Marspants]

Yeah every time I look this up the only answer I can really get is because "It's Cool" Or "It's foreign", which actually might just be the case.

[MrPopo]

As for the English in Famicom RPGs, I read on a forum (is it this one?) that having the text in English would take up less space than Kanji.

This is probably the biggest reason for old video games to have it. You only need ~40 characters for all the text to be in English, but for Japanese the character set is much larger. And in those days the space to store those graphics was at a premium. Plus, if you go over 255 characters in your total set then you need a double-wide variable to address it, which really eats into the memory quickly.

[jfrost]

I thought writing in kanji was actually a benefit in old Japanese games, since you would be able to say more with just one symbol, taking less screen space and thus less text (memory) to say the same thing.

Actually, I thought I had read somewhere that was a big reason why localization mostly sucked in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, since translators had to deal with extremely limited room for text.

[MrPopo]

I thought writing in kanji was actually a benefit in old Japanese games, since you would be able to say more with just one symbol, taking less screen space and thus less text (memory) to say the same thing.

Actually, I thought I had read somewhere that was a big reason why localization mostly sucked in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, since translators had to deal with extremely limited room for text.

Yes and no. Kanji lets you say more using less screen real-estate, but it's more expensive to store the graphics of all the kanji. In terms of memory required at run time it's more expensive to use kanji. Kanji takes up twice the memory per character, so you need to be using less than half the characters you would in English to save memory.