TextFugu » Topic: Japanese in a game, question

Japanese in a game, question

Nzurozeta — Fri, 27 May 2011 17:10:16 +0000

Ok, so for a bit of extra practice I started playing Dragon Quest (from the original nintendo), of course in all japanese, but while I was translating the menus I noticed something interesting. Each of the menu options in the game were all in Hiragana (which is nice since I can read it) but when I went to translate them, they came up as having kanji in them instead? Let me just give an example:

はなす was a menu option, but when I searched it on jisho.org it came up as 話す　instead.

Here’s the link from Jisho http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E3%81%AF%E3%81%AA%E3%81%99&eng=&dict=edict.

I know the command in the game is used for speaking with people so I assume what I chose is right…but then I’m still baffled by why the game didn’t use the kanji instead?

Help?

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

zeldaskitten — Fri, 27 May 2011 17:24:38 +0000

Maybe it’s so younger japanese who don’t know kanji that well can read it. Or maybe it’s just for fun. There’s no law that you HAVE to use kanji. :)

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

Nzurozeta — Fri, 27 May 2011 17:42:53 +0000

Hahaha,that sounds pretty good to me! I still have a lot to learn and I’m definitely seeing a lot of variation just playing through and translating what I can.

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

Mars — Fri, 27 May 2011 17:58:47 +0000

I agree with Zeldaskitten. The newer games in the Dragon Quest series are rated Everyone 10+, so it makes sense that many kanji would be left out. I’ve noticed in anime, if the viewing audience is generally younger, the lyrics to the theme song are on the screen, but with furigana on all the kanji. Since your game was on the original NES, they probably couldn’t script furigana into the text-blocks, or lacked the necessary space.

It’s good to practice things that are meant for children when you’re still learning; so, good for you. I’m looking for Japanese-language Disney movies, myself.

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

MisterM2402 [Michael] — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:25:27 +0000

My guess is that the resolution the NES outputs isn’t big enough to display kanji – say you’ve only got 8×8 pixels for each character (no idea, that’s just an educated guess), how would you represent 話 clearly? It’s not like 話 is a complicated kanji: schoolchildren learn it in second grade or equivalent (according to Wikipedia).

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

Mars — Fri, 27 May 2011 22:41:41 +0000

Good point. So simple, it didn’t even occur to me.

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

Nzurozeta — Mon, 30 May 2011 19:51:57 +0000

Wow, thanks for all the responses! I’ve been wanting to start using my japanese with a game and figured I’d go as simple (and interesting to me) as I possibly could. And considering I’ve played Dragon Quest one in english already this seemed like a good match.

I spent some more time today working on the very first block of text that comes up once the game start (slow and steady to the extreme) and I found another interesting thing.

Understandably there are multiple Kanji with a similar meaning but I found the word 団交　but in the game (I have kanji sonomama ds rakubiki jiten thankfully) it was a different Kanji　that I can’t seem to replicate here…. but it looks like a box with two vertical lines on the inside and a little stem coming off the top left of the symbol. …That may not be very helpful, but I was curious why this kanji could be broken down.

I suppose it makes sense that maybe the character is more common as 団交? I hope this makes sense, and thanks to everybody who takes the time to sort my mystery out!

Reply To: Japanese in a game, question

MisterM2402 [Michael] — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:54:03 +0000

^ Do you mean 白 or 自? Are you sure it’s the same word? Perhaps it’s the same character but in a different font. Do you have a screenshot maybe?

I would have thought Pong would be the simplest game to play in Japanese ;)