Kanji can work similarly to letters from Western languages in that you recognise them as part of words: what I mean is that you recognise the overall shape of the word and not what composes it. Therefore you can recognise them in context but it can be hard without.
We don’t often notice it as English speakers, since our characters are so simple, but in every language, there’s an art to creating text that’s readable at low resolution. A great example is comic sans, which looks awful now, but if you go check out what it looked like on a low-Rez CRT from the 90s, you get a much better idea of what they were going for
I don't think I have ever seen anyone talk about the international font size, only about translation and adaptation, this is truly unique and new to me.
I think nowadays its most common playing games made for the PC first then ported to console. Sometimes the text and gui end up waaaay too small on a tv. But it seems to be happening less frequently now than even 4-5 years ago.
For me, an example of a game that definitely had this issue would be Xenoblade X. The UI text for that game is incredibly tiny, especially on a Wii U handheld, with the cause probably being them designing it for the larger, blockier Japanese characters. When translated to western characters though, it became nigh-unreadable (especially with the thin-ness of the font used).
@@DenkyManner I mean, I know there were low size problems in the past but I thought they were errors by the devs, not a problem with language changes, and since I can't read japanese opinions on the topic I would know even less about them getting way too small texts from western games.
For non Japanese speakers, let me explain the part 2:37. Most Japanese speaker can’t read the dot character 緊. But after zooming out, we can easily read them cuz our brains automatically fill in all that missing details. This is so interesting.
For English, the equivalent is a 3x3 1 bit pixel font. Those are so tiny that some letters are literally identical. But in context, it's readable anyway.
Another alphabet equivalent would probably be a VERY pixelated M, which tends to look an awful lot like an H or W to the point you cant tell which one it is, but if you see the letters "ARIO" are next to it you intuitively know is an M
@@bern9642 Reminds me of Hyrule warriors! In the port (and improved edition) was the text suddenly so small, i could barely read it, and i do not have trouble with text often in games. They where like "it was to big so make it smaller" and went overboard i think
The fact that Japanese font conveys more info in less space is part of the reason why speed runners often play the Japanese version of the game. The text boxes are shorter and allow you to get through the game faster, leading to better split times.
@@MK8MasterJunjie There's also the fact that many older games are first released in Japan, then released elsewhere, and so the Japanese version has more bugs to exploit to skip things.
Really depends on how the game handles text. If you can at any time press a button to cancel the text, or have all appear at once ... assuming it doesn't go through pages. You can skip the text at the same speed regardless of language. Plus there's a lot of games where textboxes aren't even a thing, so the language shouldn't matter. This only matters if you can't skip the text, or if a longer language has pages you have to press multiple times to go through, or if the game just speed up the text and doesn't skip it. But it's rather more what @accuratejaney8140 said; for older Japanese games, they were released in Japan first with all bugs. Then were later translated and had bugs fixed. So it's not about the language, but about using bugs.
The opposite issue used to be very common in the 8 and 16-bit eras: Japanese games would be designed to allow only a few kanji for things like character names and when they were translated the names had to be shortened to fit the sometimes as short as 4 letter spaces. For example in Phantasy Star Alisa became Alis, Tyrone became Odin etc.
Even games that only allowed inputting hiragana and katakana had this to some degree, since each character is roughly twice as much information as in latin script. I actually learned how to spell my name using katakana at one point because I was sick of having to mangle it and omit vowels when playing a game that had that problem :P
I have to wonder if this is true with fan translations as well. Seiken Densetsu 3 for example Riesz and Charlotte were called "Lise" and "Carlie" in the translation I had so you can imagine my confusion when I played Trials of Mana. Also much respect for mentioning Phantasy Star.
There's a similar problem with manga. Speech bubbles are often designed to use vertical text, and it becomes difficult to adapt them to Roman characters which are always horizontal. I remember this was particularly problematic in Dragon Ball
Yeah that's true too for dialogues boxes. Sentences in Japanese are way longer in English. Translators do their best to shorten sentences so they still fix within the dialogue box, and they do that for most of the lines. But for some lines it's just impossible so a sentence is separated in 2 dialogue boxes, so you press A and the next dialogue box just finishes the previous sentence. It's a relief this workaround exists because otherwise I'd be a nightmare. Another example is Ace Attorney. In the Japanese versions of the all the games, there's only 2 lines of text for each dialogue box. In english when they translated it, they had the bright idea to ease a lot of the pain and just change the UI of the dialogue box to make it larger and instead fit 3 lines of text. It's pretty funny when you see footage of the japanese versions and are kind of taken aback by the big change in UI.
pokémon was my fist exposure to this. in pokémon gen I and II you can see how the localization team had to completely rearrange the ui to fit the longer (in english) pokémon names within the pixel grid, vs the japanese versions, even somewhat mangling how the pokédex was suppose to appear as a ‘book’ with little bindings and a symmetrical layout. around gen III or so they finally gave up and made the font narrower instead.
Yes! This is so important Many western games have font sizes that are really small as if they only tested the games in huge screens and not in the size of tv an average person has. Sometimes you need large text even if your tv is large if you are sitting far away from the screen Thanks for the video Mr Sakurai! 😄
Not just big screens. They are testing in their desks near the screen. It makes a big difference if you instead sit on your couch with the TV farther away.
And then you have me, with bad eyes and a smallish screen... Even games meant for handhelds I often can't read on my TV from across the room! I really need to get into the optometrist again...
@@keiyakins If you have myopia, you can try to get a setup where you sit closer to the screen, squinting will really hurt your eyes. On the other hand, if you still can't read comfortably because the text is too small even with a clear view of the screen, that's absolutely the game's fault. It happens on Switch (handheld mode) a lot of the time when the devs don't consider it. Also, always check if the settings allow you to customize text size. The vast majority of games don't but you might be surprised.
Hey France here, and I’m here to thanks you Mr Sakurai for including our beautiful language in your video, j’espère que vous passer une bonne journée ! Haha get that loser, another victory for France
One detail I haven't seen mentioned here is color contrast. So developers out there, please make sure your text isn't going to be put against a backdrop of nearly the same color as the font. Especially if the text is small, the amount of contrast makes a huge difference in readability, and even little things like giving the text a drop shadow can help too.
2:43 this part is really funny. I'm in the process of learning Japanese, and usually play games in that language as a way of practicing my skills. This happens a lot of time in NES games, you can't properly recognize a lot of Kanji because of hardware limitations, but context and nearby Kanji will give you enough hints about the Kanji displayed (the zoom out in the video).
You know, there's times when the text is annoyingly too big and makes the player lose focus and interest. And if it's too small, players won't be able to read it, specially if it's the kind to go away after some time.
Hello, I'm a baguette dev and YES French to use big sentences. Always think about it when you start to add text in your games ! An easy way is "just" keeping a lot of space even if your sentence is short ;)
Interesting (and glad) that you speak abou this, Mr. Sakurai. Mark Brown (from YT Channel Game Maker's toolkit) does a yearly analysis of accesibility features in videogames, and he often points out that while Western games have adapted quite well to provide accessibility features like font size changes, games from Japanese developers usually struggle on that end, often providing very little features, and having small, nearly unreadable text as a result.
Wanted to point it out that localization team plays a huge part in this process. Like if the translated text is too literal, it takes a huge chunk of spaces. This is where editors come in to rephrase it in a shorter length as long it brings similar meaning to the original texts. Trails games are a huge example of this since those games have a massive amount of texts. Just read Trails in the Sky localization story & you'll understand it.
This is a really important topic and I’m glad Sakurai brought up resolution and portable screen size to distinguish text size. Also neat little trivia, most speedrunners opt for the Japanese version because it has condensed text fast enough to run through like Sakurai explained about Kanji conveying more with less space.
For whatever reason though, in a lot of games, the Japanese text also scrolls faster. Look at how quickly each letter appears in Japanese Ocarina of Time vs how painfully slow it is in English...
My favorite example of text size is the Ace Attorney series, which debued in Japan on the Gameboy Advance. Part of the reason it only got released in English once the remakes for Nintendo DS rolled around, is because the GBA's screen resolution would only let you have two lines of text per textbox, for both Japanese and English. Ace Attorney is a game about spotting contradictions and lies, so two lines was fine for the information dense Japanese, but would've been very difficult to write for in English. So the DS remakes were modified by the translation team to allow _three_ lines of text per textbox, which made it much easier to fit all the required information in each box. But now that screen resolutions have gotten better in later games for later consoles (like Spirit of Justice for 3DS, or Great Ace Attorney on multi-platform), the English games can get away with just using two lines of text like the Japanese version.
As a visually impaired person, I'm thankful Sakurai is addressing this topic. I've had to skip out on a couple RPGs I was really looking forward to because the font they used for the UI was too small.
When I was working on user interface for games supporting up to 11 languages, German was the bane of my existence. Words in German often contains more letters than English, French and Spanish and text in user interface often come in boxes like buttons and dialogue box. Another challenge was managing languages that read from right to left.
translating a game is hard work. Localizing is even harder. Looking for words that are well related is a hard job, even with the advent of the web, with things like google being in existence. Each word and character has to be precise and well structured while looking like the original. And testing the game is one of the most important aspects of the game. Like you have to test a game while localizing otherwise it just won't work. Give the game to the localizers as they translate it because most of the time it'll not work well without trying out different permutations and see whether the same words work in various scenarios
Text configuration in videogames is such a funny and fascinating in history that I learned so much about them through 1) the challenges the Mother 3 fan translation team went through, to actually rework the text system to be able to fit english text 2) Speedrunners generally prefer JP versions of games because the format meant text scrolled faster.
Back in the NES days, having to fit text was a challenge because of how many letters per words there are in comparison to Japanese. That's why names had to be shortened, writing had to be simplified, and lack of resources for localization meant most of the time japanese had to localize to English themselves. A perfect recipe for 80s awkward one-liners like "Eastmost penninsula is the secret".
Another interesting note - PC games often employ very small font sizes, because it’s assumed the person playing them is at a desk sitting very close to a large monitor. When PC games are ported to console, developers will often scale the font size up, sine the user is now sitting on a couch a considerable distance from a television
I remember bumping face-first into a text size issue back in 2007. Back before HD TVs were more affordable, I had to play games on a small CRTV. But some game devs of the day were designing their games with high definition in mind, and high definition _only._ So on my small screen, a game like Dead Rising was more challenging than intended just because I couldn't read some of the text!
I had that with Harry Potter OOTP on the Xbox 360. It also wasn't compatible with 4:3 output, if I recall (or was that Shrek the Third?), but luckily the CRT I was playing on had an option to stretch the screen to full height, but it still was annoying having to keep switching aspect ratio in the console settings, to be able to launch the game, for sure.
Gonna be taking a trip to Japan for a honeymoon in a few years, so understanding Kanji will definitely be a hard thing to do. But I realize how fun it is, and hopefully I get to play games in both English and Japanese languages down the road someday. This is definitely informative stuff. Keep up the good work Sakurai. 😊👍
The comment about Japanese having fewer characters just reminds me of how some games are faster to speedrun when set to Japanese or Chinese because of text scrolling speed. Ocarina of Time is a big example that comes to mind, where there are a lot of cutscenes with unskippable text scrolling - playing in Japanese can save entire minutes in a speedrun!
Funny I tested this out on the language menu and what he says makes total sense. Language and fonts are important to fit into a game for all audiences. Interesting lesson.
This advice is also worthly for streamers: make in-game font size a little bigger (if the game support that) as the audience using a mobile phone to watch or being not so good at sight can be the majority(you can watch you own stream on the phone or ask friends with visual problems to determine the most comfortable size) As a Kanji/Hanzi character includes more information, losing a part of the structure of the character may not hinder the understanding in the text(especially with the help of the context) like the experiment at the last shows……The hard problem is finding out which part of the character is useless when our brain recongnize it while reading PS: an interesting application of the high infomation density of Japanese/Chinese is Danmaku used by JP's niconico and CN's bilibili and (surprisingly) other CN game streaming platforms(You may heard it if you have a little deeper knowledge about the ACG culture there): this is a way to let the short commemts overlaying directly on the video temporarily at a certain time(comment writer define that), and the place may be fixed at the top or bottom or let the comment fly from right to left through the screen as the video plays, and this is possible in JP/CN because the information density of the langauge is high and can express enough complicated content inside the width of the screen, but if you imangine to do this in English you may find out that the screen is too narrow for placing your expression or the flying comment is too long to read
Wow, i had no idea you had a hand into that as well ! i definitely thought an other team would take care of translation, then also of how to place things. I was surprised to see French too :D made me smile!
Oh, I absolutely agree with this one; it's always important to make things easy to read when it comes to localization, and that includes the size of the text itself! Also, I had never known just how hard it was for people to add kanji into NES titles until now. The more you know, indeed!
I think the time I really noticed how important text size was is when I was playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses on my Switch Lite--that game's text is TINY on the handheld screen, and you have to read a LOT of text in that game--it results in fatigue from having to hold the Switch closer to your face than is normally comfortable. I've noticed a fair amount of Switch games that were clearly designed with UI for console mode--like Ori and Blind Forest/Will of the Wisps for instance, the UI is practically unreadable on portable mode! Def wish more Switch devs remembered that some people will *only* ever be able to play in portable mode, and put in UI scaling options. Really, I think pretty much every game should having UI and text scaling options as a basic accessibility feature--I may hate Ubisoft but they're doing it right with all those options in Assasin's Creed.
Remember when Hyrule Warriors got on the Switch, was upscaled to 1080p, but all the UI elements were kept for a 720p game so now they were really small? Yeah...
I must say that for having played a few japanese games lately on 3DS to improve my learning, they really made some great progress on the matter. Sometimes, reading the furigana (reading of kanji that is put in smaller on top of the actual word) is a hell of understanding...
You bring a VERY GOOD POINT here. When I was considering sizes of UI and the size of the fonts for different sections of it, I kept wondering how a word in my language is shorter than a word in another language or in Japanese case, my words were longer. That's when I considered to find out a system that would make the UI elastic on some parts, making text capsules wrap around the word instead of making a BIG default capsule to fit all languages. It worked cool but, the asymmetry of it made it "off-putting" to my eye because the UI started to have "dead gaps" in between elements 🤔 It's hard to narrow down a good balance of default sizes. Even in Arabic I tend to stick to the fact that text-boxes and capsules should respect the 4 lines per paragraph, even if I need to split the paragraph in halves and thus making extra PUSH buttons for dialogues than in other languages. Is good to see that you can read much with Asian languages in less space, but they take a big font size that needs to be taken into consideration (what I can read well in 14px cannot be applied to Hebrew or Japanese -- they need BIGGER fonts!). Thank you for the insights Sakurai-dono. You are a good teacher for us indies and veterans alike 👍 Also, people forget that latin letters also mean words, for example A is a "bull/ox" and D is a "fish" 😄
There's also cultural considerations, like I've noticed with a lot of game UI in Korean, the text is smaller than Japanese or Chinese, despite all of them having very meaning dense single characters
Korean gets away with smaller script, because they have a simple phonemic script, like English. Any symbol always means the same sound (it can change in some cases depending on the syllable construction though). But yeah, Korean has basically normal letters, like English. The symbols are just different and arranged in blocks. That's why it's much easier to read.
The part about the kanji at 2:37 is so funny because I didn’t know it was kanji until he asked the question and it zoomed out (I thought it was a enemy from Undertale). I’m learning Japanese and I still haven’t started kanji because of college/university, but I’ve already heard it’s a lot of work so kudos to the developers who crammed all that detail in so few pixels.
i remember reading somewhere that ideally the text is still readable at a 480p resolution, i think to acommodate for handhelds, different tv sizes, and also for people just sitting a good distance away from their tvs. i dont game dev but its a really interesting tip thats stuck with me for some reason
I remember reading an article about the history of the translation of Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne, one of the hurdles they had to face is the limited letter space occupied by the kanji characters, translating them into english simply took too much space so they had to look for shorter words, an example would be Jack'o Lantern, they had to change it to Pyro Jack & it was the same for all the following games until Persona 5 retained the original name. super interesting stuff!
This is very funny to me as several Japanese games in the west have the same issue, games like xenoblade x and ff7r were criticised for having very small fonts that I myself struggled to read on my small TV
Nintendo hates UI options. It's easier said than done to do UI stuff. No devs will prefer to work on menus and extra optimizing. But AAA studios really have little excuse to release a game without any options. I've turned down buying games knowing the text is small. Hate that.
On the game I'm working on, I've made it independently possible to scale the UI and the text; you can decide to bump the UI down to 0.8x, but bump UP the text to compensate, or perhaps bump UP the UI scale, but decrease the text to fit more "verbose" languages
For anyone with a hobbyist interest, I recommend looking up design doc on yt. Great channel that focuses a lot on the different elements of UI in games. You'll find the content there and here are complementary. Anyways, as someone who works in the field of translation, I'd like to stress the importance and impact of the text size and the space allocated to text in software. When you translate from one language to another, you usually end up with more words in the target language as a by-product of having to reformulate the ideas or structures in a way that seems fluent. From Eng to French, for instance, this averages 15%. Planning ahead with more flexible text windows makes translations better, as translators will need to cut around corners when space is insufficient.
Never thought of text scalability as a localization feature before. I've always thought of it as a accessibility feature for different screens and for those with bad eyesight.
"We often wonder, 'Why is this text so small?'" You're not the only ones. I've been wondering the same thing ever since most games went HD. Why some games have microscopic English text has never made sense to me.
As a native spanish speaker, I feel this can be a pretty huge issue when translating from different languages I don't know much japanese but translating from english to spanish, some sentences can be a lot longer in comparison. I think english is a language that regularly has short sentences which is the total inverse in spanish, where a sentence can theorically be infinite with the usage of connectors. It doesn't help the fact that english has words than can express something very specific while spanish might not have these kind of words. Loan words are a thing but sometimes you can't just do that when you want to reach a general public, like more casual videogames
Translation in general tends to result in longer sentences than average too, because every language has its quirks and trying to preserve meaning is tricky.
Muchas palabras bien específicas del inglés en realidad existen en español pero la gente no las usa. Por ejemplo: «rant» del inglés en español se puede traducir a «diatriba». No sé sí sería mejor si yo fuera localizador poner la palabra desconocida, pero qué sé yo...
@@Shrek_es_mi_pastor Creo que esa palabra es demasiado rara y poco común en diálogos comunes. Es un tema complejo porque uno tiene que tomar en cuenta a quién va a ser dirigida una traducción pero también existen límites dependiendo del caso (y en videojuegos esos límites se pueden llegar de forma muy fácil en español, si mal no recuerdo, en Smash 3DS/Wii U mucho texto se ve demasiado estrecho por las limitaciones léxicas del español)
As a German I can also confirm that a German Sentence with the same meaning as an English one, would on average be longer. Let's also not forget that German has some long words, because we often combine words together into one single word, were in English they would be split into two, but together would form a new meaning or specify something a bit more. (Like "sun glasses" -> "Sonnenbrille", you might have to take something like this into account, because you can easily put "sun" into one line and "glasses" into the next, while Sonnenbrille is just one single word) Sure, there exist some rules to split these words, in the case that you need to break them to fit them into multiple lines, but depending on the flexibility of the UI or the position of the word you might not have the space to do so. The situation about specific words not existing in another language are also true for almost any language. I often see people taking German as an example because we have some very long and ridicilously specific words like "Schadenfreude", "Schattenparker" and sometimes people even mention "Rindfleischettikiterungsüberwachungsgesetz" (not that this would be a word that would come up in any casual conversation, as long as your not talking about laws regulating the labeling of cow meat...), but I also know that there other languages with single words, that convey something that we don't have a short word for and would need to describe it in a small sentence. In Japanese there is for example a single word to say something along the lines "created from nothingness", nothing like this does exist in English nor German and would need to be described or translated into multiple words, longer than the original one. As a translator you are really at the mercy of the UI designers.
El problema también con el español es que tienes que hacer que gente de muchos países pueda entenderlo, puede que un país tenga un regionalismo que es una traducción perfecta para la situación pero al no se usado en todos lados tienes que irte por una forma más descriptiva que entiendan todos
Wow. And not only does it apply to videogame UIs, but if I recall correctly, most, if not all, of what was mentioned in the video can also apply to general software UI design, as well as when books (particularly illustrated novels and comics) get translated into other languages.
Kanji, Chinese words are some of the most efficient forms of written language, every single symbol, syllable is an entire word. You can pack more words and meaning using Kanji that almost any other language, which is one of the reason why Chinese and Japanese games usually end up not translating well into other languages e.g. English that has many alphabets to form a single word. Also Japanese is a very subtle language that has a ton of nuance in how emotions and personality are expressed, that often gets lost in translation and the lack of text space.
Translation in general has trouble with nuance, because every language has subtle nuances but they're different. That's also part of why translated text tends to be longer when spoken, no matter which pair of languages you're using.
The more languages you intend to add the more of a headache it sounds like it becomes.. Although, that's literally what localisation teams have to do, props to them.
One reason I love resizeable text in games I play is because I tend to play on a TV that's kinda far away. Until recently, the TV was mounted in a corner of the room near the ceiling, so I was also playing at an angle, too, which made it even harder to read small onscreen text.
Scalable text is also important for accessibility. There's no reason to gatekeep visually impaired players! GMKT has an entire series dedicated to accessibility features, and any aspiring (or current) developers really ought to watch.
a while back, i made a mod that replaces Oblivion's UI with Skyrim's some folks very graciously translated it into languages like Russian and Polish, but ran into layout issues. some pieces of text were much longer in those languages. what's more: Oblivion's font system doesn't support resizing. i ended up having to build some new configuration options that translators could set to enlarge some menus' widths these kinds of issues come up a lot, and they can pop up in places you don't even think about
I think you also have to be careful about symbols too, some are regionally specific like that green and yellow arrow thingy someone else talked about in another video of a similar topic.
Symbols like × and ◯ and ✔ are interpreted differently depending on the culture. Even colors can be perceived differently! For example, in Japan*, taxis have a *RED* light when they're *FREE,* and a *GREEN* light when they're *OCCUPIED.* And in the Japanese* stock market, stock prices going *UP* are indicated with *RED,* and stock prices going *DOWN* are indicated with *GREEN.* In both of these cases, the colors are reversed when comparing to most other (western) countries! * and a few other Asian countries
As I understand it, 👍 wasn't added to emojis for a while because in some countries it's a rude gesture. In others, it means good, proceed, etc. Really shows how symbols can have unexpected differences in meaning.
Yeah the size of letters in games is pretty important I only focus on the english version keep in mind, on menus I see is important to to have biggers letters to give the players the view is a more importamt thing to choose and the smaller ones for subtle stuff, even outside the games having same thing in menus can help too
As a translator, I hate it when the text windows are small and have rigid max character count. It is frankly a pain in the butt to restructure the sentence over and over to be able to fit it all in, especially when you end up having to omit parts of the sentence because it makes the resulting text worse overall.
For me the text in Three Houses was definitely too small to be seen from where my chair usually is in relation to the TV. I had to get my glasses updated just to be able to read it without squinting. It was a good way to show how much I needed a prescription change, honestly.
One of the great ironies about the 8-bit era was that because Kanji require fewer spaces to convey information, it meant that more information could be conveyed in smaller storage spaces. Nob Ogasawara had to fight to get more space for text in Pokemon Red and Blue (shrinking the amount of space reserved for player Pokemon boxes in Bill's PC) so that the game could have richer English dialogue.
I've learned recently to give a lot of credit to studios that try their best to port games to the Switch. It must be difficult to make the text both suitable for docked/TV play (not distractingly large on already-massive screens) and undocked/handheld play (where it has to be bigger not just because the screen is smaller, but usually the resolution has to be reduced a ton to work in undocked mode, too). Many third-party ports seem to fail at this, too, especially if the Switch version has to come out at the same time as the versions on more powerful consoles and PCs, and they don't have the privilege to delay the Switch version like with Dark Souls: Remastered. PC game developers probably have to start thinking about this stuff too as Switch-like devices such as the Steam Deck and the Aya Neo start showing up.
I remember how in the Doom Switch port, one of the complaints people had was that the text was too small specially in handheld. It's incredible how something like pixel density also has to be taken into consideration when developing a game. Even if we have 5" 4K screens in the future, I hope I don't have to squint my eyes too much to see text only because "it fits".
I love this, especially since Sakurai is touching on written language/Japanese. And that last part is crazy, actually impossible to cram the really complicated kanji on there. I do wonder how hard it is to read to Japanese people. Obviously context also helps a lot so it might not be hard for that many people.
Even such a minor, *minor* part of these games is so polarizing to me. It's something we take for granted that the average size of a text box is 3-4 lines, usually 3, while in Japanese games, this can get as low as one! And I don't mean like as subtitles, I mean in games with heavy amounts of written dialogue, like R.P.G.s. It's just crazy to think of one of those games where you can only see one line at a time, but in Japanese and Chinese, it packs enough information to be satisfactory.
Repeat request, but if it isn't in the cards already, I think a video all about load times and storage would be useful. It could answer questions such as: "Where should resources be stored?", "Why does this game take so long to load?", "How can we make it load faster?", and "Are there ways to distract users from load times?"
Game devs right now have a bad habit of leaving all textures uncompressed, so that they don't have to waste resources on decompression. But too many uncompressed textures can also lead to bloated file sizes and disk read times.
That part about putting kanji characters into NES games was crazy.
Kanji can work similarly to letters from Western languages in that you recognise them as part of words: what I mean is that you recognise the overall shape of the word and not what composes it.
Therefore you can recognise them in context but it can be hard without.
I'm Japanese but I couldn't guess the last letter "緊"
But as a sentence, I could read it without any discomfort
We don’t often notice it as English speakers, since our characters are so simple, but in every language, there’s an art to creating text that’s readable at low resolution.
A great example is comic sans, which looks awful now, but if you go check out what it looked like on a low-Rez CRT from the 90s, you get a much better idea of what they were going for
Many games of that era opted for writing everything in hiragana/katakana since kanji were problematic.
I'd probably just resort to writing kanji in a 16x16 space when I can.
in case anyone's wondering, the subtitles on the Japanese version of this video are indeed larger than the ones on this version
I don't think I have ever seen anyone talk about the international font size, only about translation and adaptation, this is truly unique and new to me.
I think nowadays its most common playing games made for the PC first then ported to console. Sometimes the text and gui end up waaaay too small on a tv. But it seems to be happening less frequently now than even 4-5 years ago.
There was quite a lot of talk about text being too small when the 360 launched, but the problem didn't last long once developers realised.
For me, an example of a game that definitely had this issue would be Xenoblade X. The UI text for that game is incredibly tiny, especially on a Wii U handheld, with the cause probably being them designing it for the larger, blockier Japanese characters. When translated to western characters though, it became nigh-unreadable (especially with the thin-ness of the font used).
@@Kaizoman666 I had problems with The Ascent on the Xbox because, at least on launch, the texts were too small and there were no way to scale it up.
@@DenkyManner I mean, I know there were low size problems in the past but I thought they were errors by the devs, not a problem with language changes, and since I can't read japanese opinions on the topic I would know even less about them getting way too small texts from western games.
For non Japanese speakers, let me explain the part 2:37. Most Japanese speaker can’t read the dot character 緊. But after zooming out, we can easily read them cuz our brains automatically fill in all that missing details. This is so interesting.
That's really cool
For Egslinh, a smilair efecft can ouccr if lteetrs are srcmlabed but the frsit and lsat ltteer are croecrt.
For English, the equivalent is a 3x3 1 bit pixel font. Those are so tiny that some letters are literally identical. But in context, it's readable anyway.
@@NotAGoodUsername360 I only started to see it at "lteetrs", amazing.
Another alphabet equivalent would probably be a VERY pixelated M, which tends to look an awful lot like an H or W to the point you cant tell which one it is, but if you see the letters "ARIO" are next to it you intuitively know is an M
Sakurai is so great he can make a video about text size interesting.
Text size is extremely important in video games. Extremely. It's already an interesting topic.
It IS interesting regardless
I know, it IS very important I was just joking because it SOUNDS like it would be a boring video.
@@bern9642 Reminds me of Hyrule warriors! In the port (and improved edition) was the text suddenly so small, i could barely read it, and i do not have trouble with text often in games. They where like "it was to big so make it smaller" and went overboard i think
When you have as much game dev experience as him, nearly everything in game dev becomes very easy to make interesting.
The fact that Japanese font conveys more info in less space is part of the reason why speed runners often play the Japanese version of the game. The text boxes are shorter and allow you to get through the game faster, leading to better split times.
Oh, I was wondering about that actually. I couldn’t understand why people speed-running Super Mario Odyssey always picked the Japanese version.
@@MK8MasterJunjie There's also the fact that many older games are first released in Japan, then released elsewhere, and so the Japanese version has more bugs to exploit to skip things.
Really depends on how the game handles text. If you can at any time press a button to cancel the text, or have all appear at once ... assuming it doesn't go through pages. You can skip the text at the same speed regardless of language. Plus there's a lot of games where textboxes aren't even a thing, so the language shouldn't matter.
This only matters if you can't skip the text, or if a longer language has pages you have to press multiple times to go through, or if the game just speed up the text and doesn't skip it.
But it's rather more what @accuratejaney8140 said; for older Japanese games, they were released in Japan first with all bugs. Then were later translated and had bugs fixed. So it's not about the language, but about using bugs.
The opposite issue used to be very common in the 8 and 16-bit eras: Japanese games would be designed to allow only a few kanji for things like character names and when they were translated the names had to be shortened to fit the sometimes as short as 4 letter spaces. For example in Phantasy Star Alisa became Alis, Tyrone became Odin etc.
Even games that only allowed inputting hiragana and katakana had this to some degree, since each character is roughly twice as much information as in latin script. I actually learned how to spell my name using katakana at one point because I was sick of having to mangle it and omit vowels when playing a game that had that problem :P
I have to wonder if this is true with fan translations as well. Seiken Densetsu 3 for example Riesz and Charlotte were called "Lise" and "Carlie" in the translation I had so you can imagine my confusion when I played Trials of Mana.
Also much respect for mentioning Phantasy Star.
There's a similar problem with manga. Speech bubbles are often designed to use vertical text, and it becomes difficult to adapt them to Roman characters which are always horizontal. I remember this was particularly problematic in Dragon Ball
Yeah that's true too for dialogues boxes. Sentences in Japanese are way longer in English. Translators do their best to shorten sentences so they still fix within the dialogue box, and they do that for most of the lines. But for some lines it's just impossible so a sentence is separated in 2 dialogue boxes, so you press A and the next dialogue box just finishes the previous sentence. It's a relief this workaround exists because otherwise I'd be a nightmare.
Another example is Ace Attorney. In the Japanese versions of the all the games, there's only 2 lines of text for each dialogue box. In english when they translated it, they had the bright idea to ease a lot of the pain and just change the UI of the dialogue box to make it larger and instead fit 3 lines of text. It's pretty funny when you see footage of the japanese versions and are kind of taken aback by the big change in UI.
pokémon was my fist exposure to this. in pokémon gen I and II you can see how the localization team had to completely rearrange the ui to fit the longer (in english) pokémon names within the pixel grid, vs the japanese versions, even somewhat mangling how the pokédex was suppose to appear as a ‘book’ with little bindings and a symmetrical layout.
around gen III or so they finally gave up and made the font narrower instead.
Yes! This is so important
Many western games have font sizes that are really small as if they only tested the games in huge screens and not in the size of tv an average person has.
Sometimes you need large text even if your tv is large if you are sitting far away from the screen
Thanks for the video Mr Sakurai! 😄
Not just big screens. They are testing in their desks near the screen. It makes a big difference if you instead sit on your couch with the TV farther away.
And then you have me, with bad eyes and a smallish screen... Even games meant for handhelds I often can't read on my TV from across the room!
I really need to get into the optometrist again...
@@keiyakins If you have myopia, you can try to get a setup where you sit closer to the screen, squinting will really hurt your eyes.
On the other hand, if you still can't read comfortably because the text is too small even with a clear view of the screen, that's absolutely the game's fault. It happens on Switch (handheld mode) a lot of the time when the devs don't consider it.
Also, always check if the settings allow you to customize text size. The vast majority of games don't but you might be surprised.
In the PC space, the growing popularity of the Steam Deck (and other PC gaming handhelds) is starting to exacerbate these problems as well.
@@fernandobanda5734 yeah I just use a desk chair lol
Hey France here, and I’m here to thanks you Mr Sakurai for including our beautiful language in your video, j’espère que vous passer une bonne journée !
Haha get that loser, another victory for France
One detail I haven't seen mentioned here is color contrast.
So developers out there, please make sure your text isn't going to be put against a backdrop of nearly the same color as the font. Especially if the text is small, the amount of contrast makes a huge difference in readability, and even little things like giving the text a drop shadow can help too.
White with a black outline works well in a bunch of places if there's not enough extra time
2:43 this part is really funny. I'm in the process of learning Japanese, and usually play games in that language as a way of practicing my skills. This happens a lot of time in NES games, you can't properly recognize a lot of Kanji because of hardware limitations, but context and nearby Kanji will give you enough hints about the Kanji displayed (the zoom out in the video).
You know, there's times when the text is annoyingly too big and makes the player lose focus and interest. And if it's too small, players won't be able to read it, specially if it's the kind to go away after some time.
Hello, I'm a baguette dev and YES French to use big sentences. Always think about it when you start to add text in your games !
An easy way is "just" keeping a lot of space even if your sentence is short ;)
Interesting (and glad) that you speak abou this, Mr. Sakurai. Mark Brown (from YT Channel Game Maker's toolkit) does a yearly analysis of accesibility features in videogames, and he often points out that while Western games have adapted quite well to provide accessibility features like font size changes, games from Japanese developers usually struggle on that end, often providing very little features, and having small, nearly unreadable text as a result.
Wanted to point it out that localization team plays a huge part in this process. Like if the translated text is too literal, it takes a huge chunk of spaces. This is where editors come in to rephrase it in a shorter length as long it brings similar meaning to the original texts.
Trails games are a huge example of this since those games have a massive amount of texts. Just read Trails in the Sky localization story & you'll understand it.
Matt McMuscles made a video on Trails in the Sky SC’s localization.
This is a really important topic and I’m glad Sakurai brought up resolution and portable screen size to distinguish text size. Also neat little trivia, most speedrunners opt for the Japanese version because it has condensed text fast enough to run through like Sakurai explained about Kanji conveying more with less space.
For whatever reason though, in a lot of games, the Japanese text also scrolls faster. Look at how quickly each letter appears in Japanese Ocarina of Time vs how painfully slow it is in English...
I absolutely LOVE when a game lets me choose a size for their texts, I hope it gets more and more normal over time
I appreciate that you're concerned with accessibility :D
I’m loving the differences between Japanese text and English text it’s so good
I love how these videos are short and to the point. not wasting any time
Never thought about how difficult it must have been to put kanji into 8 bit games, that was a really cool section.
緊急:Emergency
My favorite example of text size is the Ace Attorney series, which debued in Japan on the Gameboy Advance.
Part of the reason it only got released in English once the remakes for Nintendo DS rolled around, is because the GBA's screen resolution would only let you have two lines of text per textbox, for both Japanese and English. Ace Attorney is a game about spotting contradictions and lies, so two lines was fine for the information dense Japanese, but would've been very difficult to write for in English.
So the DS remakes were modified by the translation team to allow _three_ lines of text per textbox, which made it much easier to fit all the required information in each box. But now that screen resolutions have gotten better in later games for later consoles (like Spirit of Justice for 3DS, or Great Ace Attorney on multi-platform), the English games can get away with just using two lines of text like the Japanese version.
I LOLed at the last part with the complex kanji. The production value of these videos is incredible. Thank you Sakurai~san and team!
i love working on UIs so much, great to see a video about such a specific neat little thing
It is great when video games are accurately translated from Japanese to English. Furigana is very helpful.
As a visually impaired person, I'm thankful Sakurai is addressing this topic. I've had to skip out on a couple RPGs I was really looking forward to because the font they used for the UI was too small.
When I was working on user interface for games supporting up to 11 languages, German was the bane of my existence. Words in German often contains more letters than English, French and Spanish and text in user interface often come in boxes like buttons and dialogue box. Another challenge was managing languages that read from right to left.
This just goes to show how much work and consideration goes into something as overlooked as localization of a game into different languages.
translating a game is hard work. Localizing is even harder. Looking for words that are well related is a hard job, even with the advent of the web, with things like google being in existence. Each word and character has to be precise and well structured while looking like the original.
And testing the game is one of the most important aspects of the game. Like you have to test a game while localizing otherwise it just won't work. Give the game to the localizers as they translate it because most of the time it'll not work well without trying out different permutations and see whether the same words work in various scenarios
Text configuration in videogames is such a funny and fascinating in history that I learned so much about them through
1) the challenges the Mother 3 fan translation team went through, to actually rework the text system to be able to fit english text
2) Speedrunners generally prefer JP versions of games because the format meant text scrolled faster.
Back in the NES days, having to fit text was a challenge because of how many letters per words there are in comparison to Japanese.
That's why names had to be shortened, writing had to be simplified, and lack of resources for localization meant most of the time japanese had to localize to English themselves. A perfect recipe for 80s awkward one-liners like "Eastmost penninsula is the secret".
A bit of a double whammy because you had very little space on the screen and very little memory to store the text!
Great, after this video, I now have text size to consider for different languages, thank you for this!
Another interesting note - PC games often employ very small font sizes, because it’s assumed the person playing them is at a desk sitting very close to a large monitor. When PC games are ported to console, developers will often scale the font size up, sine the user is now sitting on a couch a considerable distance from a television
I love the attention to details. Thank you Mr. Sakurai. I feel like home with this videos.
I remember bumping face-first into a text size issue back in 2007. Back before HD TVs were more affordable, I had to play games on a small CRTV. But some game devs of the day were designing their games with high definition in mind, and high definition _only._ So on my small screen, a game like Dead Rising was more challenging than intended just because I couldn't read some of the text!
I was thinking of Dead Rising’s text problems here. Capcom really got ahead of themselves.
I had that with Harry Potter OOTP on the Xbox 360. It also wasn't compatible with 4:3 output, if I recall (or was that Shrek the Third?), but luckily the CRT I was playing on had an option to stretch the screen to full height, but it still was annoying having to keep switching aspect ratio in the console settings, to be able to launch the game, for sure.
Another great video by Sakurai! Love how he mentioned games that accommodate different text sizes for people to more easily read.
Gonna be taking a trip to Japan for a honeymoon in a few years, so understanding Kanji will definitely be a hard thing to do. But I realize how fun it is, and hopefully I get to play games in both English and Japanese languages down the road someday. This is definitely informative stuff. Keep up the good work Sakurai. 😊👍
Too many games have small UI. Thanks for bringing up this topic
These videos are incredible. I am eternally grateful for everyone involved in creating them.
The comment about Japanese having fewer characters just reminds me of how some games are faster to speedrun when set to Japanese or Chinese because of text scrolling speed. Ocarina of Time is a big example that comes to mind, where there are a lot of cutscenes with unskippable text scrolling - playing in Japanese can save entire minutes in a speedrun!
Wow, very interesting indeed.
Never thought that it could be THAT important, specially taking other countries’s preferences into consideration. 😮
As someone who can't see anything 5-10 meters away from me clearly even with glasses, text size is indeed very important
Funny I tested this out on the language menu and what he says makes total sense. Language and fonts are important to fit into a game for all audiences. Interesting lesson.
This advice is also worthly for streamers: make in-game font size a little bigger (if the game support that) as the audience using a mobile phone to watch or being not so good at sight can be the majority(you can watch you own stream on the phone or ask friends with visual problems to determine the most comfortable size)
As a Kanji/Hanzi character includes more information, losing a part of the structure of the character may not hinder the understanding in the text(especially with the help of the context) like the experiment at the last shows……The hard problem is finding out which part of the character is useless when our brain recongnize it while reading
PS: an interesting application of the high infomation density of Japanese/Chinese is Danmaku used by JP's niconico and CN's bilibili and (surprisingly) other CN game streaming platforms(You may heard it if you have a little deeper knowledge about the ACG culture there): this is a way to let the short commemts overlaying directly on the video temporarily at a certain time(comment writer define that), and the place may be fixed at the top or bottom or let the comment fly from right to left through the screen as the video plays, and this is possible in JP/CN because the information density of the langauge is high and can express enough complicated content inside the width of the screen, but if you imangine to do this in English you may find out that the screen is too narrow for placing your expression or the flying comment is too long to read
thanks for the important advice, sakurai! always the helpful amazing gamer.
Wow, i had no idea you had a hand into that as well ! i definitely thought an other team would take care of translation, then also of how to place things. I was surprised to see French too :D made me smile!
Oh, I absolutely agree with this one; it's always important to make things easy to read when it comes to localization, and that includes the size of the text itself!
Also, I had never known just how hard it was for people to add kanji into NES titles until now. The more you know, indeed!
I think the time I really noticed how important text size was is when I was playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses on my Switch Lite--that game's text is TINY on the handheld screen, and you have to read a LOT of text in that game--it results in fatigue from having to hold the Switch closer to your face than is normally comfortable. I've noticed a fair amount of Switch games that were clearly designed with UI for console mode--like Ori and Blind Forest/Will of the Wisps for instance, the UI is practically unreadable on portable mode! Def wish more Switch devs remembered that some people will *only* ever be able to play in portable mode, and put in UI scaling options. Really, I think pretty much every game should having UI and text scaling options as a basic accessibility feature--I may hate Ubisoft but they're doing it right with all those options in Assasin's Creed.
Remember when Hyrule Warriors got on the Switch, was upscaled to 1080p, but all the UI elements were kept for a 720p game so now they were really small? Yeah...
I must say that for having played a few japanese games lately on 3DS to improve my learning, they really made some great progress on the matter. Sometimes, reading the furigana (reading of kanji that is put in smaller on top of the actual word) is a hell of understanding...
Cries in Xenoblade X.
日本語と英語を見比べるために英語版の動画を見にきました。
動画コメントの翻訳ボタンも押すとフォントの大きさが変わってくれるので、見やすくてありがたいですよね。
It must've been tough sometimes reading kanjis symbols in the NES/Famicom days!
Huge kudos to Japan Artists fitting Kanjis in 8x8 Square sprites!
この動画をわざわざ見ている日本人はほとんど居ないと思うけど
海外の反応は日本人からしたらめちゃくちゃ面白い
It's such a simple thing but incredibly important.
You bring a VERY GOOD POINT here. When I was considering sizes of UI and the size of the fonts for different sections of it, I kept wondering how a word in my language is shorter than a word in another language or in Japanese case, my words were longer. That's when I considered to find out a system that would make the UI elastic on some parts, making text capsules wrap around the word instead of making a BIG default capsule to fit all languages. It worked cool but, the asymmetry of it made it "off-putting" to my eye because the UI started to have "dead gaps" in between elements 🤔
It's hard to narrow down a good balance of default sizes. Even in Arabic I tend to stick to the fact that text-boxes and capsules should respect the 4 lines per paragraph, even if I need to split the paragraph in halves and thus making extra PUSH buttons for dialogues than in other languages. Is good to see that you can read much with Asian languages in less space, but they take a big font size that needs to be taken into consideration (what I can read well in 14px cannot be applied to Hebrew or Japanese -- they need BIGGER fonts!).
Thank you for the insights Sakurai-dono. You are a good teacher for us indies and veterans alike 👍 Also, people forget that latin letters also mean words, for example A is a "bull/ox" and D is a "fish" 😄
There's also cultural considerations, like I've noticed with a lot of game UI in Korean, the text is smaller than Japanese or Chinese, despite all of them having very meaning dense single characters
Korean gets away with smaller script, because they have a simple phonemic script, like English. Any symbol always means the same sound (it can change in some cases depending on the syllable construction though). But yeah, Korean has basically normal letters, like English. The symbols are just different and arranged in blocks. That's why it's much easier to read.
The part about the kanji at 2:37 is so funny because I didn’t know it was kanji until he asked the question and it zoomed out (I thought it was a enemy from Undertale). I’m learning Japanese and I still haven’t started kanji because of college/university, but I’ve already heard it’s a lot of work so kudos to the developers who crammed all that detail in so few pixels.
i remember reading somewhere that ideally the text is still readable at a 480p resolution, i think to acommodate for handhelds, different tv sizes, and also for people just sitting a good distance away from their tvs. i dont game dev but its a really interesting tip thats stuck with me for some reason
I feel like this is why most retro games were way better about making text readable than modern stuff.
I remember reading an article about the history of the translation of Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne, one of the hurdles they had to face is the limited letter space occupied by the kanji characters, translating them into english simply took too much space so they had to look for shorter words, an example would be Jack'o Lantern, they had to change it to Pyro Jack & it was the same for all the following games until Persona 5 retained the original name. super interesting stuff!
This is very funny to me as several Japanese games in the west have the same issue, games like xenoblade x and ff7r were criticised for having very small fonts that I myself struggled to read on my small TV
I wish more switch games had text size options.
And separate configurations for TV and handheld.
Nintendo hates UI options.
It's easier said than done to do UI stuff. No devs will prefer to work on menus and extra optimizing. But AAA studios really have little excuse to release a game without any options. I've turned down buying games knowing the text is small. Hate that.
On the game I'm working on, I've made it independently possible to scale the UI and the text; you can decide to bump the UI down to 0.8x, but bump UP the text to compensate, or perhaps bump UP the UI scale, but decrease the text to fit more "verbose" languages
For anyone with a hobbyist interest, I recommend looking up design doc on yt. Great channel that focuses a lot on the different elements of UI in games. You'll find the content there and here are complementary.
Anyways, as someone who works in the field of translation, I'd like to stress the importance and impact of the text size and the space allocated to text in software. When you translate from one language to another, you usually end up with more words in the target language as a by-product of having to reformulate the ideas or structures in a way that seems fluent. From Eng to French, for instance, this averages 15%.
Planning ahead with more flexible text windows makes translations better, as translators will need to cut around corners when space is insufficient.
Never thought of text scalability as a localization feature before. I've always thought of it as a accessibility feature for different screens and for those with bad eyesight.
Great video and insight on planning text sizes for international releases.
Three Houses developers: Big text? Nah.
"We often wonder, 'Why is this text so small?'"
You're not the only ones. I've been wondering the same thing ever since most games went HD. Why some games have microscopic English text has never made sense to me.
I'll make sure to give everything in my game the same importance, my game will be a slideshow of letter after letter filling up the entire screen
Ah, the old "skyward sword" textbox approach. If half of your playtime isn't spent waiting for letters to fill out a box, is it really a game?
@@FalconFetus8 it's called the game of waiting
@@FalconFetus8 I love Zelda but legit when I play the games now I find myself wishing I could skip dialog sequences entirely like cutscenes 💀
One thing I know is Ui makes gameplay better 🙂
As a native spanish speaker, I feel this can be a pretty huge issue when translating from different languages
I don't know much japanese but translating from english to spanish, some sentences can be a lot longer in comparison. I think english is a language that regularly has short sentences which is the total inverse in spanish, where a sentence can theorically be infinite with the usage of connectors.
It doesn't help the fact that english has words than can express something very specific while spanish might not have these kind of words. Loan words are a thing but sometimes you can't just do that when you want to reach a general public, like more casual videogames
Translation in general tends to result in longer sentences than average too, because every language has its quirks and trying to preserve meaning is tricky.
Muchas palabras bien específicas del inglés en realidad existen en español pero la gente no las usa. Por ejemplo: «rant» del inglés en español se puede traducir a «diatriba». No sé sí sería mejor si yo fuera localizador poner la palabra desconocida, pero qué sé yo...
@@Shrek_es_mi_pastor Creo que esa palabra es demasiado rara y poco común en diálogos comunes. Es un tema complejo porque uno tiene que tomar en cuenta a quién va a ser dirigida una traducción pero también existen límites dependiendo del caso (y en videojuegos esos límites se pueden llegar de forma muy fácil en español, si mal no recuerdo, en Smash 3DS/Wii U mucho texto se ve demasiado estrecho por las limitaciones léxicas del español)
As a German I can also confirm that a German Sentence with the same meaning as an English one, would on average be longer. Let's also not forget that German has some long words, because we often combine words together into one single word, were in English they would be split into two, but together would form a new meaning or specify something a bit more. (Like "sun glasses" -> "Sonnenbrille", you might have to take something like this into account, because you can easily put "sun" into one line and "glasses" into the next, while Sonnenbrille is just one single word) Sure, there exist some rules to split these words, in the case that you need to break them to fit them into multiple lines, but depending on the flexibility of the UI or the position of the word you might not have the space to do so.
The situation about specific words not existing in another language are also true for almost any language. I often see people taking German as an example because we have some very long and ridicilously specific words like "Schadenfreude", "Schattenparker" and sometimes people even mention "Rindfleischettikiterungsüberwachungsgesetz" (not that this would be a word that would come up in any casual conversation, as long as your not talking about laws regulating the labeling of cow meat...), but I also know that there other languages with single words, that convey something that we don't have a short word for and would need to describe it in a small sentence. In Japanese there is for example a single word to say something along the lines "created from nothingness", nothing like this does exist in English nor German and would need to be described or translated into multiple words, longer than the original one.
As a translator you are really at the mercy of the UI designers.
El problema también con el español es que tienes que hacer que gente de muchos países pueda entenderlo, puede que un país tenga un regionalismo que es una traducción perfecta para la situación pero al no se usado en todos lados tienes que irte por una forma más descriptiva que entiendan todos
That NES Kanji character looking like a mid-match Splatoon 3 Tableturf Battle.
Seeing Splatoon in a Sakurai video is amazing. The UI design in that series is just ink-redible.
Wow. And not only does it apply to videogame UIs, but if I recall correctly, most, if not all, of what was mentioned in the video can also apply to general software UI design, as well as when books (particularly illustrated novels and comics) get translated into other languages.
Great information about text size, Thank you.
Very interesting. 1:17 was something I never considered
Kanji, Chinese words are some of the most efficient forms of written language, every single symbol, syllable is an entire word. You can pack more words and meaning using Kanji that almost any other language, which is one of the reason why Chinese and Japanese games usually end up not translating well into other languages e.g. English that has many alphabets to form a single word.
Also Japanese is a very subtle language that has a ton of nuance in how emotions and personality are expressed, that often gets lost in translation and the lack of text space.
English only has one alphabet, not many. I think you meant characters. Also, what one may say is subtle, another would describe as imprecise.
Translation in general has trouble with nuance, because every language has subtle nuances but they're different. That's also part of why translated text tends to be longer when spoken, no matter which pair of languages you're using.
The more languages you intend to add the more of a headache it sounds like it becomes..
Although, that's literally what localisation teams have to do, props to them.
One reason I love resizeable text in games I play is because I tend to play on a TV that's kinda far away. Until recently, the TV was mounted in a corner of the room near the ceiling, so I was also playing at an angle, too, which made it even harder to read small onscreen text.
Scalable text is also important for accessibility. There's no reason to gatekeep visually impaired players!
GMKT has an entire series dedicated to accessibility features, and any aspiring (or current) developers really ought to watch.
a while back, i made a mod that replaces Oblivion's UI with Skyrim's
some folks very graciously translated it into languages like Russian and Polish, but ran into layout issues. some pieces of text were much longer in those languages. what's more: Oblivion's font system doesn't support resizing. i ended up having to build some new configuration options that translators could set to enlarge some menus' widths
these kinds of issues come up a lot, and they can pop up in places you don't even think about
I think more games could benefit from using symbols and images in UI, they can be universally recognized and thus they don't need translation.
I think you also have to be careful about symbols too, some are regionally specific like that green and yellow arrow thingy someone else talked about in another video of a similar topic.
This is a tricky situation. If your text doesn't fit, you can shrink it or abbreviate it. If the user doesn't understand your icon, you're doomed.
Symbols like × and ◯ and ✔ are interpreted differently depending on the culture. Even colors can be perceived differently! For example, in Japan*, taxis have a *RED* light when they're *FREE,* and a *GREEN* light when they're *OCCUPIED.* And in the Japanese* stock market, stock prices going *UP* are indicated with *RED,* and stock prices going *DOWN* are indicated with *GREEN.* In both of these cases, the colors are reversed when comparing to most other (western) countries!
* and a few other Asian countries
As I understand it, 👍 wasn't added to emojis for a while because in some countries it's a rude gesture. In others, it means good, proceed, etc. Really shows how symbols can have unexpected differences in meaning.
Yeah the size of letters in games is pretty important I only focus on the english version keep in mind, on menus I see is important to to have biggers letters to give the players the view is a more importamt thing to choose and the smaller ones for subtle stuff, even outside the games having same thing in menus can help too
Interesting to hear how something you consider commonplace seems weird in other places.
As a translator, I hate it when the text windows are small and have rigid max character count. It is frankly a pain in the butt to restructure the sentence over and over to be able to fit it all in, especially when you end up having to omit parts of the sentence because it makes the resulting text worse overall.
That explains why Star Ocean The Divine Force has so small Texts.
For me the text in Three Houses was definitely too small to be seen from where my chair usually is in relation to the TV. I had to get my glasses updated just to be able to read it without squinting. It was a good way to show how much I needed a prescription change, honestly.
I have always thought about this since I saw some texts in Majora's Mask in English and Japanese
One of the great ironies about the 8-bit era was that because Kanji require fewer spaces to convey information, it meant that more information could be conveyed in smaller storage spaces.
Nob Ogasawara had to fight to get more space for text in Pokemon Red and Blue (shrinking the amount of space reserved for player Pokemon boxes in Bill's PC) so that the game could have richer English dialogue.
Didn't they still have to increase the ROM size? Or was that only G/S?
That was really interesting to learn about the kanji
I've learned recently to give a lot of credit to studios that try their best to port games to the Switch. It must be difficult to make the text both suitable for docked/TV play (not distractingly large on already-massive screens) and undocked/handheld play (where it has to be bigger not just because the screen is smaller, but usually the resolution has to be reduced a ton to work in undocked mode, too). Many third-party ports seem to fail at this, too, especially if the Switch version has to come out at the same time as the versions on more powerful consoles and PCs, and they don't have the privilege to delay the Switch version like with Dark Souls: Remastered.
PC game developers probably have to start thinking about this stuff too as Switch-like devices such as the Steam Deck and the Aya Neo start showing up.
I remember how in the Doom Switch port, one of the complaints people had was that the text was too small specially in handheld. It's incredible how something like pixel density also has to be taken into consideration when developing a game.
Even if we have 5" 4K screens in the future, I hope I don't have to squint my eyes too much to see text only because "it fits".
No wonder why the HUD in Doom Eternal Switch looks different...
Also, I think many developers work on PC and don't test the games on a TV from further away, so the text ends up tiny.
Nice information about Text Size.😄👍
I love this, especially since Sakurai is touching on written language/Japanese. And that last part is crazy, actually impossible to cram the really complicated kanji on there. I do wonder how hard it is to read to Japanese people. Obviously context also helps a lot so it might not be hard for that many people.
If only font size for Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition could be bigger now
why have I only now found this excellence
Even such a minor, *minor* part of these games is so polarizing to me. It's something we take for granted that the average size of a text box is 3-4 lines, usually 3, while in Japanese games, this can get as low as one! And I don't mean like as subtitles, I mean in games with heavy amounts of written dialogue, like R.P.G.s. It's just crazy to think of one of those games where you can only see one line at a time, but in Japanese and Chinese, it packs enough information to be satisfactory.
YOOOOOOOO SAKURAI PUTTING DRACULA'S CURSE FOOTAGE YOU LOVE TO SEE IT
Repeat request, but if it isn't in the cards already, I think a video all about load times and storage would be useful. It could answer questions such as: "Where should resources be stored?", "Why does this game take so long to load?", "How can we make it load faster?", and "Are there ways to distract users from load times?"
Game devs right now have a bad habit of leaving all textures uncompressed, so that they don't have to waste resources on decompression. But too many uncompressed textures can also lead to bloated file sizes and disk read times.