I've just been playing some random Sega Saturn games. So far, I noticed that the Japanese Sega Saturn versions of Doom and Revolution X are completely in English. There is not a single bit of Japanese, written or spoken, at all in these games. You'd almost think they pressed the wrong image into the discs, except they are correctly region coded to Japanese consoles. Does anyone know what's up with this? Surely some Japanese customers had some trouble playing these games. This is surprising to me, considering other Western-made games (in the 1990s) released in Japan were translated, like Three Dirty Dwarves.
Since those are Western games, as long as they were playable by Japanese people as is, there was probably little incentive to translate them and run the risk of introducing new bugs to the code. Japanese are generally pretty good with individual English terms, it's grammar and complete sentences they often struggle with. So English item names are usually not much of a problem. Stuff like an English story in a game, however, is mostly intended as ornamental, and not to be actually read. Also: 1. English makes it look "cooler" and more computer-ish. 2. Smarter Japanese people enjoy figuring out what the English words mean if they don't already know. 3. Video games have a long history of using English text. Early arcade games all had "HI-SCORE", "GAME OVER" etc. in English, even if they were intended for use in Japan. At least into the late 80's, many Japanese games chose to use English for things like items in order to keep the "video game aesthetic". In the case of these games they may have deliberately kept the English to maintain a Western aesthetic.
Puyo Puyo Fever has english as a selectable language in options. Onimusha Dawn of Dreams has full english text and speech selectable in options. But, I guess, that's not what you're talking about.
It's not just Japan, though. When I was growing up in Italy the majority of games, particularly pre-Playstation, were only in English. I remember even on the Dreamcast Italian games were a rarity - all the games I recall buying in Italy didn't have an Italian language option. The two games you mention have very little text beyond the menu screens. Even if they were in Japanese, stuff like オプション (options) or メニュー (menu) are just English words written in Japanese text and could be read by Japanese speakers regardless. Also, the Japanese are generally pretty terrible at English - almost all the words most people do know are loan words like those above.
Yeah, but that's a different thing. It's generally taken for granted that most europeans know english. English isn't as foreign to us, Europeans, as it is to japanese people even if some of us don't know it very well.
Has anybody checked this out? It might not be related to the thread but it's pretty cool and it works for the NES/FC!
The principle's the same, though, particularly when you take into account the rest of my post. The standard video game menu options are possibly more foreign to a non-English speaking European than the average Japanese person. Of course, you could make the argument that Japan is/was a larger market than individual European ones, so should have localised menus on that basis. It's also not really fair to make a comparison to Europeans as a whole. I'm sure a game with English menus or even entirely in English wouldn't pose any issues to most Scandinavian or Dutch gamers, for example, but in the past I've had to basically act as an English-Italian translator in order for friends to play through Resident Evil or Championship Manager.
Apprently the Japanese version of I am Setsuna for the Switch is in English if your Switch is set to English.
Like some Genesis/Megadrive games, that's kind of funny. English only games are not that uncommon in Japan.
I know this thread is probably about actual Japanese released that are in English. But is it possible that some of them were actually Asian releases (i.e. Japanese region, but not for Japan)? I see this as a possibility that the product was made for a "worldwide" release. So it can be released again without any change in code.
PS2 NTSC-J Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness include the option to switch between Japanese and English; this might have been for the abovementioned "coolness" factor, but more realistically because the NTSC-J version was distributed in other Asian countries. I think this was a very nice, sensible touch from the devs (or whoever made that decision, probably Igarashi himself?). The games were released in the US first, so it's not like they had any extra work, the English version was ready so it was just a matter of choice. I do not know if the US and PAL version include Japanese though? Someone?
The Japanese version of Super Mario Odyssey is like that too - the packaging is completely in Japanese (well, except for the song lyrics printed inside the cover) but the game plays entirely in English if that's what your console is set to. Thinking about it, so is Super Bomberman R. I also have 2 Hong Kong market Switch games (Mario Kart 8 and Zelda) - they are both marked in Chinese but will play in English or Japanese if the console is set to that language.
Interesting. I never knew that... That explains why a lot of games in Japan still have the title or part of it written in English. Thanks for sharing (even if it was a year ago) I have a few Japanese gamecube Games. Sonic Adventure 2 is all in Japanese, but you can change all the settings to English. Doshin the giant is all Japanese, and so is Donkey Konga 3. But I guess these are newer than the 80’s
There are no reasons to have sufficient knowledge in Japanese language in order to understand the story. Early Genesis/MegaDrive games have the same file on the rom cart depending on which console's region from. Many Japanese people have fair English knowledge. PAL games have multi languages.