How come a lot of Japanese retro games are fully in English?

memory limitations

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The real question is, why is Ristar so angry on the western version?

>>3542646
he got the kirby treatment

every country in the world belongs to america

>>3542674

>to israel

FTFY

tradition
early arcade games that came over to japan were in english

>>3542626
That's understandable, probably to lessen any localization problems. What I want to know is why games like space harrier, wonder momo, or wagyan land (only examples) have english words but still spell them phonetically. Was there not a word in Japanese to use?

>>3542741
Also by only examples I should specify I meant those were only examples, not that those were the only instances of that sort of thing.

>>3542626
Because there was no need for Japanese. Unless the were an RPG, they weren't full of faggot story bits that need actual native dialog. The simple English terms are easy enough for most Japs to know, plus it made releasing in the west easier.

>>3542626
English is cool to Japs the same way Japanese is cool to us yanks.

>>3542861

Well no, Japanese actually learn English as part of the curriculum as it's a major world business language.

Weebs learn Japanese so they can pretend to be ninjas while wearing metal plated headbands

>>3542679
Same thing.

>>3543397
>Japanese actually learn English
Kind of, they have English classes but most of them are laughably terrible for actually learning the language. It's like learning Japanese through subbed anime.

>>3543538
To be fair, the English Language is pretty fucked.

Because WWII.
No seriously, look that shit up. We basically fucked them til they loved us.

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>>3542741
>probably to lessen any localization problems

The problem with that is that there were game completely in English that never left Japan. Pic related.

>>3543687

>We
>us

You weren't alive back then.
And Japanese don't love you.

Most japanese games never left Japan. They only localize a small fraction of their game production. Luckily many times they localize their good stuff, but a lot of the times they also keep the good stuff for them.

>>3542646
Angry Kirby Syndrome.

>>3542626
Because Japanese realize their language is shit tier and that English is the best of the major languages spoken in the world.

>>3543806

Japanese love their language so much that they practice art purely based on in, look up shodo.

but yeah english is a major language in the world. Western at least.
Also very easy to learn, a bit lacking and poor, but good enough for communication.

>>3543784
yeah whatever, weeb

Is that why Puro Resu is so big there? Is that why Tezuka invented Manga and based the whole shit on WALT DISNEY?
HUH?
WHAT NOW, WEEB SCUM

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>>3544064

>>3544306
And?
No one ever said it never went both ways.
Japan and America love each other. It's because after we blew their shit out, we stayed and rebuilt their country, and not only that, defended them from the heathen chinese and koreans for the last half century.

>>3545090

Plus we buy all their DVD players and cars and shit

>>3543397
He's right. It's why there's so much superfluous English used in Japanese graphic design. They simply think it looks cool.

>>3543771
The decision to release a game internationally isn't always made at the same stage in the game's development. What I mean is, they might not know if there will be an international release or not. They can make it easier on themselves if there will be one in the future, and since they can save money and very importantly they can save time by not having to make a separate version monolingual westerners.

>>3544306
Not to mention that Jungle Emperor is certainly not obscure, it was also the first anime to be broadcast in color.

Disney is a band of thieves, plagiarists, and talentless hacks that cry their eyes out when they're expected to put the mouse in the public domain.

The reality is that Japanese was fucking EXPENSIVE.

If you wanted Japanese text in your game, you had to sacrifice a lot of sprites and memory for it. For mystery games with lots of text, this wasn't much of an issue because the initial investment quickly pays off when your language is twice as efficient with kana compared to romaji, so you save line space and can make menus smaller. But for your simple game without a lot of text, we're talking ~30 something characters (alphabet plus punctuation, if you're just writing "press start" and "game over" you only need 10) compared to ~60 if you just wanted one type of kana, or double that if you wanted both. If you wanted diacritics that didn't look terrible, you needed another 25 or 50 characters for those too.

There were also severe readability problems with Japanese on early systems, so much so that most early games would use Katakana because it was slightly easier to read over a blurry RF connector. English characters didn't have this problem, so they tended to be used for menu screens, and they could be made smaller in terms of font size.

And then there was the obvious concern of exporting, a game in English can be sold anywhere in the world.

>>3543538
>It's like learning Japanese through subbed anime.
Anyone who've seen a couple hundred titles will be capable of watching jav/hentai and understanding 85% of dialogue.

>>3544306
build wall

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>>3548170

Here's another one without text for you to get triggered about.

>>3548163
Moaning isn't dialogue.

>>3544306
>>3548334
>this is the same company responsible for insane 70+ year copyright terms

English is so cool! Sonovabitch!

>>3549397
HAIL 2 U

>>3548334
Not only that. In Kimba, they called it a baboon when he's actually a Mandrill.

Guess what they call it in the Disney one too? You'd think they'd have researchers for that shit.

>>3549603
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrill
>Both the mandrill and the drill were once classified as baboons in the genus Papio, but they now have their own genus, Mandrillus.