There's no way to see if the line fits without paching and playing? SOOO much time wasted, that must be brutal.
Yep, this is a common trend with Japanese games, they like to do their line breaks manually, which is a crappy way of doing it in Japanese, but when you convert it to English, it turns outright hellish. There is a limited number of text windows and space, and that space is measured to fit the Japanese text. When you change it to English, which takes a lot more letters to spell something, suddenly you have much less space to work with.
Take a saying that comes up in this game for example:
一石二鳥, which means "
killing two birds with one stone." In Japanese it's exactly four characters, in English it's
thirty two including spaces. It's not always this extreme, but in general, this restriction is a huge killer for Japanese games that are translated to English.
Because not only is Japanese much more flexible with nuance, so many things are lost in a translation to English (take honorifics or politeness levels), with the space restriction on top of that, sometimes when you're playing a US version of a JP game, you're missing like half the content of the dialogue, since there was simply no space to put it.
So while Japanese elitists can be obnoxious, there actually is some truth in it (but usually they are elitists for the wrong reason.
)
Luckily, PSP2i is relatively generous with its space for story text windows, so with some well thought out phrasing and some smuggling (transferring sentences from one window to another linked one), almost nothing was lost in the story dialog.
At first I was hoping that Jam could find a way to add more space, but apparently it's not that easy (or everyone would be doing it).
And the fun doesn't stop there: In Japanese, all the characters are generally the same size. So when you have a four character word, it takes up four characters every time, so you know how many characters per line you have to work with.
When you change it to alphabet, or specifically, to the PSP font, not all letters are the same width. IIIII is much more narrow than WWWWW, for example. That's why even if you adhere to a set character limit per line, sometimes it overshoots, as in the example picture above.
This issue without word wrapping is really common I feel, the official US version of vanilla PSP2 has it too, just look at where the line breaks are in text windows, they are completely irregular.
You can see it in some bigger games too, take Suikoden V for example (Googled images):
Which is almost certainly because of the same issue.
It's kind of an interesting subject, that's why I wanted to write a bit about it. You'd think that this is a really archaic system, but it still shows up in modern games too.
But in games like these, the translation is actually a relatively small part of the actual work (assuming you understand the source and target language well), the biggest challenge is to wrestle and pin down the limited space, and make it submit to you.
