furigana-in-parentheses-kokurase.jpg

Translation

• Context: Kokurase is a game made using RPGMaker, a tool that doesn't support ruby text, consequently, it uses parentheses to display the furigana for the names of the characters when introducing them.
  • The game's first episode game is available for free on Steam.
• joshi seito
  女子生徒
  Female student.
  • Games made with RPGMaker tend to write the name of the character speaking as the first line in the dialogue box, probably because the tool doesn't come with a way to display the name of the character in a separate box.
    • I don't want to diss the software or anything, but the way RPGMaker is designed is a nightmare. The text shown on these dialogue boxes is inputted in a field that's displayed as-is. There's no automatic line-wrapping. It's fixed to four lines of height. And it must use monospaced fonts in order for the text in-game to have the same size as the text in the editor, WYSIWYG-style, otherwise it will just not fit in the dialogue box.
    • This hellish design is only tolerable because its main target audience speaks Japanese. You see, in Japanese a single character can be an entire word, so the fact you literally can't fit more than around 20 characters in a single line doesn't matter. It takes 4 spaces to say "female student" in Japanese: 女子生徒. In English, the same amount of space gets you "fema." Because the text must be monospaced due to cursed design reasons, it doesn't matter if "f" is half the size of 女 in most fonts, they both take the same number of pixels to display in that dialogue box. On top of that, English's syntax requires writing "I" and "you," whereas Japanese can omit the pronouns. Given this, the same dialogue box on which you can write a lot in Japanese, you can write very little in English, and if you sacrifice a whole line for the character name, you may not even be able to write a full sentence in English. Japanese RPGMaker games can say a full sentence with half line and break the line there, leaving half the box unused, empty, like some sort of space-squandering dialogue box baron. English RPGMaker games can't afford this spacious luxury and only wrap lines when they run out of space.
  • Some games use descriptions like "student," "villager," etc. for nameless background characters, and, by extension, important characters who haven't been named yet, but will soon.
• "watashi, Kamata Sakura wa
  Koyasu Yoshimitsu-san ga suki"
  「私、蒲田桜（かまた　さくら）は、
  子安洋光（こやす　よしみつ）さんが好き」
  "I, Kamata Sakura, like Koyasu Yoshimitsu."
  (double subject construction.)
  • suki - "to like [something, someone]," "to love."
  • 「」 - quotation marks.