dijonketchup

Some weird girl on the internet

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Alison

Valkyrie with The RPG Valkyries
Team Member with Power Up With Pride
Freelance video editor

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dog
@dog

I don't think I'll ever understand why Square made the font smaller in the DS version of Chrono Trigger, even though it's meant to be played on a small handheld screen. The SNES font is genuinely easier to read! (SNES left, DS right.)


dog
@dog

By comparison, the Japanese versions have exactly the same size font. DS version is exactly as easy to read as the SNES version was. Makes it weirder the English version went for that tiny unreadable font. (SNES left, DS right.)


dog
@dog

OK, that's even weirder. Because the DS version is bilingual, if you start the game in Japanese and then swap to English, it has to be able to render Japanese character names alongside English text. Which... means it has room to fit the bigger Japanese text alongside the English. They just don't ever use that room for English.


dijonketchup
@dijonketchup

My best guess is that they made the font smaller so that names can be longer and fit in the UI, unlike the SNES version, because English is generally longer than Japanese. The SNES version worked with the same amount of space for the localization, so nicknames were limited to five characters and many enemies had their names clumsily abbreviated. Dialogue boxes were fine, but the battle UI was very smooshed and crowded. Presumably the smaller text was to help with that. This is all speculation on my part though.


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in reply to @dog's post:

in reply to @dog's post:

i wonder how practical it would be to hack the old font in.
(...and the old translation, while we're at it. RIP Debuggest)
'cause like, the DS version would otherwise be a definitive way to play it - the FMV cutscenes, autorun, the ABXYLR button layout for the 4th-wall-breaks, nice touchscreen menus.. but on the other hand, tiny barely-readable text and Deverminator EX.

Square overall has really odd opinions of how this kind of text should be displayed. Maybe this is nitpicky, but it always bugged me how for all the Final Fantasy DS remakes, they moved away from "dialog appears one letter at a time" to "all dialog appears at once in a big simultaneous lump."

I always thought the one-letter-at-a-time stuff was cute, like they were actually speaking it. Though Chrono Trigger DS here seems to have dodged that particular bullet, at least.