Video game kanji


This is an issue I've posted about before, but I just finished playing
a Japanese strategy RPG game (Super Robot Taisen Alpha 2), and while I
was playing I made a note of any words that came up which I could not
read. I'm not going to post the whole list, but some of the most
notable examples:

銅鐸
一縷
蜉蝣
謹慎
牽制
成就
膠着状態
乾坤一擲
清楚
贖罪
末裔
小癪

There are no furigana or readings in parentheses at all. Are these
all words that the average Japanese person could read? It's hard to
believe that this could be aimed at a very young age group (and
indeed, the nostalgia factor of combining these robot shows, many of
them from the 70's and 80's, may suggest an older audience).

This is a general pattern I see in Japanese video games; complex
non-jouyou kanji frequently used with no indication whatsoever as to
their reading. Sometimes the game's text is voiced and so you can
hear the voice actors pronounce the words, but otherwise you have no
clue without looking it up. I find this interesting since the rise of
video games and manga is often attributed to a declining literacy
among youth; but this game I played had a huge amount of text -- an
English translation that someone made that doesn't even complete the
story runs over 600 pages (although in script format).

-Chris
.

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