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Oh no.

This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.





How? Near enough no one was using the Kunrei system for any of that. If anything this will make it more consistent or at least no worse. Macrons are the biggest inconsistency but that’s always been the case.

It was either Hepburn, the English title (i.e. rock instead of rokku), or just most sensibly kana/kanji that would have been used for this everywhere, never other romanisation systems, to within a rounding error.


It was almost never quite Hepburn either, usually shi/chi/tsu/fu/ji with no di/du, but often alongside wo/he/ha (in roughly that order of likelihood, not always consistently), macrons almost never, っち is cch. Ironically, I have to imagine there's more "bastardized Nihonsiki" out there than "bastardized Kunreisiki", because the differences between the two are exactly the ones that matter when typing them out, and of course everyone in the j/e scenes is by far most often inputting wa-puro ro-maji (and of course that's ji, not zi, because which one is on the home row?).

In short, the usual infelicities of Japanese romanization as practiced in the wild on keyboards people actually have, and there is a method to the madness but it's not what any of the standards reflect.


Elaborate? I’m not following.

For people not familiar with Japanese, finding any info about a Japanese-language game can be a pain. They may have a Japanese representation, an official romanized name, a community romanized name using a different system… plus may also go by an outright English-language name, in some circles, which may (or may not) overlap with the name of an English-language port (if it exists). Then consider that some games have pretty extreme and confusing name variants in various editions or on different platforms, and those may go by different names in different contexts.

You can see the same game go by three different names on a community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same md5sum as a clean dump)

The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover. That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you know at least some Japanese)

Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re switching to another existing system (which I think is already widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.


Even with official names of media you can get stuck.

Consider 彼氏彼女の事情[1]. The Japanese name is the same for the Manga and Anime, but the official names for the US localization of each are different (the manga went with a romanization of an abbreviation of the Japanese name Kare Kano while the Anime went with a translation of the full name His and Her Circumstances.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kare_Kano


終末何してますか?忙しいですか?救ってもらっていいですか? has an "English" title on it's Japanese cover beside the Japanese one "Do you have what THE END? Are you busy? Shall you save XXX?". I'm guessing the author did it themselves. The capitalisation on THE END is presumably supposed to reflect on 終末 (shuumatsu - the end [often used for apocalypses etc]) punning on 週末 (shuumatsu - weekend) and the XXX is because the Japanese title gets to omit the subject and English can't.

Needless to say, the official English translations didn't keep that title, going with "What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us?"


Nothing new is happening here - this is the government moving towards formally recommending the system that's already most widely used.



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