Traditional Writing Direction in Japanese Games
The Japanese language can be written horizontally, from left to right, just like English. More traditionally, it can be written vertically, top to bottom, right to left. It inherited this writing direction from China; written Japanese from hundreds of years ago is, by and large, equivalent to the Chinese writing system from the same time period. This style of writing is called tategaki (縦書き) in Japanese. These days, we’re most likely to see tategaki in books, especially novels. As mentioned in my Links Round-Up post from the other day, I was surprised to see tategaki in the video game Ugetsu Kitan. Japanese video games, as far as I was aware, tended to always use left-to-right writing direction, most likely due to the underlying computer software being primed for such a convention. After seeing the vertical writing in Ugetsu Kitan, I became possessed by a desire to find more games with tategaki.
Why the obsession? Honestly, the “why” eludes even me. Perhaps simply because the more traditional writing direction seems rare in electronic media. Most, if not all, computer systems default to horizontal, left-to-right writing. Implementing any other directionality requires additional effort. Because Japanese can be written horizontally, it requires a reason to justify the effort to use the more traditional style. I also have a fascination with the aesthetics of text; the way that text looks on a page, especially in different languages. For example, written Japanese uses equal-sized characters, so it’s always “mono-spaced”. English, in comparison, can have variable character width depending on the typeface used.
To answer the immediate question: yes, there are many games that use tategaki. Quite a few of them are visual novels, which makes sense considering that physical books tend to prefer the convention.
In my digging, I came across a blog article titled “Visual Novel Structure and Direction - Screen Structure 4 ‘Implementing Vertical Writing’” (my translation; unless noted otherwise, all Japanese has been translated by me). This article looks at a few visual novel games and discusses briefly the ways tategaki is used and how to avoid pitfalls. For example, the author points out that the game Gakkou De Atta Kowai Hanashi ensures that character portraits are placed on the left side of the screen, to ensure the text never covers the character artwork. This point emphasizes why tategaki is probably not used in many visual novels: character portraits tend to be the highlight of that genre. Fitting both detailed character portraits and vertical writing into the limited screen space can be challenging.
The author goes on to point to 1987’s Shin Onigashima as the possibly first game with tategaki. Shin Onigashima is based on Japanese folklore. The designers likely wanted to use the traditional writing direction to evoke an older time. I still wonder if there is an earlier example on another system, such as the PC-88. A more recent example the author shares is 13 Sentinels, which uses vertical writing in its message log. Both of the preceding games are examples of titles outside of the visual novel genre that still make use of tategaki.
Giantbomb’s wiki proved to be a surprising source of a few more examples. Clearly someone else shares my interest in finding games with this style of writing. Some of the examples on this page aren’t surprising: DS Bungaku Zenshuu (DS Literature Collection) is simply a collection of classic Japanese literature; like a curated package of ebooks.
In a related search, I checked to see if the visual novel development program Ren’Py is able to render Japanese from right-to-left. It took longer than I expected to find an answer. At any rate, it looks like Ren’Py supports vertical writing for any language. I’ve tested it a bit, and it looks like it would require a little bit more tinkering than simply setting the text to vertical. A blog post called “Making Ren’Py Use Vertical Writing” has some screen shots showing what it looks like without much customization. The author points to the visual novel, Full Metal Daemon Muramasa, which was made in Ren’Py and uses tategaki; here’s a video of the game in action.
Finally, in putting together this little dive into an obsession, I found that modern versions of CSS support vertical writing systems. Similar to Ren’Py, making a website look good with this vertical text would require more effort than simply changing a setting. The entire text would likely need to be planned out in advance and placed in a carefully curated layout. It’s this added effort that gives this text directionality in the digital realm even more charm.