Playing PS1 or PS2 games on my PS3, the text is clear as crystal, but most PS3 games I find to have really small text which can be a nightmare when it comes to the more compressed kanji.

It's a really big pain. The challenge should be understanding the Japanese, not super human eyesight.

Even Japanese people are complaining how small the text is on some of the games (especially those crappy 2D SRPG games). If it was just a few first waves games then fine, but high profile titles like Metal Gear Solid and Yakuza (though not as bad) seem to have this problem as well - a complete experience wrecker.

Oddly, when I played Trusty Bell the text was decent size and was readable (well the font made it extremely hard but that's another issue).

Anyway, I just wanted to know if anybody else has this problem, and what to do about it etc.. Also, which games are giving you grief and which ones you find alright.

It's no picnic on the Nintendo DS either.

phauna Wrote:It's no picnic on the Nintendo DS either.

I don't seem so bad with the DS. For me at least, it's not so much the characters being small, rather when they blur into white squares, only being able to guess what they are on they're outlines.

But yeah, thinking back I've had a few similar instances with DS games.

I find the same thing on web, even. I almost always enlarge Japanese websites when I view them because I simply can't tell what I'm looking at.

I've been assuming that once you start at them enough, it become like our alphabet: You recognize the pattern even if it's super small and smudged... Since you say Japanese people are complaining about the size, maybe I've been wrong about that.

wccrawford Wrote:I find the same thing on web, even. I almost always enlarge Japanese websites when I view them because I simply can't tell what I'm looking at.

I've been assuming that once you start at them enough, it become like our alphabet: You recognize the pattern even if it's super small and smudged... Since you say Japanese people are complaining about the size, maybe I've been wrong about that.

Yep, I was reading a review of... I think Agerest Wars, and one person found it so bad to the point where he thought his eyesight had gone funny.

I only hear this complaint by natives about only a select few games though. Never heard it about Metal Gear or Yakuza.

wccrawford Wrote:I've been assuming that once you start at them enough, it become like our alphabet: You recognize the pattern even if it's super small and smudged...

Problem with that is the alphabet is very small and simple compared to kanji. This can hopefully be the case with kana etc, but I doubt I'll ever get used to seeing 麗 or something in super small text.

You do, it's not that bad. I've never played anything on the PS3 specifically, but while I do find small text annoying I don't find it particularly difficult to read. Especially as you pick up more vocabulary and get more used to their shapes as words as a whole, they look familiar without actually looking at the kanji that make them up. Like your 麗 example, 綺麗 actually has a pretty distinct profile as a word, even when it's scrunched up as tight as can be.
I admit that it can be more difficult to pick up new kanji or figure out specifically what kanji are in a particular new word, however. But when it comes to straight-out recognizing words you already know, I don't think it's that bad.

Virtua_Leaf Wrote:Playing PS1 or PS2 games on my PS3, the text is clear as crystal, but most PS3 games I find to have really small text which can be a nightmare when it comes to the more compressed kanji.

Do you have a HD TV or an SD TV?

When I used it on an SD TV (23 inch or so), I found it nearly impossible to read the text on some PS3 software.

With a HD TV (around the same size, max. 1080i), I've not had that problem at all. It seems to make everything look a little bigger anyway. I remember Metal Gear Solid 4's text looking bigger after switching to a HD TV (those it was never unreadable; at most those little English messages telling you what item you picked up/your DP/etc were difficult to make out at times).

I haven't been able to check it against the games that were originally too small to read properly (demos of "龍が如く　見参！" and "ARMORED CORE 4 ANSWER"), but I've not had the same problem with anything else.

With Armored Core it was mainly the subtitles I couldn't read well, and 龍が如く some explanatory text was just a blur. I hadn't seen anyone else complain (though I hadn't read much about it either), didn't realise it might just be a problem with the game itself.

wccrawford Wrote:I find the same thing on web, even. I almost always enlarge Japanese websites when I view them because I simply can't tell what I'm looking at.

I find it helps to use Safari because it has very nice font rendering compared to IE/Firefox.

I have a high definition front projector with a 92 inch screen, so I haven't had many problems.

It's a problem on sdtv's. Western games (Dead Rising and Banjo Kazooie come to mind) had the same problem with unreadable text until the devs released patches to fix it.

albion Wrote:Do you have a HD TV or an SD TV?

I was wondering if something like this would help. I'm using quite an old one actually (built-in VHS type of thing).

I wonder if I could hook my PC monitor up to the PS3... I think that might be HD.

I'll look into it. Thanks for your suggestions everyone.

Gee, I don't know what to say.

They look fine on my PSP, and I will check the 360 when it arrives, but if they are too small, then I'm sure Sony will work something out. Maybe.

I'm sorta opposite. Before I started doing RtK, I found playing Japanese games on SNES to be impossible... the kanji were completey destroyed by the resolution, it was impossible to recognize them. Then I did RtK and now I don't need to see the details, it doesn't matter. Some of the time, I don't even need to be able to discern the radicals. I see the overall kanji and simply know which one it is, even if it's bastardized.