They should ban JP players if they ever touch latin characters. I mean why should they be able to type in English/German/French etc when we can't type in Japanese.
There were rumors going around that the Japanese font used in the game had various copyrights attached ... and that SE couldn't get legal rights to use it in the United States. Personally, I don't really buy that. I've never, EVER seen it said by Square-Enix itself -- it's always some BS, farfetched, nonsense heard 7th or 8th-hand by someone's brother's cousin's friend's high school gym teacher that has a drinking buddy ... that once worked for Squaresoft.
Myself, I think they made a deliberate decision to "deactivate" the Japanese input system in our version ... it's still in there. All the IME plugin does is reveal it.
I think part of the reasoning behind this decision was an overall impression of American stupidity, ignorance, and lack of education. Many of us are familiar with
Final Fantasy IV, for example, but few know that the version of the game originally released in the United States had large parts of the difficulty gutted out of it ... allegedly because the English-speaking audience wouldn't have the patience or brains to sit through such a "wordy" title.
Perhaps they felt that a confusing "language mode" would only serve to anger and infuriate us ... it would be better if they just locked us away from the option altogether, so we couldn't hurt ourselves with it. They'd be lucky if we didn't shriek and hurl rocks at our keyboards, damn dirty apes that we are.
There may also be some sense of cultural "distaste" at the thought of good ol' Nihongo being sullied by inexperienced, English-speaking typists. Any and all Japanese players can read Roman characters (our own alphabet). This is not an exaggeration; they couldn't have graduated from middle school without at least knowing that much.
The same is not true of NA players. To them, Japanese text is a stylized, exotic-looking form of gibberish ... and if we had access to it, well ... I largely suspect that the vast majority of NA-originated Japanese text would be something like the nonsense we see in RMT names. To many l0ling idiots, it would be a toy with which to spam purty squiggles.
That fact aside, I heartily wish they would have just left the option in. It wouldn't have had to be EASY for us to turn it on ... an obscure flag in a configuration file would have been enough. >_<
To Blaze: that's an interesting conversation, though I think the GM was beginning to get a little bored.
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