The condensed fonts pack for Gameboy and Gameboy Color now offers a new Japanese font called “Japanese Condensed”. This font is optimised to fit more characters on the console screen.

After all, Japan is the country where the Gameboy originated from. There are tons of benefits of localising your game for a Japanese audience.

How do I use it?

Japanese Condensed is made of 5 different fonts:

• Japanese Condensed Kana contains hiragana, katakana, Japanese punctuation signs
• Japanese Condensed Kanji 01 to 04 contains the 900 most frequently used kanji

The alignment matches that of the other 2 fonts in the pack, so feel free to mix and match Japanese characters with Latin script.

To simplify the typing process, the character mapping supports half-width (e.g. ﾋﾞﾃﾞｵｹﾞｰﾑ) and full-width characters (e.g. ビデオゲーム).

Have a look at the README file included in the zip. It contains the list of kanji for Japanese Condensed Kanji 01 to 04. But the easiest way to type kanji is to cycle from font 01 to 04 until I find the match in the GB Studio preview for dialogue. It means potentially changing font multiple times within a single word. If there’s no match, the kanji is not part of the font set and you have to fall back to hiragana.

What to pay attention to?

Unlike Condensed and Condensed Mini, this font doesn’t use anti-alias, so you only set the palette for the darkest (for the characters) and the lightest colour (for the background) in GB Studio. It means that you can creatively use the other 2 colours for the UI frame for example.

Finally, because the font is small and Japanese characters can be complex, please be mindful before using kanji in order to retain readability. Hiragana or katakana equivalents are almost always preferable to a complex kanji.