Emphesis on capitalization..

[Saelyra]

Anyone else at least slightly annoyed by the capatilization of NAMES and PLACES in the Pokemon games? It drives me nuts, for one. When I catch a pokemon, even if I don't give it a nickname I tend to rename it from, say, NATU to Natu. But I guess I'm just picky like that when it comes to grammar... ^^;;
I'm hoping they'll drop the trend in Diamond and Pearl, but somehow I doubt it. I can see how it was necesary in R/B because they couldn't color the font or anything, but surely that could be changed now...?

Anyways, enough of my ranting about such a minor detail. Anyone else?

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

I think it's terribly irritating too.

 

[Trainer-c]

It doesn't really bother me all that much, I believe the capitalization (Especially during NPC dialogue) is for the sake of providing hints and such to the player. Especially to those who may be visually impaired, or have trouble reading the text. And in FR/LG they used colored fonts to tell the genders of the NPC's apart.

 

[Murgatroyd]

Actually, I believe the reason for the CAPITALIZATION is that the Japanese language doesn't have anything of the sort, and for certain inserted strings, the capitalization would have to vary depending on its position in the sentence. Adding a contextual capitalization function would require considerable programming beyond the simple substitutions needed for translation, so instead, they just decided that terms that can be inserted into stock phrases would be all caps, all the time.

 

[Zhen Lin]

Hmm, an interesting hypothesis, I wonder if hackers could enlighten us there.

It could perhaps, also be a reflection of the tendency to, in Japanese Pokémon, to spell a number of things in katakana... even native names like Satoshi, Takeshi and Kasumi (though once upon a time katakana names for girls were popular), as well as words like waza, hachimaki and kizu (in kizugusuri). (Then again, this usage might be the norm in purely kana texts, as in Pokémon.)

 

[Saelyra]

Huh, interesting o_o. I don't know much at all about the Japanese language, beyond the few common words that most people who follow anime know... nor am I much of a programmer. Interesting stuff, but aren't there alot of games translated from Japanese to English without such rough spots...?

 

[Kasumi]

I really don't mind at all. I think I even nickname my pokes in all caps.

 

[Nekusagi]

I kinda find it annoying too. On the other hand, all caps do POP OUT MORE in a sentence, and if I don't have to go through ten lines of text a second time to find out my fetch quest item is at MOUNT MOON or whatever, I suppose it's worth it.

 

[Saelyra]

Yeah, it does come in useful for that sort of thing; but I imagine that nowdays they could acheive the same method of pointing something out by using colored font as opposed to 'Hey, I caught a GROWLITHE on ROUTE 15! Then I had to use a BURN HEAL before I got to the POKEMON CENTER!'... ie, like in Zelda:OOT. They could get the same emphisis on a certain name or word without it look so jagged.

 

[Dratini927]

I kinda find it annoying too. On the other hand, all caps do POP OUT MORE in a sentence, and if I don't have to go through ten lines of text a second time to find out my fetch quest item is at MOUNT MOON or whatever, I suppose it's worth it.

This is what I agree with. I tend to like how it "pops out" like that because if it was just in the normal text way, then there's a chance that I will read over it, and miss something important. Having in the caps makes it almost for sure that I will be sure to read it, and make sure that I'm heading in the right direction in the game.