Is Using Romaji in a game for Japanese translation acceptable?

Question

I am supporting other languages in my game for its next release and would like to support Japanese. The issue I have is a I do all of my own font and bitmap rendering internal in the engine, I do support the full extended ASCII 0-256 character map with all of the special accents, so all roman based languages work fine. But with Japanese if I supported Kanji I would need to write special calls into the OS to render the text for me which would be too much work since my game is on 5 different platforms.

I have found that there is a romanized version of Japanese called Romaji that I could use, is this acceptable to use in a game? I have read that Romaji is only used as a learning tool to learn English and for road signs, and not used if possible. Do most Japanese people who play games already know English, is it a waste of time? If they know Romaji are they probably already going to know English? What percent of Japanese game players know English? How much is my Japanese market going to expand by support Romaji or Kanji?

Answer 1

Japanese would definitely not find that acceptable in a professional app, no. There are variations of romaji, and each Japanese learns/uses their own ways and it might be incredibly confusing if the app is using a different "style". For example, "つ" can be translated as "tsu" or "tu" depending on who you're asking.

There are also Japanese who flat out don't know romaji. Not many, and mostly older folks, but there are.

I also asked my (Japanese) wife what she'd think about an app targeted at Japanese which was in romaji and she said "if I thought it was made for Japanese and it turned out to be in romaji I'd go 'eh!?'". That "eh!?" is up to you to interpret. :)

What you can do is use hiragana and/or katakana only. If your app is aimed at children, that might actually be preferred. There are only ~50 letters each, and you might even find bitmaps for those for commercial use somewhere.