Unbeknownst to me, but knownst to the localization team at Atlus, the 3DS is able to use just about any PC font available when porting a Japanese developed game over to North America. For this reason they went through several trial and error font selections in order to find just the right font for the upcoming Etrian Odyssey IV. According to Project Lead Nich Maragos:
We knew we wanted to go with a serif font for Etrian Odyssey IV, to complement the game’s narration-heavy feel of reading an epic saga. From there, we browsed online font repositories and picked out a few likely-seeming candidates, then made a few crude image hacks to see how they might look when implemented in the game. Our choice had to be legible without being too basic, with the right spacing and kerning to look natural inside the existing boxes, while also being thin enough to accommodate the character limits we’d used during the editing process.
So there you have it Font is important in a handheld game. To prove it check out the screen shots below showing off the font that Atlus went with.
Mike's first experience with a console was in the early 80’s when his dad brought home an Atari 400. It wasn’t the greatest gaming machine at the time but it did play a crude version of Pac-Man and it had a keyboard. But, Mike's love for videogames really got started when his friend invited him over to his house to show off his newly acquired NES with Super Mario Bros. Mike had never experienced a game like that before and his friend actually convinced him that jumping into one of the pits would give him a powerup. It was a cruel joke and Mario lept to his death. But from that moment on Mike was hooked.
Mike was originally brought onto the Gaming Trend staff as a PSP editor starting with the god awful Major League Baseball 2K8. Thankfully, these days he reviews much better titles. He also spends an obscene amount of time playing The Lord of the Rings Online with his Dwarf Rune Keeper named McLush and his Warden named Hanton on the Elendilmir server.
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