>>3296239
Because Japan was not the largest market? The entirety of Americas and England's market (the largest English ones) alone is like 5 times Japan. Have you never looked up countries economies?

English characters are more legible in lower resolutions plus they're considered stylish

There are a couple of considerations:

1.) English slogans are trendy, and some basic English is taught in Japanese grade schools. I guess developers figure all-English menus might appear exotic? Or maybe they're just trying to exercise players' knowledge of the English language.

2.) "Gray imports." In other words, it made games more import-friendly. The country does get a lot of tourism.

>>3296254
>The entirety of Americas and England's market (the largest English ones) alone is like 5 times Japan.
That might be true now, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.

Japanese know the meaning of "press start", "continue"; etc.

Also, all the instruction are in japanese on the game manual if they need any kind of help.

I think it depends on the game though, the Mario games that have text are in japanese AFAIK (at least SMW and SMB3 for sure), while Super Metroid is entirely in english in the JP version if I'm not mistaken.

>>3296329
No, even back in the 90's it was true.

>>3296356
Please post the figures.

>>3296331
>Super Metroid is entirely in english in the JP version if I'm not mistaken

I think the NA and JP versions were the same ROM, except the JP version had Japanese language support toggled on by default.

If you noticed, you can enable Japanese dialogs in the NA version as well.

>>3296239
because programming languages are usually based on the english alphabet and programming japanese characters on top of that creates an extra workload and uses extra space

>>3296393

That wouldn't have anything to do with console games, as ROMs used tables and bitmap fonts. There was no such thing as language "encoding" in this case as it's all done graphically, like character sprites. It really didn't matter which language the in-game dialogs were in as long as it didn't involve some incredibly complex script rendering like Korean. Japanese and English consist of simple phonetic characters, so that isn't an issue.

>>3296369
Probably detects the console region and sets the default language accordingly. A lot of early megadrive games did the same, with Streets of Rage if you have a modded console and toggle between regions as the backstory is scrolling past it will switch between languages on the fly.

>>3296413
I was under the impression the only technical difference between a Super Famicom and an NTSC Super NES was the shape of the cartridges themselves. I don't think there were any actual region coding between them like there were for PAL versions.

>>3296239
It's less work later on. English is a required course in Japanese schools for many years.

Programming languages are mostly written in English. Back then, development teams were very, very small, so a programmer would end up doing most of the stuff you see onscreen. Since a programmer was more acquainted with the language, they just left it like that.

>>3296239
It takes less space to store 26 latin characters compared to ~100 kana.

Most Japanese people know English vocabulary, so unless the game is particularly text-heavy it's just wasteful to use Japanese.

>>3296254
That literally has zero to do with it. He's asking why a Japanese release would have English and your response is the size of American and European economies. The only effect that would have is releasing a game in those territories, it doesn't explain why English is in a Japanese region release. That's like asking why they sell snowshoes in Maine and getting told it's because a majority of the world experiences seasons.