akaritan

Pulltop's new VN, Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o looks beautiful, has a large cast of voiced characters with sprites, and generally is an obviously high-budget VN... but it is also a VN I'm not really interested in.
You might want to ask why... after all, I like Pulltop's games in general, and it doesn't look any worse than the others by the same company, in terms of production values.  It is also being hyped a lot (inasmuch as VNs are ever hyped) and a lot of the people who have just begun playing Japanese VNs are excited... unfortunately, veterans are somewhat less so (with a few rare exceptions).
Here are the reasons:
1.  The existence of an the protagonist's memborship in an astronomy club.  I'm going to be blunt... no other club has so many protagonists as members of it in all of VNs.  For every four moege, there is one with a 'tenmon bu' and the protagonist is either a member or helps out.  The obsession with stars is more of an otome thing, so I can't help but wonder why... I really am tired of reading VN lectures on constellations I don't give a crap about.
2.  The existence of two osananajimi heroines... the osananajimi heroine is the biggest cop-out heroine type.  The reason?  Because the simple statement 'we are osananajimis' becomes an excuse for laziness in character development and relationship development.  It also becomes an excuse for one of the most fundamentally idiotic tropes out there... the 'osananajimi>lovers transition'.  I have yet to see one of these that wasn't annoying and made real sense when you took a step back and thought about it.
3.  The decision to include a non-entity protagonist.  Understand, one of the signs any given VN-maker will almost always give - without realizing they are giving it - when they are going to make the protagonist a non-entity or cipher is failing to give the protagonist his own character profile, even when other male characters have one.  I am sick and tired of this reliance on using 'normal' protagonists with a group of heroines harem.  It doesn't work and it doesn't make sense, so I wish they'd just stop it.  It is one thing if the heroine's link to the protagonist is non-love/non-interest before you get on the actual path... it is almost conceivable that way.  However, the dense idiots created by most of these companies just don't work as harem masters.
 

None of my incarnations has ever been very good at pretending to be nice. 
Yes, that is an understatement, from a purely objective perspective.  However, when you are a sentient universe-eating monster that used to be a fat, bald otaku from a frontier planet in a rather pathetic galaxy in an even more pathetic universe, it is kind of hard to understand how to be ‘nice’. 
Understand, I was just out to have a few drinks, perhaps eat some of the more nasty criminals that infested the city of Neo Lovenia, and maybe find a few people worth loving… I had no intention of getting involved in something so utterly boring as a slum-dwellers’ riot when I left the sewer-level apartment I’d chosen more out of memories of a certain child’s cartoon back ‘home’ than any practical reasons.  Unfortunately, as with most matters involving mortals, I wasn’t exactly given a choice whether to get involved or not.
Especially when a really pretty girl hidden under the rags of a filthy slum-dwelling piece of mortal trash was tossed off a bridge, straight into my arms…
That, in and of itself, would not have been much of a problem.  On any other day, I would have simply eaten the girl, made her into one of my trillions of immortal servants, then gone on about the business of getting myself debauched in the biggest city on one of the most degenerate planets in all of that particular universe.
Unfortunately, the men in the silly blue robes with the magic staffs had the bad taste to try to blast me with lightning bolts, probably thinking I was one of the girl’s allies.  Since this verged on that most terrible of all sins, incivility, I decided to retaliate in kind.
It wasn’t my fault that the fragile matter of that particular space-time continuum wasn’t up to the task of withstanding the equivalent of a sigh of exasperation from me.
The bridge, the rioting slum-dwellers in their filthy rags, and the entire unit of what passed for police on that particular sorry excuse for a civilized world, were suddenly wiped from existence, along with a large portion of the surrounding streets and buildings… and a perfect half-sphere of the water running through the reservoir below. 
Needless to say, I was somewhat dismayed.  While I tended to devour all sorts of nasty things in my true form, I generally refrained from drinking the water on planets like that one… one could never tell just what was in it, after all.  The oily taste of rotten fish and the bits of effluvia that tended to infest the waters on backward worlds like this one filled my mouth, reminding me of why I generally refrained from such activities when in mortal form.
The girl in my arms was quite unconscious, and I was briefly tempted to just toss her in the river and be done with it… but she was also unreasonably pretty underneath all that grime.  So pretty, in fact, that she reminded me of my own mortal days, when I spent most of every day staring at a computer screen at animated beauty because the world around me was so ugly.  As such, I believe that it is only reasonable that I should be forgiven for deciding to refrain from eating her before I got to know her.
Once an erogamer, always an erogamer, after all. 
Having returned to my home, such as it was, I found myself at a loss.  Being a sensible creature, I’d long-since arranged for my own pocket dimension full of all the creature comforts to follow me wherever I went, and there was no chance of trouble from the outside entering without my permission.  Unfortunately, I had seemingly lost my wits, deciding to bring a mere mortal child, however pretty, to my sanctum, full of walls of eroge, anime blu-rays, and video games from every era of my pox-infested homeworld’s technological age.
As such, I was quite well-aware that my home wasn’t exactly suitable for the inhabitance of beings of the female persuasion.  The nightmare of many otakus yet to obtain the power of true enlightenment, of taking a girlfriend home only for her to find out about his hidden passions and reject him furiously, briefly raised its head. 
I shook my head, smiling somewhat wryly at my rather prosaic worry.  After all, if all else failed I could always eat the girl anyway.  Pretty as she was, she would be even prettier with glowing orange eyes and a bear-trap smile full of endless hunger.  However, now that I had refrained from eating her once, I found it difficult to consider doing so anyway.   I am nothing if not stubborn, as a particularly bone-headed (literally) Neanderthal discovered when we got into a headbutting contest during one of my many pleasure trips to my homeworld’s distant past.
So it was that I found myself transforming the girl’s rags into a simple kimono (again, once a weaboo, always a weaboo), cleaning her body by the simple expedient of turning all non-living matter on the surface of her skin into quick-evaporating anti-bacterial soap. 
Why did I have to inherit the original’s otaku-obsessions?  I wondered, feeling a bit exasperated.  All of the avatars made by the original have their own quirks and individual leanings, though the essential nature of the being we represent is unchangeable.  However, I am one of the few unfortunates to have inherited the original’s ‘hobby’ and tastes. 
The one thing all of us inherit is ‘hunger’.  It takes different forms, depending on the individual, but all of us eat people.  If it is the simple fondness one might have for their favorite meal, the result tends to be what most mortal races would call a ‘monster’.  The individual’s basic personality survives being eaten… but their body and their desires are changed drastically.  In the billions of years since my maker had eaten this particular universe, I’d come to understand just how differently our emotions toward those we eat effect various species.
If we happened to actually know and like the person in question, the result that came out the other side was generally superficially unchanged… after all, the more we know and like someone, the less likely we are to want to turn them into a duplicate of ourselves. 
But I digress.  I was speaking of our ‘hunger’.  In some cases it manifests as lust, in others it manifests as greed, in some it manifests as sadism, and yet in others it can manifest as a desire to kill.  It isn’t always negative… if it was, very few universes would have managed to survive our presence. 
In my case, it is pride, the desire for recognition given free reign.  Need I state how paradoxical my otaku hobbies and my ‘hunger’ are?  I’ve not quite gone so far down that path as the original went… so I’m not about to proudly state that I love eroge to the world.  Unfortunately, that meant that I was generally forced to hide my hobbies on whatever world I chose to use as a foothold at a given time.
As such, I vanished the various otaku paraphernalia in the room, transforming the walls into something resembling the inside of a castle lord’s room from the Middle Ages (imagined by me), with a four-poster canopied bed, deep purple silk sheets, covering the walls with bookshelves filled old-fashioned hand-written, hand-bound books in the local language (translated in an instant).  As a bow to my ever-present weabooism, I left the katana and wakizashi hanging sheathed on nails driven into the wall and the set of samurai armor I’d created in one of my all-too-common fits of obsessive madness on its stand in the corner of the room closest to the heavy varnished-wood door. 
I took another look at the girl and sighed deeply.  Her fuzzy black cat ears and silky black tail attracted my otaku-obsessions like a fly to honey, and the fact that she was a Japanese-style bishoujo only made it worse (considering the whole reason this universe had been devoured was because the original found out there were naturally-occurring cat-people there). 
The urge to eat her was briefly overwhelming, but it soon receded, tamed by certain… other feelings.  Unlike the original, I have some restraint, after all. 
I picked her up, threw her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and carried her over to the bed, where I dropped her, covering her with a down-filled quilt I materialized out of thin air.  Her white, oh-so-white skin which contrasted so wonderfully with her midnight-black hair once again invited me to dine upon my guest, but I had little difficulty suppressing the urge this time.
That done, I picked a random book off of the shelves and began reading, Hmm… Waylander by Gemmel… my original’s tastes are a bit predictable.  I reflected as I waited for her to wake.
The story was about a kingslayer assassin, and it was written by one of the original’s childhood favorite authors.  While the story started as a straightforward revenge story, describing the rapid collapse of the man who became Waylander into the worst pits of human nature, it was still an enjoyable read… very much like cheap fantasy junk food.
A few hours later, I sensed her stirring in the bed, her ears twitching and her breathing becoming shallower.  An instant later, she shot upright, screaming. 
Irritated, I created a sound barrier around her head and waited for her to stop.  The cat-like ears of the native form I was using were highly sensitive, and her screaming could have awakened the dead.
I observed her closely, seeing that her wide, unfocused eyes were a large, brilliant emerald in color and her teeth had the prominent canines that distinguished her visually from humankind, together with her ears and tail. 
Eventually, her eyes focused, and her screaming stopped, and I released the sound barrier, waiting for her to speak. 
“…w…wh…who are you?”  She asked in obvious confusion, her voice hoarse, most likely from the screaming.
“My name is Clephas.” I replied, giving her what I thought was a gentle, reassuring smile.

If you don't like MOE I only have one thing to say to you... read this blog until you love it!

Here in the United States, we’ll be spending Thursday the way The Lord God intended: eating our weight in meat, potatoes, and gravy, then farting ourselves to sleep on our uncles’ living room couches. Those of you from other countries have good reason to be jealous; there’s no slumber quite as deep or blissful as the post-Thanksgiving coma. But guess what, my forlorn foreign friends? This year, you’re in luck. That’s right — I’ve decided to write another image editing post. With any luck, this’ll put you to sleep faster than the second season of The Walking Dead.
I know. Those are lofty claims, but I’m ready to deliver a Thanksgiving miracle. You’re welcome.
Insomniacs of the World, Good Night.
So at the tail end of image editing on a yet-to-be-released otome translation, I got a care package from the TL team with an additional set of graphics that needed retouching. Most of it was straightforward stuff — modal UI elements, chapter title screens, etc. — but one folder in particular seemed to emanate waves of pure evil. You know that feeling you get when your phone rings at 7 o’clock on a Sunday morning? And you can see it’s your boss calling? And every hung-over bone in your body screams at you not to answer, but you know you have to? Yeah, kind of like that.
So I opened it.
Inside were 13 different full-screen maps, all very similar to the one above, showing the in-game route from one castle to another. I could already see it was going to be a relatively painful retouching job — lots of smallish text set against an intricately illustrated and heavily weathered map. Complicating matters was the fact that the same map was then repeated 12 more times with slight variations, each image representing the path traveled by the characters over the course of a particular chapter.
Ouch.
Image editing is all about measuring twice and cutting once. The more you mess with an image, the more room there is for errors and inconsistencies to creep in — and the more time you waste. So in this case, my first job was to see how much each map actually differed from the next. With any luck, I could create a base map template that contained 90% of the heavy retouching — those elements that were common to all maps — then paste the individual elements for all the other maps on top of that. In Photoshop, the easiest way to do this is layering one image over another, then applying the Difference blending mode. (For you programmers out there, you can think of this as running a diff command on two text files.) The result looks something like this:
The black pixels represent areas where the two images are identical; the non-black pixels show where they differ. In this case, after doing this with all the images, I could see there were two main points of difference between the maps. First, the inset box on the lower right, which shows the characters’ origin, destination, and the direction of travel, along with thumbnail pictures of each location. Second, the path indicator along the road, with a highlighted road marker showing the characters’ final destination. With this info in hand, I could now start tackling the retouching itself, while setting the Photoshop file up for maximum efficiency and flexibility.
The first step in building a map template was to remove the Japanese text from the image:
Tedious stuff, but fairly standard. You might notice that I only removed the text from one of the orange road marker “capsules.” There were a couple reasons for that. For one, there weren’t a lot of similar patches of texture to pull from for cloning, so retouching them all would be a pain in the ass and produce uneven results. Moreover, it would be inefficient, since other than the weathering, they all look more or less identical. So in this case, I drew a selection path around the one retouched capsule, turned it into a smart object, then duped it about 20 times for all the other markers along the road:
Better, but not quite there yet. It’s painfully obvious that all the capsules are identical, and they stick out like sore thumbs; they’re crisp and clean while the rest of the map looks beat up and worn. So my next step was to blend them into the map and add an element of irregularity by duplicating the original map image, floating it up to the top, then applying the Lighter Color blending mode. This mode compares the two images pixel by pixel, and whichever pixel is lighter gets displayed in the final image. Since the capsules were comparatively dark, this effectively lets me pick up the weathered areas of the map where the lighter parchment shows through and apply it only to the capsules.
Much better. They look baked into the map now. As a final touch, I also added the slightest bit of canvas texture as an FX layer set to Color Burn to bring back some level of darker noise to the capsules. Not too much, though; since we have to be able to read 4-9 small English letters as opposed to a couple large kanji characters, we need to allow for some increased contrast.
Done and done. I was finally in a position where I could start adding the translated text to the map. And that’s where I decided to break one of my cardinal rules: never set English type in vertical stacks. Every rule has its exception, though, and this was one right here. The lettering in older, hand-drawn maps was often a loosey-goosey affair, with cartographers squeezing in type wherever they could, however they could. Horizontal, vertical, curved — whatever it took to cram words into the space available. English vertical type would have been right at home on a document like this. Since most of the place names on this map were short, and the space available to me was largely vertical blocks, I decided to go for it. I picked a Western font I thought captured the feel of the original map lettering, then re-set all the type.
With the base map template finished, I could quickly set about outputting those other 12 map variants. This basically involved creating a dozen layer group overlays for the inset box in the lower right, each one holding updated text and location images copy/pasted from the original maps, along with UI indicators as needed — the blue swirl indicating current location, and the hand-drawn arrow indicating direction of travel. Then I created another set of overlays for the red path line drawn over the map itself. Since the capsules were all smart objects, I could easily highlight individual ones as needed by selectively applying a light orange Color Overlay FX with a Soft Light blending mode.
Think that bright red line and arrow on the road looks shockingly bad? Me too, especially considering how well art directed the rest of the VN is. It’s almost like the devs had an intern add it in Windows Paint at the last second or something. Oy vey.
Anyway, everything else came together quickly after that. In short order, all the maps were exported and the new files were back in the hands of the team.
Asleep yet?
All told, the project took about 90 minutes for 13 images, with the first half an hour or so spent reviewing the maps and coming up with a plan of attack. Had I not “wasted” that time up front, I could have easily spent 2-3X longer trying to get things done in less efficient ways — if not more.
So what have we learned today?
When it comes to image editing, always measure twice and cut once. Plan ahead, especially on more complex projects. Always be willing to break, or at least bend, your own rules if a situation demands it. I will be made up of approximately 93% pumpkin pie by this time tomorrow. #3 is a very conservative estimate.

So I just spent 50 minutes of my day watching this. Trying to process what I just watched is hard, there's just so much information to take in. I watched it alongside OriginalRen, SuikaShoujo and The Major, yet despite our best efforts, our brains simply were no match for the depth and intricacy this anime provides.

I'll try to give you a feel, a small sample of what it feels like to watch "Issho ni Sleeping: Sleeping with Hinako", but I truly believe that the only real way to appreciate this show is to just watch it yourself.

So first off we have our heroine Hinako. Hinako really likes to sleep. Her main trait as a character is not being able to fix the strap on her shirt.



As you can see from this cleverly crafted angle, this entire anime is told in first person perspective. But we're just scratching the surface of how thick the plot really gets.

After Hinako changes clothes, covering your face so you don't see her changing, even though she just ends up sleeping in her underwear anyway, she goes to sleep.

And thus, our sleep adventure begins!





That is the face of pure bliss.



Here we have some amazing shots that truly depict the wonders of a 2D girl sleeping.





A real good close up of the heroine, it's almost like she's breathing on you





In this shot here, you can see Hinako's breasts changing sizes, giving us a clear reason why Hinako just can not get the left strap of her shirt to stay in place, her left breast simply doesn't have as much mass.






This shot here is a classic. The subtle twitch Hinako's leg makes each time really provides livelyness to her sleep, making you feel like you're sleeping right next to her.







10 minutes in and the anime really ramps it up by having Hinako turn to the other side. In my opinion this was one of their best moves yet.







Here we get a first glimpse of Hinako's windowsill which displays a clock and a vase with a plant. This is a very intringuing as the clock displays no numbers, a fact that will become really important later on so make sure you keep it in mind.







Another very rare shot of Hinako's armpit, one of my personal favorites if I daresay so myself. The disproportionally sized breasts really help elevate that armpit.







18 minutes in and the biggest game changer yet, Hinako makes use of one of her pillows! We can neither confirm nor deny if there's any significance behind this pose and the pillow's peculiar shape.







And just 30 seconds later we are shown Hinako's sleep eating abilities.







This is one of the rarest shots in the whole story, at the 22:22 minute mark, Hinako dangles her arm from the bed. What a delightful display of character.







And this 24 minute mark is the crucial turning point where we have a clear view of Hinako's room and lo and behold, nobody is sleeping next side her, even though we're supposed to be there, what could this possibly mean!?







At the 26 minute mark, Hinako has a dream about the moment we confessed to her and she gladly accepted our feelings. While the dream itself lasted a mere 10 seconds, I could really feel a deep emotional connection with Hinako's character just from watching her sleep for the past 26 minutes.







And in the next minute, Hinako wakes up. I'm sure we were thinking the same thing, and that is how much we love each other. Hinako, being the amazing girlfriend she is, sings us a lullaby with really inspiring lyrics such as "Go to sleep, go to sleep on Hinako's chest" which have the result of making her fall asleep.







At the 30 minute mark, Hinako has yet another dream, this time about when she was training hard to lose weight, she even gives us advice on how to be BIG like Hinako.







And now, the biggest game changer yet, Hinako falls off her bed! My heart could barely take it, seeing Hinako fall on the floor after 30 minutes of sleeping really came out of nowhere, this anime sure knows how to tug on your heart strings.







And now starts the most romantic scene in an anime I have ever seen.








What a straightforward approach. Hinako tops all those tsunderes in generic romcoms, you don't get this level of romance too often.








Of course we have a really deep connection with Hinako, and she reassures us of that by returning our feelings (even though we didn't really say anything, I'm sure our feelings got acress).



I had to hold back my emotions over how realistic everything got, the intense urge to kiss my screen really started to come out.








*doki doki*





Hinako wastes no time though, she knows what her main goal is, this woman has her priorities set straights, that's why right after this she once again heads to bed and instantly falls asleep. Pro sleepers really are something else.







But the thrilling ride isn't over yet, can you believe they still have more in store? This time, Hinako invites us to sleep on the same bed as her. My heart almost jumped out of my chest. The anime really makes this a realistic experience by tilting the camera 90 degrees. It truly felt like I was right next to Hinako.







[immersion intensifies]








35 minutes in, Hinako does yet another unpredictable thing, she decides to get a night snack. Gosh, this anime really doesn't hold back on the plot twists.







Brushing your teeth is important too. Even if you didn't eat anything. Deep.







Once again, after falling asleep, Hinako falls on the floor. This time facing the other way, I liked that change of pace, this anime really knows when to spice it up.







She doesn't forget her girlfriend duties though and reminds us we are also an entity, a sentient being, and thus we need sleep as well. Notice how her strap keeps sagging lower and lower, symbolizing we're reaching the end of our journey.







After she falls asleep, Hinako has one last dream. In this one though, she ended up getting fat due to eating so many snacks. I'm sure she'll resume her training the next day!







And now, after a whole 40 minutes of Hinako sleeping, morning comes, and this is where the plot really thickens!




You see, after this, Hinako sleeps with us again, twice, do you not see what this means!?




This whole time, we've actually been trapped in a dream world, but not just that, we were trapped in a dream world, inside a dream world, inside a dream world, inside a dream world, and we weren't a human being either, we were a ghost that posessed random objects around Hinako's room in order to try to wake her from the dream by looking at her body from several different angles. Remember the clock I mentioned at the beginning? What was missing? Pointers! That's because in this dream world, there's no time flow! We've been stuck sleeping with Hinako over and over, that's why she always wears the same outfit when she sleeps.







I could barely see this coming, it came by so fast my brain just had no time to process it.




This anime is a deconstruction of the human psyche, one that if you're not paying attention to, you will miss its profound message, the 50 minute length time really manages to portray to intricacies of the brain by having the same still shots over and over again across the timeline, you really feel like you're diving into Hinaki's profound sleepiness and tracing its patterns.




The emotional bonds you manage to form with Hinako as you watch her sleep from every possible angle really make this a standout from the crowd. You can not get this deep level of characterization anywhere else.



It brought me to tears as my eyes were strained while I wtched 50 minutes of a girl sleeping on a bed, making me empathize with her.




The story sucks you in, almost making you fall asleep just like Hinako.



This 16 year old girl who can't put on a shirt strap properly is the apogee of all female characters. If you haven't used the term "waifu" now, I'm sure this anime will change your mind.




Issho ni Sleeping: Sleeping with Hinako is, without a doubt, the best anime ever made.

You know how you can translate Japanese far too literally and end up with stilted and nonsensical prose? It’s also possible reinterpret Japanese graphics far too literally and up with an illegible mess. Case in point: vertical type.

Japanese text is typically typeset one of two ways: the traditional tategaki style (characters arranged in vertical columns, read from right to left), or the more modern yokogaki style (characters arranged in horizontal rows, read left to right, as in English). When editing images for visual novels, you’ll usually be dealing with a lot of tategaki, but it’s possible you’ll encounter some yokogaki as well. Unless you just bought a pamphlet from that crazy guy hanging out beneath the subway stairs — Happy Birthday to Gravy! I’m Made of Bees! — you will literally never see English typeset this way. So how do you handle it when you do?

Typically, as long as you have the room, you’d set it the same as you would any other English text: horizontal, left to right, for maximum legibility. But what if you don’t have room? Particularly when dealing with UI elements, you might only have enough real estate for a single vertical column of characters. What then?

Grab it by the spine
Thankfully, generations of English-language typesetters have already solved this problem for us. Just walk over to your media shelf and look for yourself. See all those books, DVDs, video games you’ve got lined up there? Not only did you spend an obscene amount of money on those — seriously, how are you ever going to pay off your student loans this way? — but their spines all display titles the exact same way: horizontal type, rotated 90 degrees clockwise so that it reads from top to bottom. Any designer worth his or her salt will tell you that’s how it’s done.

So there’s your answer. Do that. You’re welcome.

But now you face a much bigger challenge: convincing non-designers that this is, in fact, the best approach.

The vertical smile frown
This came up once on a project where almost the entire UI was arranged in vertical lines of Japanese calligraphy. I’d painstakingly set hundreds of text elements in the correct bookspine-style, only to get a note back from the project lead asking that everything be re-typeset in the exact manner of the original Japanese, character stacked atop character.

Y
o
u

k
n
o
w
,

l
i
k
e

t
h
i
s
?

I’ve been a professional designer for enough years that, honestly, I forget not everyone gives much thought to why you don’t set type like this. So in that sense, the request didn’t annoy me; I understood the motivation behind it. But I did end up having to write a fairly lengthy defense of bookspine-style type as a result. Since I’m not the first person to face this problem, and I know I won’t be the last, I thought it might be useful to summarize a few of those points here.

If you’re an image editor, maybe it’ll give you ammunition to back up your case one day. If you’re working with an image editor, maybe it’ll provide some insight into the thought he or she puts into typesetting. If you’re my mom, maybe you’ll finally believe I learned something in college.

The End of the World as We Know It
Seeing is believing, so let’s try all the options and see for ourselves what works and what doesn’t. I’ve cropped in on a small slice from a hypothetical UI sprite sheet for our discussion. I’ve also simplified it, hiding all the various hover and active states, so all we’re dealing with is the vanilla text.
Here’s the original edited version:

For this project, we need a script/calligraphic type that will remain legible even at very small sizes. (I do all my VN reading on an 8” tablet, so I use that as my small-screen baseline.) We land on this font here, a clean Western script that still feels right at home among traditional Eastern design elements. And since you can see that some of the UI text runs very long — these are chapter titles, I imagine — compactness is also a consideration. This typeface handles that quite nicely.
Let’s see what happens if, rather than bookspine-style, we run these lines vertically:

What’s wrong here? More like, what isn’t?

It doesn’t fit: Unlike squarish Japanese characters, English letters tend to be taller than they are wide. This means if you stack them vertically, you’ll end up with something that eats up almost twice as much space as horizontal type. You’ll need to reduce the point size to make everything fit. Or worse yet, squish the letters vertically to compensate. Yuck.

It fights against the letterforms: This is a script face, so it slants rightward, one letter leading the eye into the next. Moreover, lowercase letters set in script often physically join to one another, as if written in a smooth, flowing hand. A vertical stack is antithetical to both of these: there is no “next” letter to lead the eye into, nor is there any adjoining character to connect to.

It looks like a gap-toothed palooka: Notice how some of the letter pairs almost overlap, while others have relatively large spaces between them. This is another reason English type wasn’t meant to stack vertically. Even though there’s exactly the same amount of space between the baseline of each letter, some have descenders (e.g., the “tails” of the letters y or q), some have ascenders (e.g., the “flagstaff” of the letters b or d), and some have neither (e.g., x or o). This gives the vertical type a drunken stagger-step of sorts, an ungainly visual gait that we’d like to avoid at all costs.

It doesn’t handle punctuation well: There’s no graceful way to handle periods, colons, and so forth in vertical type. You could center it below the last letter, as in the original Japanese, but that looks confusing in English. And how would you handle a possessive, like “Darbury’s cat”? Stacked vertically, it would look more like “Darbury, scat.” (Fine. See ya, ingrate.)

It’s borderline illegible: There’s been lots and lots of research into the science of how people read — how we recognize letters, words, and sentences. There’s a lot of pattern recognition going on in our brains and, for native speakers of Western languages, those patterns almost always work horizontally. Setting type vertically can literally slow down reading and comprehension speed by an order of magnitude.

So let’s be clear: this sucks. But there are a few things we can do to slightly minimize the suckage. First, let’s set everything in all caps. Like this
That eliminates our gap-tooth problem; uppercase letters don’t have ascenders or descenders, so all the letters now appear evenly spaced. But we’ve had to reduce the point size even further to make everything fit. (We started out at 20pt. We’re now at 12pt.) Also, our calligraphic type still slants to the right, making each letter feel like a drunk who leans against a wall only to find it isn’t there. We want a handwritten feel to the type, however, so we try switching to an upright block letter font instead:

This is pretty much as good as it’ll get ... and it’s still not great. It’s still hard to read, and we’ve had to sacrifice the elegance of a script typeface. But wait — it gets worse. Right now, these lines have lots of padding left and right, since I’ve hidden all the other elements on this sprite sheet. What happens when they sit closer together, as they probably will in-game. You get this:

I don’t know about you, but my brain wants to start reading horizontally adjacent words as sentences: “It birds and eye listen” Huh? It’s like trying to drive an SUV where the steering is constantly pulling to the right. It’s not what we’re looking for in a car, and it’s not what we’re looking for in our typesetting.

In short, vertically set text is a god-awful mess. Don’t use it. (Obligatory waffling: Okay, maybe if there’s one or two vertical buttons in the whole game. And maybe if they were really, really short — you know, like “SAVE” and “QUIT”? Maybe then you could get away with it. But otherwise, nononono a thousand times no.)

Introducing my backup singers
I’m not the only one preaching this gospel. These fine folks agree:
 
 
 
 
 

So the next time someone asks you to set vertical type, just say no. Then link to this blog post and tell ‘em Darbury told ya so.