handy HINTS

» Japanese uses three types of characters. Hiragana characters represent specific phonetic sounds, and are used primarily for Japanese words. Katakana characters are a different representation of the same sounds, and are usually used for loan words from other languages. Kanji characters represent words and phrases – a fluent reader would be expected to know over 2,000 of these. » Some games use these character sets in non-standard ways. For example, the Bonk and Puyo Puyo games tend to use hiragana characters exclusively – rendering おぷしょんfor the Option menu, whereオプションwould be more common.