Because they are the same, it’s just different fonts making it look like different symbols.
You’ll find similar font inconsistencies with さ for instance, where the bottom stroke is sometimes linked with the vertical one.
Many japanese fonts imitate a more cursive style of writing, you can often see little details that hint at a brush movement especially on high-DPI fonts. If you write a り by hand and don’t fully raise the pen/brush between the two strokes you’ll end up with something resembling the usual hiragana font rendition in one stroke.
I am not familiar with that game, but if it’s supposed to be retro style then it’s probably a throwback to the 8-bit era when game developers found creative ways to overcome hardware limitations. VRAM was very limited in those days (depending on which console we’re taling about, fonts may have been limited to no more than 128 characters, which isn’t a whole lot seeing as each syllabary alone contains 46 characters and you also need numbers and punctuation and stuff). And the characters themselves were small, like just 8×8 pixels, so り and リ already looked a lot alike to begin with. Same with へ and ヘ… you don’t need two separate characters for each.
I’m not familiar with Japanese typewriters, but it might even go back to that. I know in English similar tricks were used… like a lot of typewriter keyboards don’t have a 1 or 0 key because you’re just supposed to use l and O.
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Because they are the same, it’s just different fonts making it look like different symbols.
You’ll find similar font inconsistencies with さ for instance, where the bottom stroke is sometimes linked with the vertical one.
Many japanese fonts imitate a more cursive style of writing, you can often see little details that hint at a brush movement especially on high-DPI fonts. If you write a り by hand and don’t fully raise the pen/brush between the two strokes you’ll end up with something resembling the usual hiragana font rendition in one stroke.
In general it’s not at all uncommon for written styles and print styles to look significantly different, although since many English speakers don’t learn to write cursive anymore it may not be obvious. There’s always the print ‘a’ that looks usually very different from the written one though. If you look at Cyrillic instead, the cursive version is extremely different from print for many letters: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RfgPENh_VTo/V3bui7LE5MI/AAAAAAAALT0/CirbThXw_xccd2tEKPC9bx-AG78rJfE1QCLcB/s1600/letters%2Bserbian%2Bcyrillic.gif
I am not familiar with that game, but if it’s supposed to be retro style then it’s probably a throwback to the 8-bit era when game developers found creative ways to overcome hardware limitations. VRAM was very limited in those days (depending on which console we’re taling about, fonts may have been limited to no more than 128 characters, which isn’t a whole lot seeing as each syllabary alone contains 46 characters and you also need numbers and punctuation and stuff). And the characters themselves were small, like just 8×8 pixels, so り and リ already looked a lot alike to begin with. Same with へ and ヘ… you don’t need two separate characters for each.
I’m not familiar with Japanese typewriters, but it might even go back to that. I know in English similar tricks were used… like a lot of typewriter keyboards don’t have a 1 or 0 key because you’re just supposed to use l and O.
The same reason a is sometimes written 𝓪