Sometimes having all 2,000 common kanji in a font is not viable. For example, a lot of older games primarily used kana, with a few characters being kanji.
How do developers, designers, translators, etc.. decide on what should be kanji in those restrictive media?
As an English speaker, I would assume to have a 30-30-30 split between kana, common kanji (possibly favouring nouns?), and relevant kanji (like having 魔法 in a fantasy game for “magic”, or 測 in some utility program for “measure”).
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>Sometimes having all 2,000 common kanji in a font is not viable.
This has not been the case for decades. Developers, designers, translators, etc. no longer really face this problem.
Besides which, the guys who made the games that were restricted, weren’t making dedicated character maps that only use *some* of the kanji. That would be really weird and a bit pointless.
Older games that came out before memory increases made kanji feasible were more or less [entirely in kana](https://nicolive.cdn.nimg.jp/tsthumb/thumbnail/200114/19/30/pg21868241224270_640_360.jpg). Spaces were used to help legibility, though if I’m honest, it is pretty clunky.
So the 30-30-30 thing you’re talking about has never really been used. If space is so limited that you need to minimise the cost of each character, then you would use kana because that’s as efficient as you can get. Once memory is at the point that this isn’t an issue, there’s no point to using only a restricted set of kanji.
It’s a lot of faff for very little benefit.
It’s really just…not a problem anymore. As you said, in the past game developers primarily used kana (not only due to storage constraints but also for legibility as the resolution of those games were smaller) but the size limit of an NES cartridge was 1 megabit. The average iPhone app is 34.3 megabytes. That’s over 274 NES games.
In the modern world you’re more likely to butt up against resolution than storage capacity, and even then only in every specific scenarios. I suppose if you’re making a tamagotchi or something you’d just pick kanji that are highly legible in small resolution scenarios and hope that context fills in the rest for the kana.