@madmax brought up the question on what to do with Japanese titles, I thought I'd post an actual thread about it, rather than having the answer hidden in the Missing Consoles thread.
I just noticed that final fantasy ii for wonderswan color was changed to its Japanese name. what's the policy on that? should names be Japanese or English?
it makes it harder to find and creates an inconsistancy with Famicom and Super Famicom games as well..
I've slowly been setting up a style guide for adding Japanese titles to game entries. I've been working with @desocietas on how the library she works for lists material with foreign titles and how we can use some of those ideas for our purposes. While not everything that they do in a library will work for us, the idea of how they work their searchable database will. The way they work it is there is an alternate title field which is searchable. This field would allow the real Japanese title to be listed, while having the English translation in the alt field. (That's something @matt has to do on his end, as I can't do coding.) That way, we can list the Japanese title, for the sake of accuracy, while still having it come up in searches for "Castlevania", "Final Fantasy", "Dragon Warrior", Mega Man, etc.
The problem with the Japanese names is that the titles are already inconsistent, even within franchises. Castlevania is a perfect example, and Searching for "Akumajo Dracula" would only produce a portion of the Castlevania titles anyway. Example, Castlevania 1, 2 and 3 are actually, Akumajo Dracula, Dracula II: Noroi no Fuin and Akumajo Densetsu. Then there are games like Castlevania: Bloodlines, which is actually Banpaia Kira, but also has the English translation of Vampire Killer on the cover. AND Then when you get to the later titles, they started adopting English within the Japanese name, so you have Castlevania: Akatsuki no Menuetto (Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow) or Akumajo Dracula: Circle of the Moon (Castlevania: Circle of the Moon). Not to mention, the various releases of games with only name Akumajo Dracula.
If you want to change it back, feel free to for now. I'd like to get the alt field added asap, but from the looks of it we are going to have to wait until next week.
