I was playing GS1 on my iPod the other day and I noticed that some of the words were spelt in Katakana, even if they are normally written in Hiragana or Kanji. For example, when Sahwit explains he saw the phone on the shelf, he and the others say タナ instead of 棚 or たな.
Is it just for emphasis?

Also, is there anything special about the Best Price! editions of the game, or is it just a price reduction?
ありがとう！

In GK2 too, it's not uncommon for a random word to be in kana... I don't really know for sure, but I have a few ideas why, and I imagine it's some combination of the three:

-To make it slightly easier to read. After all, the less kanji, the easier the reading is.
-Minor emphasis. I don't think they're emphasizing the word that much, though, because they have red text and <>'s for that.
-To show a character's unique pronunciation of a word. Obviously, some characters will do it more than others... it shouldn't be that difficult to see when a character is going to do it a lot

(And I think it's usually in katakana rather than hiragana to distinguish it from the particles and stuff)

I don't think there's a difference in the Best Price version... well, except the price ofc :P


Croik or someone can probably give a more definitive answer...

Also, slightly off-topic, but if you're played that far, what's Sal's speech style in the Japanese version?

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Thanks for your explanation!


I'm playing the trial version that only has the first 2 cases, but I looked up gameplay videos on YouTube and found that his speech isn't really that different from normal speech, apart from some kanji in brackets like (汗) and quite a bit of katakana.
Of course I'm not fluent so I could be missing something.

I was a bit surprised too when I saw the way they use katakana in GK2. I assumed it was done to make it easier to read.

As for Sal's speech, looking at the game's script, it seems Sal regularly adds kanji like （怒） （笑） （泣） after the end of his sentences. I assume it's supposed to be like a movie script or something.