[digi_owl]

Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some very info-dense UIs.

[JoshTriplett]

The same thing applied to Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2): the original translation had to drastically simplify/cut details from the English translation to fit into the dialogue boxes, which used a large fixed-pitch English font. There's a ROM patch ("Variable Width Font edition") that changes the dialogue font to variable-width, and uses the additional space to improve quite a bit of the dialogue.