[piercebot]

> It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words...

I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice!

Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetition?

Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein?

I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji.

Has anybody played the Japanese version? Can you speak to the use of Kanji in the game?

[rangibaby]

> Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein?

I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji.

This, but it’s the other way around. When characters speak to the player, who exists outside of the game world, it is in a mix of kanji and kana. When they write within the game world, it is in kana only.

[sexy_devil]

'Cutscene'y type talks like Tom Nook or Isabelle introducing are in kanji but irc pretty much everything else like items and villager chat is hiragana.

[jhanschoo]

It's a genre staple. Up until recently screens were typically too low-res to properly display frequently-used kanji. If they included furigana the furigana might be still too small as well to display them in an aesthetically coherent manner.