There are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]).
But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse.
I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts.
Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.
Ironically, they had a better Latin font _in the Japanese language version_ for all the genre loan abbreviations like MP/HP/LV etc., (https://terimaland.com/Memory/Steam_FinalFantasyPixelRemaste...) so that image is comparing the modded in Japanese Latin font vs the font the game includes by default.
(They also have a retro blocky "pixellated" font option iirc, which doesn't have the super narrow widths)
Standard Latin characters are half width. Ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ latin characters do exist, but that’s not the difference we’re seeing here, if anything that would make the Latin font in the English release “quarter width” except that’s not a real thing that exists. It’s just an ultra condensed font, and the fix is replacing the font files with more standard fonts, not some kind of special font to treat half width as full width.
Realistically it’s only katakana that you can make this mixup on. My desktop IME will let me type カタカナ or (reluctantly) ｶﾀｶﾅ, though it turns out iOS doesn’t have a way to type the half width kana, and IMEs have differing opinions on if they prefer full width digits, so you might see full width numbers like ５０００。
it's because whatever font stack to directx renderer middleware game engines were using was usually only developed for the latin script, probably the lowest common denominator of no diacritics either.
Alternately, imagine if all text in your favorite game was IP owned by some random third party that could ruin everything one or two years down the line.
Perhaps it is time for more people to invest in royalty free IP? We are seeing a bit of a tragedy of the commons type of situation going down, right now.
Sounds like one should be able to get a long way if you put down, say, 2 years of the new license fee and then never have to pay again
I guess the trouble is that game companies can't really band together and pool money to make a good font since the point is to look unique, so this only works for the largest studios. Otoh, at least for now, the smaller ones might stay below the 25k user limit
But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse.
[1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan