Phantom Hourglass helps kanji impaired

We're not really too good at reading Japanese kanji. We'll be honest and just say it. Our horrible inability to translate the ancient Japanese script has been something that not only gets in our way of enjoying delicious Japanese gaming news, but something that also keeps us from maintaining an equal correspondence with our Japanese pen pal Hiro. We believe he might be getting bored of the magazine clippings we keep sending him. He hasn't mailed us back in months.

But, the Japanese version of Phantom Hourglass is set to at least help folks in that region, namely children, with the difficult task of reading the kanji characters. The smart approach Nintendo has come up with is to allow the player, through use of the stylus, to touch the kanji letters and switch to the furigana characters (which allow the reader to phonetically read the kanji), making the dialogue that much easier to read. The furigana characters normally reside atop kanji, but with the small screen size of the DS, Nintendo came up with this different solution.

See also: First 6 minutes of Phantom Hourglass shown