What do you say about the movie subtitles comparison mentioned earlier? I would guess there is a reason professional movie subtitles are big, simple and readable with no-nonsense fonts - game fonts in comparison look incredibly amateurish to me.
A big part of why subtitles are much more consistent in their prioritization of legibility over style is down to time.
A single line of text is on screen for maybe a few seconds. If you misread a word or struggle to complete the sentence, you just lost that information. There are no second chances. Like road signs, aesthetic consideration should be near 0. They are there to deliver information and nothing else. It's also so brief a time that you don't even get a chance to notice or ponder the details of a typeface, so a pretty one isn't even likely to be appreciated.
We've all the seen the SNL Avatar Papryus skit, and it shits all over the logo—but Avatar's biggest crime (aside from being an ugly and uninteresting piece of crap) is that it uses Papyrus for its subtitles.
Absolutely disgusting.
I definitely agree on the stylistic consistency - the font change in Fire Emblem really messed this up. You can clearly tell which is the new font used for localization and which is the original font. The new font is not just smaller and harder to read but also looks completely out of place ("Lv 15" in above screenshot).
I meant that it looks weird when characters in far back, historically inspired settings speak in text that uses "grotesque" sans serifs type, which wasn't a thing prior to the 1800s. The font in my avatar, Franklin Gothic, for example, wasn't created until 1902. It sticks out like a sore thumb when set against a world of kingdoms and crusades. The type they chose for the localization is, in terms of style, much more appropriate than something like Franklin Gothic. But functionally, it's a mistake.
The reason FE's english text kind of sticks out isn't because of the typeface itself, but because the new typeface is being squeezed into a space meant for Japanese type. It's just visibly making poor use of all the space in those text boxes.
Japanese glyphs are roughly square. Put them inside a perfect square box and they fill most of that space. Western upper case letters are mostly the same way, but the majority of the text you're reading is
lower case, a thing that doesn't exist in Japanese text, and therefore was not accounted for during development.
You'll notice that the upper case letters in FE's text boxes are roughly as tall as the glyphs in the Japanese version. I suspect this is another technical limitation the localization team had to work with. Increasing the amount of vertical space required to achieve legible lower case letters might have required more tinkering with the game's code than they could manage.
This could have been remedied by choosing a typeface with a taller x-height (the height of the lower case letters in relation to the capital letters), but they didn't do that. Mistakes were made, but I think those mistakes are almost entirely functional, not aesthetic.
I wonder if they chose that typeface primarily with character dialogue in mind, and then just applied that choice to the UI as an afterthought in the name of uniformity. In that regard, I think it's reasonable to give more consideration to aesthetic consistency when choosing a typeface for dialogue boxes because they are less removed from the actual story, setting, and content. In a game with dialogue boxes, the typeface is a key component of the voice in which the characters speak. It can directly impact the way you perceive their words.
In fact, you're statistically a tad more likely to believe a statement is true if it is written in Baskerville vs Times New Roman.
In contrast, HP meters, gauges, stat sheets, etc., are abstractions totally divorced from the game's fiction (you don't ever hear the characters say the words "hit points"), so players will likely be less conscious/more accepting of stylistic inconsistencies.
Though, depending on what type of game youre dealing with, you might have more room for aesthetic considerations in UI elements. For example, when playing an ultra difficult, fast-paced action game, the action on screen requires your constant attention, so you want a simple glance to be enough to register whatever info the UI has for you.
A turn based RPG OTOH hand gives you all the time in the world to evaluate the situation—and more time to notice stylistic inconsistencies in the game's UI. I presume Fire Emblem is turn based, so that might be another motivating factor in their decisions.
