>>39915463>>39915476For the last time, Iwata "didn't add Kanto" to Gen II. Iwata didn't have anything to do with the content of the games. However, he is the reason why Gold and Silver were able to be released as Game Boy games outside of Asia instead of being GBC-exclusive. His compression methods were for the purpose of making enough room for the Latin-based text of the romantic languages. Every single letter is a byte. The maximum size of a Game Boy cartridge is 1 MB (1,048,576 bytes). That means that you can fit a hypothetical maximum of 1,048,576 letters in a game, but even that's incorrect because of how much space needs to be dedicated for programming, music/sounds, arrays, graphics, and miscellaneous requirements.
Japanese is far more concise than English.
Example being Oak's first line.
>はじめまして! (Hajimemashite! is 7 bytes)Translated
>Nice to meet you! (17 characters)Localized to save space
>Hello there! (12 characters)Greetings! also would have worked. Pokémon is a JRPG with a lot of text. The Japanese versions of the Gen I games were all on 512 KB cartridges, and the international versions had to be released on 1 MB cartridges to accommodate all the translated text. But Japanese Gold and Silver were already 1 MB cartridges. There wasn't anything they could do to increase the cartridge size without making the games exclusive to the new Game Boy Color. That's cutting out all Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, and Super Game Boy owners which were the majority of Gen I players. That's when Iwata stepped in and came up with all sorts of compression ideas to make as much room as possible in the ROMs. It was thanks to him that the games were released in the state they are with full GB and SGB compatibility outside of Asia.
There is no actual source for Iwata "fitting Kanto into the game". It's hearsay that nobody ever looks into and everyone (including DYKG) continue to propagate.
In short,
CITATION NEEDED
