Japan has two phonetic writing systems, hiragana (for native words) and katakana (for foreign words), as well as a third writing system called kanji used to compress long phonetic words into shorter logograms.

The player character's starting stats in Dragon Quest are determined by the first four characters of their name each character had a hidden numeric value, the sum of those values would be divided by 16, and the remainder would be used to determine the player's starting stats and growth type.