Flail it Yourself Lesson 3: Gearing Up

Time for more common Katakana commands! (I wanted to type "common" and "commands" with Ks because I thought it'd look neat, but it could easily give a very wrong impression. Way to ruin snappy abbreviations for the rest of us, guys.)

Anyway, here's some more Katakana, courtesy of Final Fantasy VI.

There's another common command here besides the ones I labelled: the Squaresoft Finger is pointing to is "Soubi," (SOH-bee) which means "Equip." It's written in Hiragana, the other syllabary in the Japanese language. Hiragana is often used to represent native Japanese words in place of Kanji, particularly in earlier video games where memory space was a concern, and games aimed at younger audiences who don't have a lot of Kanji down yet. Unsurprisingly, "soubi" is also written in Kanji, especially in more recent games; when I find a decent example I'll post it here.