Edit: VNs also tend to use pretty large fonts for English in my experience.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026
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In Japanese, a single katakana can be like three letters long. ツツツ vs Tsutsutsu. 動物の森 (four 'characters') translates to Dōbutsu no Mori (thirteen characters, two spaces) but that's just romanization - it translates to Animal Forest (twelve characters, one space) which is localized to Animal Crossing (14c 1s).
Of course, sometimes it works the other way - ありがとうございます、先生 becomes thank you, sensei (but, this is just respectful thank you so could also be localized as 'sir' instead) you'll notice there's only 13 characters though, so you'll need 16 total spaces to directly translate the text.
TL;DR - information density.
This is only anecdotal, but I generally find that what I'll call the "raw" information density difference between written Japanese and English is pretty small. There's maybe a small advantage in Japanese.
In theory, Japanese should have a big advantage due to kanji, but once you account for having to display them at a larger size to keep them readable, plus all the other kana writing that's still necessary, you lose almost all of it.
So why does there still seem to be so much more English text, and what do I mean by "raw" information density? Well, I'm talking about directly equivalent, often overly literal translations. To say virtually the exact same thing in both languages takes approximately the same amount of text. But Japanese in actual usage is highly contextual. You can leave out a substantial fraction of words that would be necessary in English for a grammatically correct sentence, and not only remain understandable in Japanese, but correct enough to pass muster on a written language test.
It's entirely normal and common to omit not just subjects, but even verbs and entire clauses which the speaker assumes can be understood from context. Unfortunately a lot of this context is cultural rather than situational, and it was a real stumbling block for me for a few years. It still trips me up fairly frequently.
When someone translates this text from Japanese, it's usually necessary to reintroduce multiple things that were left out, in order to write sentences that flow naturally in English.