>In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as

>In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose. Some, much complex, JRPGs such as Falcom's titles (the Ys series), began on Japanese computers (though they did end up getting NES ports anyway). There's also the proliferation of smut on Japanese computers, since you can't have that kind of stuff of consoles. This also eventually trickles down to some "underground" computer magazines in Japan having that stuff on their pages and coverdiscs - the stuff you would typically find on their weekly gossip magazines.