As for Dir en grey, I also considered the caps for MARROW to be stylistic and maybe even for OUROBOROS. I mean, maybe their graphic designer is just going through an all caps phase just like some people go through a sans-serif phase or an all lowercase phase… at the very least, they haven’t made some kind of announcement about it like Gackt’s graduation to GACKT, lmfao.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten a Unicode error in my filesystem, though since Windows automatically saves Notepad fines in ANSI, I have to force it to Unicode every time I save files in kana.

It’s ironic, really, that Dir en grey chose their name specifically to stop it being open to interpretation and double meanings! I thought the caps on the Marrow album was just a stylistic choice for the album artwork… [shrugs]

I once joked, after seeing kana getting scrambled in my hard drive’s mp3 folder, that any music I write would be released under the title ‘Unicode Error’. That’s capitalised, and I might actually use it someday.

But lol. I’m not huge on the FF fandom, so all of that chaos is more or less unknown to me — sounds pretty hilarious though. Do people actually fight over that or is it just an internal organizational rage? XD Perhaps because so many of the titles are often abbreviated, I don’t really see people pick fights over how they’re capitalized, though I have seen people OCDly rename files to how they personally prefer after they’ve downloaded music or something.

As for Kingdom Hearts, I’ve never really encountered anyone to spelt it in all caps, despite its appearance as such on packaging and KH is also so often abbreviated that the titles themselves are less meaningful in some sense. The colon seems to be (nearly?) universally accepted for subtitled games, so CoM, Re:CoM, 358/2 Days, and BbS all get one. The FINAL MIXes don’t count as subtitles though, so I’ve always seen Kingdom Hearts II FINAL MIX+. SQUARE ENIX I’ve always taken to capitalizing. Trudging through all this, it seems easy to conclude that for the inconclusive titles like both of these game series, everything’s up to the whims of the fan.

Ah, I get this way with FINAL FANTASY and KINGDOM HEARTS. It’s even worse with some recent stuff here in the States, particularly anything with a colon. “FFXII: REVENANT WINGS” doesn’t have that colon in Japan, and it’s not too consistent here. “FFIV: THE AFTER YEARS” or “FFIV: The After Years”? The FFT port/remake is ALL-CAPS with the colon, though the FFCC stuff is generally regular-caps in the subtitles (I say “generally” because it’s “Ring Of Fates”, while other entries treat short words like “of” normally). Oh, and then there’s the COMPILATION (OF/of) FFVII, which is ALL-CAPS except for the “of” in “DoC” (which has a side game of itself as “DIRGE of CERBERUS LOST EPISODE -FINAL FANTASY VII-”); AC and ACC, though, are just a straight string of “FFVIIAC”/”FFVIIACC” (ALL-CAPS). However, with these and “DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY”, fans insist on colon-izing them (“DoC:FFVII”, “FFVII:AC”), and even sticking the “FF[whatever] part up front (it works better for organization I guess, but still wrong). So, “Final Fantasy: Dissidia” instead of “DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY”.

Oh, and then KH has some goofies. The first three games (not counting that cell phone/mobile phone port) are ALL-CAPS: “KINGDOM HEARTS [FINAL MIX]“, “KH CHAIN OF MEMORIES” (though this likes getting a colon), “KH II”. But then “KINGDOM HEARTS II FINAL MIX+” (no space; agh, didn’t even go over the “INTERNATIONAL”s for FF (nor the FFI/II for PSP (sub(?))titles)) came out, and within that is “KINGDOM HEARTS II Final Mix” and “KINGDOM HEARTS Re:Chain of Memories” (the latter we got later, though a space is often injected after the colon; thankfully, I don’t think two colons have occured). Then we have the portable sequals…ish things. “KINGDOM HEARTS Birth by Sleep” (often colon’d), “KINGDOM HEARTS coded (colon’d and reg-Caps’d), and, the doozy, “KINGDOM HEARTS 358/2 Days”, read “three five eight days over two” (“khdays” in URLs). “KHBbS”’s title is based on the KHIIFM secret movie “Birth By Sleep”, so even the in-game bonus stuff has goofy syntax.

When discussing SQEX stuff, it’s safe if you assume it’s ALL-CAPS (“SQUARE ENIX” in Japan), but when discussing things with othe Englishers, just reg-Caps it (“Square Enix” in North America).

Then again, I’ve always written MIKA in all caps for some reason. ._.

Which might not be necessarily relevant, because maybe the capitalization issue might not be so important when the name’s origination is English to begin with.

But I’ve kinda taken to spelling MUSE in all caps now, just because that seems to be the way they want it.