[redthrow]

Most of the confusion in written Japanese stems from the use of kanji. The Kanamoji Kai (カナモジカイ) was established more than 100 years ago by Yamashita Yoshitarō (山下芳太郎), and it has been advocating for the abolition of kanji for many years, though without much success.

https://www.kanamozi.org/

If you watch a Let's Play of マザー２ (the original release of the cult classic SNES game EarthBound), you'll notice that writing Japanese using kana alone is not only possible, but that most native speakers have no trouble reading it -- although some claim that having a few kanji makes it easier because of homonyms.

https://www.youtube.com/live/F_UrqsO2JQ0?si=-1r-FbCZCJ3rt-Z1...

[Macha]

You’ll notice that it uses spaces between kana words which is non standard and basically only exists in books for very small children, video games with a large child audience (most notably pokemon) and in retro video games which didn’t have the resolution to render readable kanji.

In modern content designed for people over the age of 10, spaces are uncommon as kanji does a lot of the word division duty. It’s also a little unstandardised: is 遅くなって初めて (when I first became late) one modified word or three words? Since regular Japanese writing doesn’t care as much about word partition, there is no standard so you could so anything from おそくなってはじめて to おそく なって はじめて when spaced.

I reckon a lot of these full kana games would be harder even for natives if they used a more standard space free style.

[redthrow]

I’m a native Japanese speaker, so you don’t need to explain that writing kana with spaces is non-standard in most media (although some people -- both native speakers and non-natives -- erroneously claim that no native media uses that form of writing).

The people at Kanamoji Kai (all native speakers) are well aware of this too, and their website even has a section on 分かち書き (word separation). They use the example スモモ モ モモ、モモ モ モモ、モモ ニ モ イロイロ アル。 to illustrate that using spaces is a must if we switch to kana-based writing.

>> these full kana games would be harder even for natives if they used a more standard space-free style

This is true, but I take issue with your use of the word “more standard,” as USING SPACES IS THE STANDARD in full kana games.

Any form of writing reform, by definition, involves moving from the current standard to something that is initially non-standard, right? Korea got rid of kanji and now uses spaces with Hangul. In my opinion, it’s way easier to adapt than most people think.