So i was thinking, with regards to the name in credits and on website. They must be 25 character limit but what are the optional lines for? Will they input both or just the one?
Just one. It's to account for limitations and consistency. I don't have it up anymore but I recall the survey giving a specific example where they didn't want you to use special characters in one of the three fields, just in case your name is normally spelled in a logographic language (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) and they decide to use a font for the credits that doesn't have all of the characters needed for that name, or maybe they decide to do latin characters only, or only display Japanese names if your language is set to Japanese, etc. The other is formatting, if a bunch of people are just doing first name last name and you include a version with a middle name, perhaps they'll decide to leave it out to look more consistent with the surround names. In other words, they're just giving themselves more options to try and make things consistent without having to contact people if something is really out there. They're only going to use one from each set.
In my case, I just used my first & last name for the website and credits, but for the guestbook message (one of the higher tiers) I included my middle initial as my preferred option (with same as others as fallback) just because I felt if I was signing something in a book I'd be more likely to include my middle initial. If they don't pick that version, whatever, it's fine with me.
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On a related note, we got this tidbit of new information today:
They had sort of answered this to people who asked via the Kickstarter, but it's kind of a shame that it's now being confirmed as the case. On one hand, there wasn't too much benefit to transferring between 1 & 2 since the items that transfer over don't affect the game at all, but there were those few items in Shenmue 1 that you could miss like the unreadable scroll, the white leaf, and I think one of the photos, which could have set up some extra story content for people who carried them through from 1 to 3. I guess that means they'll either have to give those items to everyone at the start of 3, introducing the problem of "how did I get these?" for people who never got them before, or they'll just completely get rid of those items and they'll just be unsolved mysteries. Oh well, I guess it can't be helped.