It has everything to do with the fact that those games use fixed-width fonts rather than variable-width fonts. If you've ever tried to hack one of those games and insert a font, you will quickly find out how much of a pain in the ass having to deal with a fixed-width font can be. Basically, Japanese, Chinese, and (sometimes) Korean fonts are all made to fit within squares of a certain size, and thus it's easier to use fixed-width fonts rather than variable-width ones. Variable-width fonts are necessary for English and other Latin languages to not look super awkward on a screen, which, effectively, adjusts the font spacing either dynamically or statically (giving each letter a certain amount of pixels statically, or dynamically by simply using a process which scans the letters and determines their width, height and spacing accordingly).
Most videogames now use variable-width fonts regardless (as it makes spacing for things like icons and other visual text elements easier), though fixed-width fonts were, at the time, a way to save space. Such limitations aren't really an issue now, since we have discs with 20GB of space, give or take.
