What's the deal with letter grades in Japanese culture?

[takenoko]

So I was listening to episode 146 of the Video Games Hotdog podcast and Zack was musing about why Japanese seem to affix a letter grade to everything. In this situation, he noticed that weapons in Dark Souls and Bravely Default would have a letter grade to indicate how good it is. And I'm sure we've all played a Japanese game where you got a letter grade that goes all the way up to S ranking.

Anyone know why this came to be or where it came from?

[Impact]

Megaman X....5? It's the earliest I remember the ranking system.

[Lunagel]

S for Super?

[HarryFA1]

Isn't there sometimes a grade above S? Like X, or SS?

[Impact]

I sure hope not. S was hard enough most of the time.

[Dengar]

The highest rank above A is SSS or ☆☆☆.

Any rank above A is supposed to mean "Better than the best".

[takenoko]

S++?

[Dengar]

Alternately, A+++

[VerusMaya II]

Megaman X....5? It's the earliest I remember the ranking system.

DDR predates this; uses E to SS, originally released 1998.
I'm sure it comes from something, though.

[Orochi_X]

I think the most common theory is that, because Japanese school grades consider anything below a C as a fail (combined with the fact that Japanese grades don't do B- , A+, etc) that Japanese developers needed to come up with a wider array of grades for player motivation.

The S usually refers to Special or Superior. In most games, simply completing a level would not allow you to obtain an S rank. You would have to collect hidden objects as well, get a perfect, massive combo or some other side mission.

It has since grown to use SS and even SSS rank and has other uses such as indicating rarity of weapons/items etc.

[HarryFA1]

I remember as a kid I'd play Sonic Heroes, & get pissed off when I got anything bellow C rank, because the characters would pretty much say "Wow! You're pathetic".

[TBustah!]

The fact that they do it isn't so strange (we use letter grades for stuff all the time in the west), but it IS odd that they usually follow the same pattern of F back to A and then S.

I never really thought about it before, but now that you mention it, I've seen it in several games. Just last night, I saw it when I was playing Excitebike: World Rally, (which was actually co-developed with an American company, dunno whether it was them or Nintendo that decided to use it), it uses the system for rating your performance on a run. You've got to get S ratings on all the tracks to beat the game.

[JustiFan]

Nice timing on this topic. I got an S rank on a Battride War mission last night and was intrigued. Thanks for the info guys.

[Phoenix512]

I probably imagine the letter ranking system was created for technical reasons back in the day compared to now since space was a premium at the time. I don't see letter grades in the various anime/drama I watched from here but numbers instead.

[Darkwings]

It's not just used in fiction, it's a way to have a grasp on something's magnitude without giving a specific "quantity" since most of the times such a scale is used when a quantification would not be possible.

It's not that different from using "stars" (usually from 1 to 5) since they indicate a certain situation, the level of comfort , etc. All things that you couldn't easily quantify (and certainly not without a lengthy explanation).

I'm sure I've seen that sort of rankings since the early 90s and you can find it in a wide range of applications like eletrical devices to indicate power consumption or the economic stability of countries.
In those cases it's also used to avoid confusion since numbers are already used to indicate other aspects (voltage, power, size, debts, credits, etc).
Other fields where I've seen letters being used is Lasers (from common pointers to military-grade stuff) and explosives (from pyrotechnics to actual bombs) and so on.

In most cases the label defines the "maximum potential" (and the general purpose as a direct consequence) while the actual "power level" can be way different even within the same rank.


In games, manga, anime, etc usually the top rank is considered A or AAA. Beyond that you have the S rank, regarded as "beyond ranking", or SSS as the very top rank when more S ranks appear.
The S rank is specifically used in fiction to indicate something with a power level off the charts, so a proper evaluation isn't even needed (or it simply wouldn't make sense).

Examples from the top of my head:
In YuYu Hakusho (same author as HunterXHunter) the S rank was pretty much considered "power beyond reason", godlike power that couldn't be stopped just by outnumbering an S rank threat with many A ranked defenders. If an S appears, you need an S to counter it. (compare to nukes)
The same thing was done from JoJo's Bizarre Adventures 3rd arc Stardust Crusaders giving each of a stand's aspects (range, power, etc) a letter.

I don't remember if the scale was kept in HunterXHunter but I do remember that they gave "grade cards" to powers and Hunters themselves were ranked using "stars".

In Wolrd Trigger (recent manga on Jump) the soldiers are pretty much automatically classified as S-rank if they own a Black Trigger (again, power level = reality shaping stuff).


With a scale of 1 to 10 you automatically expect all the ranks to be at the same "distance" from one another, or having an exponential growth (like the volume rocker on a radio).
With letters instead you don't have that same expectations since you don't usually do math with letters.


Since fiction in particular has a lot of stuff that couldn't be explained or compared (mostly supernatural):

Using a 1-to-10 scale when you enstabilish that a common bullet is a 2 and a Time Stop is a 10 then people subconsciously imagine "Time Stop = 5x Bullets" or something similar because that's what our brain is used to do with numbers. To avoid that you label a bullet as a D and Time Stop as an S.
Fists and Knives are hand to hand weapons and share mostly the same limitations. They are very different in real life, but for the sake of simplicity you could stick them together in the same rank solving the problem of granularity and avoiding the introduction of even more numbers (like 1.3, 2.7 and so on).

I think that such a system was preferred for school grades (at least in elementary and middle school in Europe) to avoid direct comparisons in the same way as explained above.