Heheh, in 
wkwk land, we donât have to deal with gendered words. âDiaâ, âIaâ, and âBeliauâ are all neutral, though they differ in courtesy level (which I believe is similar like Japanese â-sanâ and â-senpaiâ, though these are suffix).
Oh dear god do not ask me to explain -san and -senpai. I will need charts.
Look basically probably youâre about 70% right but it likely doesnât carry the senpai-kouhai relationship so the bit in FGO where Mash is the MCs senpai and she insists on calling the MC senpai like a kouhai would does not properly translate to âOkay clearly Mash is a homunclusâ.
The important part is that while Mash is hyper-polite calling your kouhai senpai is so wrong literally no one does it.
I understand the bit where senpai-kouhai doesnât strictly refer to senior-junior relationship. Some people simply admire someone that even though they met their idol for the first time, they goes all -senpai.
UhâŠ
Yeesss, but Mash has been here for two years and the MC just showed up. She is the MCs senpai and the MC is her kouhai and the sun rises in the east and when you drop something in a gravity well it falls.
Even when the relationship is inverted, you donât call your kouhai senpai. You can use -sama instead because youâre the senpai here and your kouhai does not get to tell you what honorifics you use.
Short version you seem to understand it as well as 90% of anime fans but I took two years of Japanese. Also Japan is pretty understanding about this but if youâre writing a game about the Japanese Emperor maybe ask your foreign ministry to check your work. Failing that use literally any other title. Like Shogun. If you want an anime example of how to handle a scene with an alternate history Emperor, I canât help you there arenât any.
Sorry if I look lost here, but which show are we talking about? Whatâs FGO?
Fate Grand Order. Thereâs an OVA of the game prologue. Wait for the scene where the MC points out he should call Mash senpai and she says âeveryone is a senpai to meâ.
For reference the base term is master. Kiyohime calls the MC husband because she has Mad Enhancement Rank EX, Nero calls the MC praetor because she is roman, and Mash calls the MC senpai because she was grown in a vat.
Oh, I donât follow Fate series so much (in fact, never got into them. Super lengthy, donât know start where, wee bit confusing story).
I hope we didnât derail the thread too far 
Itty bitty amount of derailment, but itâs okay! 
Aaaggghhh not again!
Uh, it is on topic for how you should handle this problem when your game is set in Japan and you are going to use senpai*
*incidentally name-senpai and just senpai as a pronoun are usually both options; Mash usually uses just senpai because she is unfailingly polite except when her kinda father is being embarassing in front of Senpai and she gets so mad my reactions in real time were âMash is yelling and itâs very disconcerting.â âMash has yelled her way to a level cap increase.â
When I first talked about gender in Samurai Of Hyuuga I tried to illustrate the point that this kind of thing matters by talking about how clearly in this setting the duty of exterminating demons is done by the Sohei warrior maidens with full Shrine Maiden regalia (there is a fully valid reason for this but Shinto ritual purity rules are definitely off topic) with naginatas so I wanted to, um, basically play a Sohei warrior maiden because (Kegare reasons) and my ending pick was to call the Sohei because this was like dealing with an ebola outbreak when you can call in the army or alternately you can call in the CDC.
Then we got sidetracked by the fact that female anime characters with katanas exist, and I didnât get around to noting that maybe the Emperor could give you Kusunagi, which is like Excalibur but more important. And he can get away with this because the real one is around but only like ten people know where it is because thatâs classified. Then the only reason any protagonist would ever use any other weapon would be that they might lose it and Ameterasu-no-Okami would be mad and possibly go back in the cave for a while and then we donât have sunlight for a week.
So basically it mostly matters in that people who play Touhou are mad that the female protagonist is like Reimu except with a katana and not the Hakurei Shrine Maiden, and everyone else doesnât notice.
I mean, this is really less about the types of pronouns we use and more about whether people prefer to use multi-replace or variables for pronouns. But if it expands the conversation then I donât really mind. 
Point, but mostly what Iâm getting at is that you need to think about more than just gender, because maybe thereâs a Japanese girl who speaks English and is a shrine maiden and takes naginata fencing lessons and sheâll want to self-insert as a female protagonist who is a shrine maiden who uses a naginata and fights demons.
Yeah thatâs highly specific but actually itâs probably more likely sheâll take naginata fencing lessons than kendo because katanas are unladylike and naginatas are not.
I donât know which of the two methods you should use to handle it, and theyâre probably not a major market sector, but at least think about whether to include her too before you decide how much work you put into using Japanese honorifics. I mean, the grand quest in Hyuuga is basically literally her actual job.
Well I guess that depends on if a person is planning on using those honorifics. I typically donât write from the perspective of Japanese culture, so forgive me if it wasnât what came to mind when I wrote the OP. 
Yeah, mostly this is because I at one point complained about Samurai of Hyuuga not having the option to be an ex-Sohei rather than an ex-Samurai. Also yes you could have a male equivalent of an ex-Sohei. He might or might not use a naginata but he wonât open-carry a katana because if you arenât at least an ex-Samurai in this general era carrying a katana can get you arrested.
Imagine basically this except less detailed and I got asked if I thought I knew more about a female perspective than woman did, and because I talk in English the way I was taught to speak Japanese in class and I wasnât sleep-deprived and cranky I tried to indirectly make this point like sensei told me to. And I always call them sensei because Japanese doesnât have grammatical plurals* and I donât want to disrespect them
*Do not attempt to explain -tachi to me I already know it no sensei-tachi is not correct in this context and I already had a conversation last night that went âSo wierd thing about the Patriarchate Of Constantanople-â âplease skip it unless itâs something other than Autocephelyâ âno, this is different (proceeds to explain Autocephalyâ) and am having Lost Jedi debates where basically that except itâs trying to explain need to know when I reference opsec because I can basically recite the need-to-know briefing from the Laundry Files from memory. So basically Iâm being a lot more snappish than usual because Iâm in âMash is yelling and itâs very disconcertingâ mode. And the fact that you didnât notice is why I am so mad when people try to teach me the stuff my first sensei covered in two months at the start of JAPN 101. Short version, if I say something isnât quite right please ask me why I think that instead of trying to teach me Japanese.
Iâm sure you can put honorifics in a multireplace as well.
@{h san|kun|senpai|kĆhai|sensei|sama|dono}
And anything else I might have missed.
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Yeeeessss that is an option.
Basically it is that if Iâm playing the richest and most powerful girl in a city of 1.8 million people with superpowers (1 and 2 and 7 are guys, 3-5 are girls and it took 60 books to learn 6âs name and nothing else whatsoever) I get to decide if I call my kouhai kouhai or use lastname-san or firstname-san or firstname-chan or maybe I call my club subordinates who are all female -kun when I tell them to get my godslayer battlesuit refueled.
Mikoto only uses {name} and san or chan because she is nice and does not intentionally abuse the fact that as a Level 5 esper sheâs basically a minor god. Level 4s occasionally duel her and itâs funny because they think the reason theyâre holding their own is because Level 5s are overrated when we see Mikoto isnât maintaining her battle aura of lightning to electromagneticly deflect ceramic projectiles so sheâs not taking this seriously and is being very careful so she doesnât accidently hurt her opponent.
If I am playing Mikoto except rude my second person pronoun is ano hito âthat personâ and I call that people to their face and they mutter that Iâm rude and the #5 is nice because she uses anata"hey you". Because The Heavensent Girl Loved By Electrons can use basically any honorific she wants. And if she calls any of her Kouhai âsenpaiâ they politely inform her that theyâre first-years not second-years.
What Iâm getting at is basically that actually Japanese honorifics are super complicated and I canât even tell you which of four Mikoto might use when sheâs helping one of her Kouhai with their math homework because that is a senpai duty and Mikoto is so good at math she assumes summer homework is an urban legend.
Oh also if a kouhai calls Mikoto kouhai she will begin sparking. But they donât because literally everyone in the city knows better. Also a proper Tokiwadai Girl would instead say something that sounds innocuous but alludes to the fact that everyone in the district lives because she hasnât chosen to kill them, but Mikoto isnât actually very patient. And if someone complains about her overreacting they are hastily yanked aside and informed theyâre being disrespectful to Tokiwadaiâs Railgun and they should really not make her any madder than she is already.
This whole âpronounâ thing is a huge can of worms. There comes a stage when you just have to say âOk, Iâve done the best I can with the multitide of descriptors people like to attach to themselves, now Iâm going to actually sit down and write the flaminâ story.â
If thereâs one thing you can rely on, especially in the west these days, itâs that as soon as you think you have all bases covered, someone somewhere is going to dream up a new word and immediately expect the rest of the world to accept it and start using it. Itâs all getting a bit ridiculous in my opinion.
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Yeah, I basically would tell you that if you didnât already know everything I just told you use English honorifics and I will pretend something was lost in translation.
If you screw up key cultural concepts universally known to every Japanese student and when I complain someone tells me Iâm wrong I flash back to sensei warning us that if we use the wrong honorific sheâll have to deduct points and I get very angry that theyâre being confidently wrong at me.
And I meant only one of my sensei but all of them did give that warning.
Um, also for context while I was playing Samurai Of Hyuuga I was helping on a fan translation and we were debating whether we should call the female main Villain Dearche, Ruler Of Darkness but decided because (reasons) the best way to convey the Japanese meaning was LORD DEARCHE, KING OF THE NIGHT SKY! And sheâs an evil clone of Hayate, Mistress of the Tome Of The Night Sky, and because Dearche talks like, uh, see above for how she introduces herself to people and Hayate talks like sheâs from Kansai but we donât think converting that to Texan fits in her case, together they are the âBearers of the Tome Of Difficult-To-Translate Accents.â
So yeah I have opinions on this subject.
Also there is an AU where LORD DEARCHE, KING OF THE NIGHT SKY! might actually be a transgender boy. We have discussed this possibility and decided that it is plausible when the subtitles say âheâ that is a common translation error and tabled the subject until next movie.
Yeah; thereâs precedent too, as we still use âareâ for singular âyou,â because âyouâ started out as a plural pronoun too. (âThouâ went with âart.â)
Wouldnât that get rather confusing, since youâd have to remember what number goes with which honorific? 
Iâd have thought a variable would be much easier to keep track of (and read).
Thatâs not going to be a problem if you allow people to write in their own pronouns. Then youâll have them all covered without having to write in more options. I donât see any difficulty here.
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I never said it was a good idea; only that you could. 
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âareâ is the conjugated form of âisâ for âtheyâ in the same way itâs the conjugated form for âyouâ. We donât say âyou isâ for one person and âyou areâ for multiple, and the same holds true for âtheyâ!