It's absogoddamnlutely artwork. As much as the game itself, as mere software, is artwork. Someone put a ton of tedious work into every font you consider boring. Typography is a whole field of study, balancing aesthetic and practical concerns, and you want to roll your eyes and insist that only Wingdings is real art.
We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork
Yes.
These aren't scribbled alphabets - which by the way are really fucking hard to do, when every copy of a letter has to look the same and still feel handwritten. These are letterforms conveying a particular tone, in use by industry professionals, for three thousand characters. Japanese has like three and a half alphabets to start with, and then Kanji is a whole mess of stolen Chinese ideograms. And they're fucking complicated.
If you think you can bang that out with the effort of a child's crayon doodle, to the quality necessary for commercial video game projects, I invite you to try. Apparently it'd come in handy.