I picked it because I thought a Japanese kids’ game would be easy to translate. It’s not a bad game, but it’s definitely aimed at a younger crowd. ( Sylvanian Families for GBC was my first successful project, something like Harvest Moon without the farming or Animal Crossing without the backstabbing.

I still think of myself as something of a newcomer, but at least I’ve put my days of being “the guy who won’t shut up about Sylvanian Families” behind me. Can you describe your relationship with the rom hacking community, and the Breath of Fire II community? What kind of contributions did these guys make? One of your beta testers actually sent this tip in to Destructoid. (There’s still “Miso Stew” in the game, though, and a few tenant names like Daiye and Yozo were left as they were.)

The headmaster at the magic school, for example, is “Yoji” in the original translation, “Youdi” in the ending cast list and “Jordi” in my version all three are pronounced identically in Japanese, but the last one has more of a European look to it. In the original translation, there are a lot of distinctly Japanese-looking names directly romanized from the original script: in some cases, these are a no-brainer as the ending cast list gives some idea as to what they were meant to be, but in others, I had to use a bit more imagination. The only real “design choice” I made was to Westernize the more blatantly Japanese bits (it is a quasi- European fantasy setting, after all).

What kind of design choices did you have to make? Some of the game seems really melodramatic, but a lot of the dialog is really natural and idiomatic–how did you decide what kind of tone to use for each character or situation? Playing through the first couple hours of your translation, it’s obvious that a lot of care and attention went into this project.

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