I'm just wondering if, in the years it took to patch Phantasia, did you guys pick up any useful tools hardware/software-wise, that would help make it easier to patch the other games?
Absolutely. At least the ones we're working on, anyway. They've recycled a lot of basic technical principles which has made it fairly simple to adapt to them.
And also because the idea of waiting 9 years for each game to be translated makes me a wee bit anxious... like waiting to drown in a dark cavern or something, you just want it over with
Bear in mind that technical setbacks (mostly related to the game's coding) are what kept the ToP project behind for the majority of the years. That's why things started picking up in serious during 2007; Habilain had acquired a lot more free time, and put together some tools to make his work easier. I picked up on some basic skills that allowed me to make a lot of cosmetic changes around the same time.
The PS2 Tales games we're working on don't have the same major technical issues that ToP did. Most, if not all of the essential stuff is doable without a need to hack the coding. In that sense, these PS2 projects in the end probably won't be quite as technically polished (at least in the foreseeable future), but we'll do the best we can with them.
The current main issue with ToP now is of course, being satisfied with the text. I'm very OCD with the damn script of the game. I've learned quite a bit more about the whole localization thing in just the past year or so. The vast majority of lines in the game have been rewritten to varying degrees since they were translated as a result.
I don't believe the PS2 projects will take as long. I think the script parts of those games will take a pretty long while (especially since their scripts are significantly larger than ToP's (which quite frankly freaks me out)), but at least they'll have full menu patches while we work on them (something that wasn't possible with ToP without making the whole game unplayable).
Author