Proto:Shining Force II

Stuffed in drx's massive February 2008 prototype dump were two in-progress translations of Shining Force II.

The first one, dated April 4th, 1994, has a first draft script that seems to be a direct translation of the Japanese text. This script features many spelling and grammatical errors, and is generally stilted and awkward.

The second prototype, dated June 7th, 1994, is very close to the final English game. This script is about one pass away from being finished.

Naturally, the bulk of the changes on these pages will be from the April prototype.

Character Names
All character names in the April prototype have their Japanese names. However, some of the romanized names here are questionable. Important note: The April script capitalizes character names in a sane manner. All drafts after the April one have the names in all-caps (BOWIE, SLADE, LEMON, etc.)

Additionally, "Red Baron" is consistently, and incorrectly, referred to as "Red Balon" in the April draft.

Items, Spells, and Monster Names

 * The Giant Knuckles weapon is "Gigant Knuckles" in the April prototype.
 * The Nazca Cannon weapon is "Nasca Cannon" in the April prototype.
 * The Leather Glove weapon is incorrectly referred to as the "Leather Ring" in the April script. This is likely due to its placement right after the ring items in the code.
 * The Wooden Panel item is misspelled as "Hooden Panel" in the April text.
 * The BLAST spell is "HELL" in the April prototype. This is a remnant of the spell's Japanese name, ヘルブラスト, or "Hell Blast".
 * The KATON, RAIJIN, DAO, NEPTUN, and ATLAS spells don't have proper names in the April prototype. The name pointers haven't been adjusted, so they point to the character names for Sarah, Huey, Jaja, Jippo, and Kiwi.
 * The Gizmo enemy is "Gismo" in the April draft. This is the only enemy name change.

Priest
The priest NPC refers to the party members as lambs in the April prototype. This might have been changed due to the implicit Christian connotations, or just because it sounds awkward in English.

The only other major change is the message for opting out of promoting a character:

Shopkeeper
Minor change for trying to access "Deals" when no deals exist. An extraneous comma was removed from the buy text. The message for refusing to buy an item was spiced up, just a bit. When refusing a buy offer from the shopkeeper, the April script uses the wrong to/too. The text for trying to repair an unbroken item is completely different between versions.

Caravan
The message for looking in the storehouse with no items is superficially different.

As are the messages for identifying item types.

The message for who can equip the item, however, seems to switch to a completely different sentence halfway through...

...and Rohde's line for trying to use an unusable item has poor formatting and verbage(not a word).

When recruiting a party member, Rohde says this:

Finally, here's Rohde's appraisal of an item's value, where gold is capitalized for some reason: