Just to let everyone know, having reached V0.99 beta (project page updated), I am on the verge of passing this working ROM to Red Soul for the first comprehensive proofreading of the story and incorporating Shiva's latest revisions. From there, DRaken will likely conduct the final proofreading, then the game will go into full-blown beta testing. Garrett, I thought we might have some more poetry, but past Toran Castle, the teams entered much rougher territory such as ominous towers and lost undersea cities - not for those faint of heart such as we poor country bards!
Menu work and stabilizing this fragile game is taking much time, but the hard work of Bongo` is showing results. Just to share our latest endeavor, here is part of an article I lifted from an internal coordination board, concerning the management of Idols:
Our most recent exercise has been a bit tedious, but with menu expansion, we may now use words with the root "combine" instead of "join". Don't these four menu variations involved with Idol management appear perfect now?
I might as well mention here that Silva Saga-II has the most aggravating menus ever. Least little thing out of whack, and the game crashes! Game reassembly is also dictating hard and fast strictures to make the English format correctly. Among them, all of the main character's fighting companions and all mercenary team members must be spelled with five letters exactly, and all Idol names must be spelled with four letters. (Disregard the name "Sky" in the older save. It's now "Skye", and "Earth" has become "Soil", as you can see.) Also, most of the shield names are too long for some of the menus and have been respelled "Fossil Shld", for example. This was required because the game adds numerical values in places. i. e. "Fossil Shld +30"
Even with these fixes and workaround solutions, we still have a couple of probably unsolvable issues with punctuation. In one instance, an extra space appears between an Idol name and the period (.) at the end of the sentence . In another, an extra space appears at the end of a battle message between the last word and the exclamation point ! We will likely have to live with these.