Tifa's weapon shop comment

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I worked as TL before, even though it was only about 20,000 lines I translated and did it for free. Essentially, most translators virtually have no access to the game whatsoever, making it extremely difficult to cope with certain lines if they use some context like the location you're at. Without knowing that this specific line was in Tifa's bar and that there is no second floor of that bar, it's very easy to make an error there.  That sort of thing happens a lot nowadays, but there's almost always someone poor guy in charge of checking those things now and fixing them if they dont make any sense. That wasn't the case back in 199x
 
hmm, just makes me think, if the translators were given a chance to play and see where the lines they're translating takes place, they might be able to better translate, but hey, i'm not square, so i probably don't know what i'm talking bout.
 
hmm, just makes me think, if the translators were given a chance to play and see where the lines they're translating takes place, they might be able to better translate, but hey, i'm not square, so i probably don't know what i'm talking bout.
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Square were extremely disorganised back then. I also get the impression that they're the kind of company that's so paranoid that they'd forbid access to the game to as many people as possible

There are also a much more general problem for this kind of thing: the game might not have been finished by the time they started the translation work. Granted, this shouldn't apply in the case of FF7 because the English version came out so much later than the Japanese one, but it's something to bear in mind.
 
look at 14... dont seem to organized now :P
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I dunno, I think they have a great plan: make the game more attractive by giving it away for free. ;D

Of course, it still doesn't work. I think they'll have to resort to paying people to play it.
 
i wouldn't play 14 for 1000 bucks, sorry, but from all the things i heard about it. utter crap, i'd rather play final fantasy versus 13 when it comes out
 
Square were extremely disorganised back then. I also get the impression that they're the kind of company that's so paranoid that they'd forbid access to the game to as many people as possible.
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Very much so. When Eidos began the PC port, they faced two problems:

1. There were certain decompression algorithms and technologies that Square refused to share
2. Square sorta... lost the source code to the final build. Eidos had to hastily find a late beta and follow Square development logs to return the code to its 'gold' condition. Certain fixes were supposedly very poorly documented.

Honestly, a lot of software companies are crap when it comes to internal documentation and change control. It's quite scary, really, that some massive dev companies can be so scatty. It doesn't help that some people have grasped the wrong end of the Agile 'stick' and assumed that any kind of documentation and procedural review is anathema.
 
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How the blazing kupo did they LOSE the FB-SC? I mean it's not like you make only one copy of that.
 
How the blazing kupo did they LOSE the FB-SC? I mean it's not like you make only one copy of that.
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unfortunately that sounds very much like something square would do
 
Probably poor organization.

I'm also becoming increasingly convinced that the people who wrote enemy AI had little-to-no contact with the devs who actually implemented the fights in the field, except for info on scene backgrounds (which some enemies are 'tied' to). There are just too many cases of complex, difficult-to-debug code that does extraordinary things (like transform enemies, spawn new ones etc.) or makes arbitrarily precise choices... that get perhaps 30 seconds per game, on average. Not to mention the abundance of creatures near difficult sections (where reloading saves and restarting the random number path reduces the range of encounters). Likewise, I think enemy design was fairly autonomous - that's why there's comparatively so many creatures in FFVII. I mean, look at the enemy rosters:

VII: 265
VIII: 193
IX: 197
X: 148

I get the strong impression that enemy design was done on its own, with a load of creatures created without much sense of context, then just kinda 'dumped' on the desk of higher-level field designers. I've heard the theory that a large number of creatures makes the experience varied, and I can buy the idea that Square wanted to showcase the new Sony technology, but it's an awful lot of design, animation and debugging for comparatively little return.

I'd like to know more about the development of the game, but the info is likely lost, and at any rate, it's difficult enough getting a company to confess its flaws internally, yet alone to the public.
 
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