Thanks, everyone, hope you enjoy the game. I was actually pretty surprised to find out it was developed by TOSE -- the production values are a lot better than I'd expect from them. I wouldn't call it a great game, and it could have used some balance adjustments, but the core action battle system is actually pretty fun.
Several people will be happy to note that based on the feedback from our last couple of projects, I used automatic line wrapping this time around instead of hyphen breaks. Saved me a lot of time, so I can't complain.
I actually wasn't that interested in this project until after I'd finished it, when I played the old patch and found out just how -- let's say "dated" it is. While the inscrutable "translation" is the biggest problem, I don't think anyone at J2e actually bothered playing the game after the text was inserted; there are a bunch of bugs you can't beat the game without seeing. One of the NPCs you have to talk to to advance the plot has a broken text pointer, causing his dialogue box to open and close without displaying anything. Similarly, there's an item you have to use in battle to complete the game that's completely invisible in menus. Combined with the borderline-nonsense text, the whole experience is pretty surreal. Unfortunately, our translation may actually have hurt the entertainment value in that regard

Thanks for the shout-out. I still haven't done a high-quality translation hack for a game that I thought was worthy of a news post, so...
I knew the translator for Villgust Gaiden (and Venus Wars, which could also use a rehack) back in my Usenet days. He was a typical nerdy teenager, and his liberal addition of profanity was not at all surprising. I think his favorite game was FF5 (which we all referred to in the mid-'90s as "FF5j" for some reason, even though it was 'j' by definition) and he was also deep into the ZZT/Megazeux scene. There's still a lot of his posts on Google Groups.
Heh, I looked up a few of his posts. The games change, but the pointless arguments never do.
I don't really know what happened with his translation for this game. Most of the dialogue in the old patch isn't just wrong, it really doesn't make any sense, even given that it was translated without context and never edited. How do you come up with lines like "This butterfly is with the boat" or "We must rebuild the temple for entertainment!" and not think, "Hey, wait a minute, something's off here"?
His Usenet messages make it pretty obvious he was proud of his work, too. I guess the novelty of having fan translations at all probably covered for a lot of the issues. That and having a scene comprised mostly of teenagers looking for attention.
Which reminds me, I couldn't help but crack a smile at the note at the start of the readme:
WARNING:
This translation contains explicict
language (including the all famous "F" word),
and is highly not recommended for anyone
who cannot handle the language factor.
This is NOT a result of our adding in
a few words here or there, but is infact
part of the translation directly from
the Japenese scripts!
and please do NOT ask us to tone down
the language because we will NOT do
so any time soon. Thank you.