A replay of Mario RPG has been long overdue for me, and I generally enjoy giving retranslations a spin, so I was quick to jump on this release. After going through several of the scenarios, I feel like I’ve played enough of it to provide some feedback on its quality.

Translation accuracy: based on what I’ve gathered, the translation is surprisingly accurate for something produced by a non-Japanese speaker. Relying on translation tools generally produces questionable results, but the content here seems fairly reliable. I did encounter at least one example of what I assume was a pun in Japanese that may have been translated in a way that ended up nonsensical, but there wasn’t much of that in the early segments of the game that I played.

Writing quality: CoolCatBomberMan isn’t a bad writer at all. I thought the English was well composed and fairly natural, and the grammar seemed solid enough. He didn’t produce text that was objectively worse than what was replaced, and that’s always a good thing.

Presentation / Formatting: Here’s where I have some problems. On the initial release of this hack, CoolCatBomberMan’s rewritten text was done in a way that didn’t fill out lines completely in order to create some kind of symmetry between the size of each line. It was a rather unconventional approach, and the biggest problem was that the text he preserved from Woolsey was formatted in the conventional manner where lines were filled completely. We had a private discussion, he made some improvements, but also made it clear that he had no interest in fixing any further formatting issues. After going back to the hack, I found that there were remaining problems with lines not being filled, but also several other issues as well. With some text boxes, an input press is required after each small sentence, in other boxes, multiple sentences display simultaneously. Sometimes small, connected sentences are grouped together on single lines. At other times, they are segregated to separate lines. I’d say that the formatting needs a lot of work in order to achieve the level of polish and consistency that I expect, and the author doesn’t appear to be interested unfortunately.

I’m opting to leave the recommendation as a very weak “yes”, if only because a large segment of players don’t seem to care very much about text formatting. As for me, I’ll probably stick to Woolsey’s script for all its issues if only because the formatting issues in this hack are so distracting.