Whenever you're working with a game to translate, you always come across some sort of wall that prevents you from smoothly translating the in-game text. With Etrian Odyssey, the basic storyline reminds of the TRPGs that I used to play in high school with my friends where you adventure through a seemingly endless labyrinth, fight vicious monsters, and complete quests. This orthodox feel to the game made it easier for me to translate, since I grew up on classic RPGs such as the earlier Final Fantasy series and Megami Tensei series.

The challenging portion of this game was the specific limitations that the Etrian Odyssey team had to follow. When going from Japanese to English, there are always lines that are lost in translation and there are many words or phrases that are much shorter in Japanese. But because of this difference in languages, one of the most challenging limitations we faced was our limit on naming items, monsters, and whatnot.

In Japanese, a monster's name could be 8 letters, but when translated into English, it turns into a whopping 20 to 30 letter name. We managed to get everything down to what seemed like a reasonable 16 characters that we were happy with, but the limitation turned out to be much stricter, and the editor and I were forced to shrink all these kick ass 16 letter English names we came up with down to 8 or 10 letters. For god's sake, the word "Yggdrasil" is already 9 letters!

...Well, after much discussion and many cups of tea, we were finally able to shorten all the names down. I guess what I want to say after rambling on a and on about the problems we had, is that even though each game had its up and downs when translating from Japanese to English, this game was very enjoyable to work on and I hope that others will find this game exciting and addicting as I did.