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I admire how you professionalized the J2E translation by taking out the unnecessary references and swearing. Also like the return to the SNES FF2 look for the text. All good so far.

However, I found something that really irked me. Talking to Kain at the very beginning of the game, I noticed you took out important details about his father, something that J2E actually succeeded in getting right. I've read Tomato's professional analysis of FF4, and I know that's a detail that was in the original Japanese FF4. I'm afraid of missing other details that even J2E, flawed as it is, managed to keep in there. I'd recommend at least going over Tomato's analysis before you start cutting details you mistakenly think J2E made up. I really do want to play your patch, as it is superior in almost every way. I just can't recommend an "improvement" that has more missing details than the thing it's trying to improve.

Multiple times I nearly stopped playing the original FF4 re-translation due to its cringe-inducing and painfully juvenile translation, as well as the unjustified 'artistic' license it took with the original Japanese script.

This patch fixes these issues, and does nearly what the original hack should have - restore the play experience as intended by the original development team.

However, I must mention some ugly bits remain - particularly the syntactically absurd usage of !!Punctuation!, truly distracting -sob-, -sob- emotive syntax, the overuse... of ellipses... in many... places...!, some remaining ALL CAPS nonsense, embarrassingly cliched and awkward phrasing, and so on. Also, the replacement of out-of-character cursing didn't always go well - now when Cecil addresses Kain as a 'son of a dog!' rather than a 'son of a bitch!'. Instances of these changes turn out to be rather lazy, and often not as much improved as they should have been.

More generally, I think the far better approach would have been to insert the original US translation into the Japanese FF4 - the minor precision issues and presence of subtle censorship is more than made up by its absolutely essential high level of polish.

That being said, with this patch, you can now throw your old FF4 translated rom away, and replace it with this one.

(With apologies to the original J2E team - y'all screwed up some things, but you also did ground breaking work that shaped the rom hacking scene today, for which we are all grateful.)