RPG MAKER 2000 VALUE! IS NOW OUT IN ENGLISH!

First thing is pretty simple, in the enemy tab the item reward could probably be extended to fill its row. I found this when checking if nothing was mixed up for the enemies tab.


However my real concern was with the battle messages and the like. One shortcoming on RM2k is it kinda has broken english. In the original Japanese version there is a certain character between (Target) and (damage value) (string), this got replaced with either a space or a dash depending on the version. This is still present in this version, but your interface in the database gives the impression otherwise.


By default, many but not all of the default provided messages lack preceding spaces, which results in text like this. It's hard to tell what does it and what does not without testing.



Frequently throughout the database you have things like this, but it's not true to how the message will appear in-game. This is what I'm talking about above: any time you have something between information in the greyed out area, it can be assumed that there actually won't be anything displayed. It's just a space.



Here's what I meant about how the presence of a space is inconsistent. But not only that, a space now exists that wasn't there in the unofficial translation. The space leading gold reward looks jarring and there's no way to remove it myself - the first field is empty.


There are also several header mistakes. For the sake of clarification I'll also try to include the sub-message issues.

Page 1
Ally Kill (Critical Hit) - "Kill" may give the wrong impression. "Critical Hit (By Ally)" may be better phrasing.
Enemy Kill (Critical Hit) - Same as above

Page 2
In general - Anything that by default only has "!" in the input field is preceded by a space, resulting in text like "Alex 13 HP !".
Inflicted Damage to Enemy, Character to X - To is not printed.
Damage Dealt to Ally - Should be “Enemy taking no damage”
Ally evaded the attack - Inflicted Damage to Ally
Ally evades damage - Ally taking no damage
(Aside: message 2 and 4 of column 1 both seem to be about not taking damage, but I don't know if it's miss or explicitly about 0 damage, because there is also an "Evades a physical attack" string. So these could be "Enemy/Ally avoided damage")
Use Item, Character uses X - Uses is not printed.
MP Recovery, Character recovers X - Not necessarily MP as this also applies to HP. Recovers is not printed.
Stat Increase, Character stats increased by X - Increased by is not printed.
Stat Decrease, Character stats decreased by X - Same as above
Ally MP Absorption, Character absorbs X - Again, also applies to HP. Also again, absorbs is not printed.
Enemy MP Absorption, Character absorbs X - Same as above
Level Up, Character Level Up to X - this might be the one case where a change was made to create readable english! Because the full level string is only displayed on level up (iirc) I would often set "Level" to "grew to level" to make this bit read right.

It's still wrong though. to is not displayed. is is. (And of course we can see skill learning is one of those cases where the space is not present, yet level up's is.) The correct phrase would be "(Character) is (Level) (X)".

I think in the future it would be cool to replace all the term fields with a dynamic system, using full length text entry, that accepts text like "(n) took (v)(p) damage!", similar to the way VXAce functions with the Vocab module.
I understand though that this might require heavy modification that simply isn't possible, or if it would cause massive incompatibility. It would however allow people to create more natural sounding english (or even other languages), as well as setting the tense they want. ('is level' is present tense. So that's stuck like that.)

The rest of the pages are shop, inn, and parameter names, and I don't think there will be issues with them, except perhaps allotted space. The space is limited in characters, so pairing them with message control might not work out so well. Obviously extending the space will cause overflow if too much is used, but I think most veterans know this. (And others learn it quickly.)