I've added simple compression to the game (helps immensely) and have used trailing bits of the final PRG bank extensively in my work. As a result of this, there is quite literally no space remaining in it; I even had to overwrite the internal rom name at NESRAM $FFE0 (ROM $3FFE0+$10ines header.) My question is this - is it a bad thing that I killed the rom name? I've played through the game in its entirety; it's quite beatable, and I made sure that I didn't muck with the vectors that immediately follow the romname at NESRAM $FFF0. So while it seems to be fine, I just wanted to doublecheck that there's no evil voodoo hardware reason that last line has to be intact.
That said, the translation itself looks really fantastic. I've got up to 15 letters displaying on-screen for item and skill names; three item names have been truncated as a result of the screen-size limit, but only by removing the space ("Mizumitama Spear" becomes "MizumitamaSpear", for instance.) Everything else remain in its full glory; no P.LTHR in this translation! The script was a tight fit, and some things did have to be clipped down, but thanks to the compression it remains largely true to its original form.
Esper Dream 2 looks even better, too! The 16x16 font has been chopped down to 8x16, and compression has been implemented for virtually all of the game's systems. The main dialogue only overflows by 236 compressed bytes (of 23676 compressed, roughly twice that or more decompressed); a trifle of a distance which I'm sure will evaporate as I work on polishing the script. It's not without its current issues, but they're getting whittled away at quite quickly - three days ago, the game was still spewing cavespeak garbage, and now it's actually looking quite nice!
