I meant the 34 000 Sections of dialogues that need proofreading.
Yeah, it is a massive game. The biggest cartridge used on the DS ever.
There's a reason this is taking forever, and that we're not attempting to translate the ~100ish pages from the physical Magic Master book, or the instruction manual as part of this release. We're not eliminating the possibility of doing those things later, but... this is a whopper of a game, and just getting the game to be playable and coherent is a serious undertaking. Plus, this is my first ROM hack project, so there's loads to learn (for instance, triple check your line length before you translate all of the 700+ imagen descriptions at the wrong length). I think I spent 3 hours rejigging imagen descriptions from 4 lines to 3 and only managed to make it through 85 of them, which is around 2 minutes per description. With 739 total imagen descriptions (so around 630 remaining) that means I have 21 hours of text juggling before the Imagen descriptions are proper. Then there are all the quests and the item descriptions (generally those are better, but... still).
I'll try to post more often than I had when my notifications stopped working, but if I don't respond for a week there's no need to send a search party. I'm not getting paid to do this, and I have a life and loved ones that deserve my time as much if not quite a bit more than this project. This is a project I'm working on because I love the game and the characters, and because it was one of the first RPGs I played through fully in Japanese (if you don't count the 2 Zelda DS games, which were more action adventure-y). As much as I love Level5 and Ghibli, and Oliver and Shizuku and all of the characters in this game, I definitely love my family more by several orders of magnitude, so... yeah. Don't worry if I don't post for a couple of days.
Thanks for the enthusiasm, though. In some weird way it is almost comforting that people would be upset if this project died. It makes me feel like all of my time devoted to working on this is maybe worth it in some way to someone, even though I can likely never put this enormous undertaking on my resume or get any official credit for it.
For what it's worth, Clyde Mandelin's MOTHER 3 translation happened when he was an established name, and in a time where companies weren't really sure what to do with ROM translations, and I think they just lucked out in never getting a C&D. The fact that their translation is so revered and that they were able to talk about it publicly and keep their jobs is a luxury that I feel few ROM translators get these days.
Long story short: The project is still going, it is just slow going.