Who translated Vagrant Story into English?

In 1999 the main English translator of Vagrant Story was Alexander O. Smith, a recent Harvard master’s graduate in Classical Japanese Literature who had joined Square’s young localization department under Richard Honeywood. The department was improvising as it went: on his first project, Final Fantasy VIII, the translators were not given access to the game files and had to hack their dialogue in with GameSharks during testing. Vagrant Story was the project where the improvisation became a style.

The famous fact about the script is that its grandeur is an English invention. The Japanese text is comparatively straightforward; Smith rebuilt it in archaic English idiom, giving Valendia the cadence of a chronicle. Crucially, he could speak directly with Matsuno while doing it, the first of their collaborations, working from the director’s dense notes on the world’s backstory. Smith has described his method on this game as revealing the inner English game that always existed underneath the Japanese one, and he counts Vagrant Story, with Final Fantasy XII, among his best work.

The verdict arrived immediately. Reviewer Andrew Vestal’s assessment, quoted by IGN, called the translation an unparalleled and unprecedented work of Japanese to English game translation. Smith’s later record kept the standard: Final Fantasy X, his last major work as a Square employee, won RPGamer’s Best Localization of 2001; he left in 2002 to found Kajiya Productions with Joseph Reeder, co-translated Final Fantasy XII (joining after Matsuno’s departure, without the direct access he had enjoyed in 1999), localized Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and reunited with Matsuno for the new Tactics Ogre translation on PSP in 2011.