Well, I'd played the import of SO3, and my crappy Japanese skillz got me through the game with a good portion of the story intact. Others on the SO3 board at GameFAQs helped out a lot as we struggled through the nuances of SO3. While I missed a lot of the data information (because there's a lot of it and I translate extremely slowly), I got through the game with a good sense of the characters and story. I just didn't do it 100%. Now that I've finally picked up the US version, I'm heading through it and reading everything I couldn't be bothered to translate months ago.

Which makes me wonder why I'd put myself through the misery of buying a game twice and beating my head against a kanji dictionary for entirely too long to figure out that the text I was trying to translate was a joke rather than a necessary piece of dialogue. I've done it before. Mostly I do it with titles that I don't think will come here, but I *knew* that Star Ocean was coming (just like I knew Final Fantasy X was coming). Shadow Hearts was up in the air for a while as to whether it would come here. I had completed it well before it was announced. I actually did rather nicely on the translation (or else they did a bad job). But I still played the US version. I did the same with Unlimited SaGa (which I disliked both natively and in translation).

I think I'm just a gaming masochist.