Translation that I've come across: https://shmuplations.com/ecco/
It's the gems like this that are particularly interesting:
Now, some of this information is wrong as Ecco does not limit you to 2 lines of text and "blunt" and "to the point" messages mostly come from glyphs, but it's entirely possible Hasegawa-san had to work with something else we don't know.This also meant that the text in the English version was very blunt. “MEET THE WHALE IN THE NORTH SEA” … “ORCAS ARE DANGEROUS”… terse lines like that. (laughs)
The English version only had two lines of space, so the hints were somewhat abstract, and you couldn’t have any thorough explanation or guidance. I hate mechanical translations, and I’m always striving to make my translations feel organic, something with a real pulse. Therefore I don’t usually just translate things directly, but instead add a little something story-wise, or adding some explanation for the rules etc. I end up adding a lot of extra information.
One simple example would be the huge whale’s lines. To make him sound more like a wise elder, I added “~ja yo”
to his speech, giving him more character than he had in the English version. We also adjusted the program for increased text length, allowing for 7 lines of text instead of 2.
It's also this section that gives me a pause
I was under impression it were entirely Novotrade who made all the changes at the request of SOJ but it would seem that work was actually split between the two studios.Due to the volume of work we had, we couldn’t make any changes to the maps or anything like that. But we did adjust the damage multipliers, increase the number of spots where you can refill air, and decrease the number of enemies. For example, there’s one stage in shark-infested waters, and you have to get through it by defeating and evading all these sharks. We reduced the number of sharks there by about 2/3.
As we were making all these adjustments to the damage parameters, one of the main programmers, Laszlo Mero (an incredibly intelligent person who was also an International Mathematics Olympiad winner), created a routine that automatically adjusted the difficulty across all the versions. For example, if something did 1 damage in the American version, it would automatically do 1/3 of that in the Japanese version. That made it very easy to adjust the difficulty. So as you can see, the text wasn’t the only thing we adjusted in the Japanese version. For players who thought it was way too easy to clear, I recommend they try the Western version if they have the chance.