christ, i'll never understand this with dub haters. i mean, show me proof that you actually understand that the japanese voice acting is superior in every way. that they stress the correct syllables/words, show the proper emotion, etc. grandia 2 is actually one of the better dub jobs out of there, and that is by no stretch a jab at dubbing, because it's actually good.

i'm not trying to start an argument, but you picked a game that actually has good dubbing as you're source for hatred of dubbing in general.

I could go into details regarding how they butchered the translation (frankly the game could use a complete re-translation, but that seems a little impractical at the moment), turned the most emotional scene in the game into a corny mess, and just generally overacted the whole script. But I won't, because that would take paragraphs of off-topic discussion, and would accomplish nothing in terms of actual results. And you know, it's not like I have never played a dubbed game that I was able to tolerate. It's just that since playing Grandia II I've always harbored a latent bias against games that are dubbed, and I always make it a point to play games undubbed whenever it's possible.

Putting that aside, I was actually able to get the PC version of Grandia II working (not sure why I couldn't do it the last time, other than the fact Vista was new when I tried it and possibly something they patched increased the compatibility), and so I'm going to attempt to take a crack at this myself. The only thing is, I was examining the text from the "compressed" file I posted earlier, and after taking a closer look at it, it really strikes me as odd. I had assumed that the reason for the compression having so much visible plain text was the speed vs efficiency trade-off it took to make it work in real time. But after closer examination, relatively large words being repeated in very close proximity with no obvious compression applied, and certain inconsistencies in the way the data stream is obscured, lead me to believe that this is not compression, but intentional obfuscation instead. This rather confuses me, because I would have assumed the data would be a good candidate for compression, and with the whole game being so tightly packed onto a single GD-ROM, space would be at a premium. Not to mention the fact that compression would in and of itself be an effective means of obfuscation, so there would be little reason not to use it. But no matter which way I look at it, the data stream just doesn't look compressed, even by a relatively inefficient means. I'm going to attack this thing full force with IDA this evening, and it'll be very interesting to see what I find.

EDIT:

You know, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the tonality in the way Japanese people speak is a lot more consistent that in english, but in general I do think it is harder for japanese people to screw up voice acting than english speaking people. Another issue that makes it difficult for the english voice actors to compete, is that the scripts translated from japanese often sound stiff and unnatural, and often the only way to get around this is to stray so far away from the original dialogue that you may as well be reading a rewrite. You don't get nearly as many complaints about the voice acting for stuff originally written in english, such as american cartoons, even though in a lot of cases it is easily as cheesy and over the top as the acting in dubs.

I was under the impression that a lot of foreign stuff in Japan is sub-only (especially U.S. TV shows... sorry weeaboos, you want a Japanese dub of House, you’ll have to settle for Black Jack). Disney movies are a notable exception.

There's a french translation on the way. Maybe they can help you.
Take a look here: http://dark.magus.free.fr/phpBB2/

But I liked the dubbing in Grandia II...