Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Maybe when Bongo` gets that handful of SS-II fixes done, and I pass the game to RS for the first stage of in-house Beta testing, he'll send down a PM structure for us to play around with!

Secret of the Stars had a 2-team system, but as anyone who tried to finish it knows, it was poorly executed. Much of the game, the second team is of little except as a walking save point.

Definitely not the case with Princess Minerva. Since each party randomly gets stuck in battles. You have no choice but to use all of them.

Here's one I just saw in battle for the first time, only the translation doesn't make any sense.

.OFFSET = { $0008048B - $00080496 }
.COUNT = $000C // 12
; [$01]は きを ためている
.TEXT
[$01] saved.
.ENDT

This is a battle message regarding a monster. In other battle messages you see statements such as: "The Sandman attacked." Or maybe, "The Sandman ran away." Or, "The Sandman guarded."

In this case you see, "The Sandman saved." But why and how would he save? One blow later he was defeated. "Saved" doesn't make any sense.

maybe he put up his guard?

This is the guard string:

.OFFSET = { $000802DF - $000802E8 }
.COUNT = $000A // 10
; [$01]は かまえている
.TEXT
[$01] guarded.
.ENDT

Maybe it conserved (saved) energy to have a more powerful attack next round. 7th Saga had a system and some Dragon Quest enemies had the same thing.

I believe you are correct. I think it is 溜める 【ためる】 (v1) to amass, to accumulate. So it's amassing "ki" (energy).

Well according to the electronic dictionary I got here, the verb form presented (tameteiru)
does indeed mean accumulate, store or save up (yes, yes, I'm trying to learn japanese on my own
little by little LOL).

Anyway, this expression is more commonly used when associated with money, so in this case
we'd really have to watch what the monster does after the message pops to see how the battle behavior
changes (and thus, what is the best way to adapt the message into context).

That said, without considering context, I'd say Ultpaladin is probably on the right track.

Beautiful! This explains why one of my people gets pounded occasionally. The battle messages zing by so fast in this game, it's hard to catch some of them. Sometimes, I look at script files during battles and miss them, too. Otherwise, I sit with one finger on a freeze button and try to be fast enough to jab it and see what-the-heck is going on. Thanks ultpaladin and Filler!

Red Soul, you will probably have a few more like this to sort out when I pass it over soon. I'm about half-way through my lightning fast second play now, and I keep catching new things to fix that somehow slipped by me the first time. Menus can be very fragile in this game. I will change this to "Sandman accumulating power..." or some such and hope the box will auto-expand like it sometimes does to hold it all. Then, I'll need to watch really closely and hope it flashes up again. This seems to be one of the more complicated hacks and intricate game systems Bongo` has reverse-engineered (besides Chaos Seed), and ironing out these myriads of details is taking me, like, forever!