Limited Text Box Space

Have there been any cases where there is no particularly easy way to translate a specific line without exceeding the limited text box space?

Plenty. We have to test the lines and revise them even after we’ve passed them through proofreading, because Japanese requires less space than we do thanks to Kanji (and well, Japanese also loves leaving clauses unsaid and simply implied via context, so we definitely need a lot more words to finish our sentences).

Typical offending characters: Ally (far too polite), Ringo (too polite/literary), Satan (too smug and uses too much silly english), and characters that talk more dramatically in general (Schezo/Raffina/Rulue/Klug, etc. because the words they use are longer and their phrases are wordier).

In the first part of the Color Tower which we just released, we struggled with being able to pun this line while also getting it to fit: 

The Japanese is “塔に　とうとう　とうちゃくだねー！　カーラの塔は　これかーら！” which basically translates to “We’ve finally arrived at the tower~! Our journey through the Color Tower begins here~!” with a set of puns in each sentence:

TOU which means “tower”, and TOUTOU which means “finally”, and maybe TOUchaku which is “arrival” + pun on the ENG word “color” written as KAARA and “from here on”, koreKARA (an extra vowel drag was added to the second part to make it koreKAARA)

Well as you can probably guess, even the straight translation would not be able to fit. So while we’re not happy about it, we couldn’t fit two puns like the Japanese did, and we also had to shuffle our wording to conserve space.

As a bonus, here’s some screenshots that made us bang our heads on the keyboards: