Phillips said that the translation was a serious challenge. According to him, the team tried to adapt the game for a Western audience, but failed to preserve all the quotes and hidden hints. Some of the mentions were shortened, and most were lost altogether.
The localization process at that time was very different from the current one. In 2000, the work was done manually, files were sent via Outlook, which caused errors and data loss. Now, modern tools allow us to avoid such problems.
The translator is confident that a modern team, more familiar with the history of Final Fantasy, would have done a much more accurate job. But he added that Western players would hardly have noticed all the references - the previous parts also had a chaotic localization.