Greetings all,
Thought I'd visit in and share the news with you! A fellow by the name of "drx" has recently dumped about 1000 Sega developmental betas onto the internet, and among them were five different versions of Phantasy Star IV!
Unfortunately, it seems that they are from too late in development to actually show anything that wouldn't have made it into the Japanese final. However, they do shed quite a lot of light on the translation process!
For example, the earliest beta (May 30th) uses the words "winner" and "loser" in the opening montage, whereas by the August 15th beta they had replaced them with the far more appropriate "Victor" and "vanguished." Note the capitalization, which makes it look like the male name "Victor" rather than the common noun. They fix this typo by the October 27th version.
Also, the first two versions still use the Japanese "Rudy" rather than "Chaz", who appears for the first time in the August 15th version.
I haven't had a chance to play through much more than the the opening sequence with the principal in the various versions, but the early versions still contain a lot of awkward word and phrase choices (for example, Alys, or "Ryre" in the May 30th version, tells the principal to "get down to brass tacks", but in the final, she says "Let's get down to business")
I'm not sure if the entire game is translated in the earliest or even latest betas, hopefully someone with more time than I have available right to try and play through some of these.
Anyway, you can get the beta roms from the torrent link at this site...
http://www.hidden-palace.org/
Or in a slightly more manageable format from this site:
http://tomsonic.dyndns.org:90/sonicprotos/
Perhaps PSCave wouldn't mind hosting them as well?