Usually the goal with any game at the beginning is to make it not suck in the time you are given. That said, I think every Japanese game has an inner English game hidden away, and once you start to find it, it sets its own bar and the goal then becomes to meet those expectations, again within the constraints of time available. Vagrant Story was one of those rare projects that was just screaming to be in English from the moment it was made, so the bar, though high, was very clear.

While a skilled translator is a great asset, the final product depends much more on several other factors, including:

1. schedule (show me a three month project that was translated in one, and I'll show you a poor localization) 2. the original team (some are very hands on, some are hands off, all with mixed results) 3. the original quality of the game text in Japanese (waaay overlooked. If you have a year, yeah, you can probably rewrite a poorly written game so it sounds pretty decent, but it's so much easier to translate something that's tightly written in the first place. The better the original, the less time you spend on damage control, and the more time you have to add value.) 4. the editor(s)!