I'm guessing that the Playstation's switching capabilities are basically the same as rm2k, seeing as to how they came out at roughly the same time(or is it the PS2 versionyou're talking about?) in any case, the events and switches are almost identical.

Yes, the switch counts for the entire game, but can easily be turned off. Let's say you want someone to say 2 thing's, alternating between the two messages such as:

and
You want the old man to say two different things? How? First you will need a switch, which by the way, are already made, you just need to name them in order to recognize them. Let's name the first switch Tyrranasaurus. Near the begnning of the game, have Tyrannasaurus turned on. Now you can have Tyrannasauras as your standard switch, to be used in everything less complicated. On the event page, have the event triggered by Tyrannasaurus. Once triggered you should have the event have the old man say the first message. Then, You should input the command into the event proccessing page to turn off Tyrannasurus. Once done, you should have the event turn on another switch, Cloud. This is where multiple event pages come in handy. Make another page and have it triggered by Cloud. Now enter the second message for the old man to say, and have the event turn off Cloud, and turn on Tyrannasaurus. Now when you talk to the old man, he will say the first message, and when you talk to him again he will say the second message, and the next time the first, second, first, ect. Another event page is just a way of organizing one event to make it do different things under different conditions. I'm not sure about the exact places or commands in which to input these through, as I've never played(if you call it that) any of the Playstation RM Games. I hope that I helped!

Atnas