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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Few game communities have had to learn patience like Japanese RPGs fans. Series like Nihon Falcom’s Ys have historically taken well over a year to see an official English translation. Yet the latest entry in the series, Ys 10: Nordics, is slated to launch worldwide three months quicker than its predecessor Ys 9: Monstrum Nox did compared to its respective Japanese release. According to publisher NIS America, it's a sign of things to come.

During a recent digital showcase of Ys 10: Nordics, I had the opportunity to ask NIS America’s Alan Costa if we should expect to see faster turnarounds on translations for RPGs such as this in the future. His response was to the point: "Yes."

"I can’t really talk specifically to what we’ve done internally to do so, but I can say that we’ve been working hard to make sure that we do localize [Falcom games] more quickly," Costa explained. "We recently announced Trails Through Daybreak 2 is coming out next year, which is a substantial cutdown in terms of … the timeline that we used to have for Trails games. And as you can probably guess based on the timing of this game, we were also working on Ys 10 concurrently."

The Trails series, which is also developed by Nihon Falcom, has garnered a reputation for being difficult to localize due to the enormous amount of text in each game. This is why many fans of the series were surprised to see NIS America announce that Trails Through Daybreak 2 would release in early 2025. It dropped the news just one day after Trails Through Daybreak launched worldwide.

"You can kind of expect [a waiting period] by nature of the fact that these games, you know, they’re released in Japan and we license them," Costa said. "But we do want to bring that timeline down."

That said, Costa stressed that regardless of how fast NIS America can localize a particular game, quality is the top priority.

"We do want to bring [games] out as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of the localization quality… Finding that balancing act is something that we’ve been working on for years at this point, and we’re getting better. So hopefully we can continue to see decreased time between the launch in Japan and when [games] come out in North America and Europe, as well as a high level of [localization] quality."

It’s natural that NIS America would emphasize translation quality, especially when it comes to the Ys series. 2017’s Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana was the first Ys game that NIS America localized, and it faced so much criticism for its English script that the company retranslated the entire game. Adding to this, the PC port of Ys 8 had several issues at launch, which led the company to enlist the help of Peter "Durante" Thoman to handle the series’ PC ports moving forward.

It seems NIS America has erred on the side of caution to avoid another controversy like Ys 8, but is now tilting its balancing act towards output. The warm reception Trails Through Daybreak has enjoyed since last month seems like a promising sign.

NIS America says Trails and Ys RPG fans won't have to wait so long for future English releases: 'We want to bring that timeline down'

NIS America says to expect faster localizations of Nihon Falcom's games from here on out.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[jshackles]

 

[West Texas CEO]

 

[TidusYuna]

Good, because i'm tired of sitting here waiting to play.

 

[Danjin44]

Things have really changed, we used to wait almost a year for JP games to get localized in west and now with most JP games we getting almost same day.

Remember Atlus released original Persona 3 on PS2 for Japan in 2006 and for west 2007 but now with Metaphor is coming out same day as Japan.

 

[StereoVsn]

Things have really changed, we used to wait almost a year for JP games to get localized in west and now with most JP games we getting almost same day.

Remember Atlus released original Persona 3 on PS2 for Japan in 2006 and for west 2007 but now with Metaphor is coming out same day as Japan.

If you look at the Trails schedule in the West, isn’t it like 3 years behind Japan?

 

[Danjin44]

If you look at the Trails schedule in the West, isn’t it like 3 years behind Japan?

For Cold Steal it took 2 years for NA and for EU took 3 years....god damn!

 

[StereoVsn]

For Cold Steal it took 2 years for NA and for EU took 3 years....god damn!

They had to add Spanish, German and French? Or do localizations for EU have more languages?

 

[Danjin44]

They had to add Spanish, German and French? Or do localizations for EU have more languages?

Honestly I'm not so sure, they might have done that for PS4/Switch version?

 

[Vyse]

Awesome news!

 

[touchfuzzy]

If you look at the Trails schedule in the West, isn’t it like 3 years behind Japan?

Pretty much, but they’ve also been pumping them out quick the last few years to get caught up. Once Daybreak II is out they’ll only be one game behind which is coming out in Japan this September.

 

[Thief1987]

We recently announced Trails Through Daybreak 2 is coming out next year, which is a substantial cutdown in terms of … the timeline that we used to have for Trails games.

Eh? It's only a cutdown in comparison with Reverie and Daybreak, they are still behind ToCS 3 and 4. But pr mouthpieces don't like to bring details to their blabbering, i get it.

 

[SantaC]

They had to add Spanish, German and French? Or do localizations for EU have more languages?

All other major jrpgs come out day 1 world wide.

 

[Mr Hyde]

Praise the Lord That's a big W for us Ys fans.

 

[Skifi28]

It's be nice if they brought the port quality up too. Talking about trails mostly as I don't have much experience with YS.

 

[Lorianus]

It's be nice if they brought the port quality up too. Talking about trails mostly as I don't have much experience with YS.

Im sorry but what ?, the ports that Durante does for NISA are from a technical stand point the golden standart of PC ports, The Korean/Chinese versions from Cloud Imperium Entertainment basically run with half the framerate and with half the graphics options available, the YS8 port was a mess at launch and then the Durante team stepped in and made it the best version to play by a mile.

 

[cireza]

Things have really changed, we used to wait almost a year for JP games to get localized in west and now with most JP games we getting almost same day.

Remember Atlus released original Persona 3 on PS2 for Japan in 2006 and for west 2007 but now with Metaphor is coming out same day as Japan.

You can thank SEGA for that, otherwise US would still be getting games 1 year later and Europe would still get 1 game out of 2.

 

[Mister Wolf]

I appreciate the effort. Will reward them with day one purchases.

 

[Skifi28]

Im sorry but what ?, the ports that Durante does for NISA are from a technical stand point the golden standart of PC ports, The Korean/Chinese versions from Cloud Imperium Entertainment basically run with half the framerate and with half the graphics options available, the YS8 port was a mess at launch and then the Durante team stepped in and made it the best version to play by a mile.

I'm not talking about the PC versions though. Some of the recent console ports have been terrible for no apparent reason. For example, The PS4 version of cold steel 3 runs flawlessly on a ps5, but the ps5 port they made recently is nearly unplayable with awful and constant stuttering despite barely any visual upgrades. I imagine it'll be the same for cold steel 4 and I hear some pretty bad things about the ps5 version of daybreak and daybreak 2. They should really step up the game and put some effort in their ports.