In an interview with PC Gamer’s Timothy Monbleau, NIS America’s Alan Costa opened up about the publisher’s plans to speed up localization and shorten the gap between Japanese and English releases for Nihon Falcom games.
“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.”
“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.”
Though noting that a waiting period between original and localized release was to be expected, Costa nonetheless said that “we [NIS America] do want to bring that timeline down.”
Finding the balance between localization speed and quality, however, was something that the publisher was looking to pin down- especially after Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, NIS America’s first Ys project for Falcom, was initially released in the West with major translation issues, leading to the game being re-translated all over again after criticism.
“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.”
This matches with statements from Nihon Falcom’s president Toshihiro Kondo earlier this year, where he mentioned that Falcom and NIS were looking to speed up localization times.
With the upcoming Ys X: Nordics and The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II both clocking in faster localizations than their predecessors, it would seem that Falcom and NIS are making true on their promise.
Then use AIs unlike people with hidden political agendas. You will save time and problems.
No. Generative AI is bad.
It’s not ideal, but I’d honestly take it over bad human localization
I’m Nonya Business! I fake think Japanese games are mid to troll/engage bait! I pretend to be a Nintendo fan but make character wars about every character in gaming because I’m jealous of Rosalina! I harass people if they don’t give me Waluigi!