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 close the gap between Japanese and English releases for Nihon Falcom games.
“I can’t talk specifically about what we’ve done internally to do this, but I can say we’ve worked hard to make sure we localize [Falcom games] faster.”
“We recently announced that Trails Through Daybreak 2 will be out next year, which is a significant shortening in terms of… the timeline we had for the Trails games. And as you can probably guess based on the timing of this game, we’ve also been working on Ys 10 in parallel.”
While noting that the waiting period between the original and localized release was to be expected, Costa still said that “we [NIS America] I want to reduce that timeline.”
However, finding a balance between localization speed and quality was something the publisher wanted to determine – especially after Ys VIII: Lacriomos of Dan, NIS’s US-first Ys project for Falcom, was initially released in the West with major translation issues, which led to a retranslation of the game after criticism.
“We want to bring [games] as fast as possible, but not at the expense of localization quality… Finding that balance is something we’ve been working on for years at this point and getting better at. So hopefully we can continue to see a reduced time between launch in Japan and when [games] come out in North America and Europe, as well as at a high level [localization] quality.”
This coincides with statements made by Nihon Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo earlier this year, where he mentioned that Falcom and NIS wanted to speed up localization times.
With the upcoming Ys X: Nordics and The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II having faster localization than their predecessors, Falcom and NIS seem to be making good on their promise.
