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.
