It sounds like localisation speed is a key point of improvement for NIS America, as the publisher has reiterated its intent when it comes to bringing Falcom titles West. As you may already know, the American arm of NIS is responsible for translating, marketing, and publishing franchises like Trails and Ys, in place of Japanese developer Falcom, which has never quite had the resources for a global operation.
Infamously, though, the West has long been behind Japan and Asia when it comes to the latest instalments. At its worst, it's taken years for some of the games to land on Western shores, but significant progress has been made in recent times, thanks to NISA's continued efforts.
Case in point: Western fans are now just two games removed from the latest Trails release in Japan, which is a huge deal when you consider previous release timelines. Indeed, Trails through Daybreak launched last month here in the West, and its sequel, Trails through Daybreak 2, is already scheduled for early 2025. This was pretty much an unthinkable scenario, even just a few years back.
"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," NISA's Alan Costa told PC Gamer.
"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 X concurrently," Costa revealed, during a Ys X preview event.
He continues: "We do want to bring that timeline down [...] 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."
It's a quote that'll be music to the ears of Falcom fans. At this point, it's worth mentioning that the scripts for some of these games are enormous — and so it's great to hear that NISA's getting the greenlight to push even harder with its localisation work.