Fans of games made by Japanese studio Nihon Falcom often have to endure incredibly long waits between releases in Japan and their arrival in North America and Europe—a trend that NIS America is determined to reverse.
For those who don’t know, we’re talking about the publisher that handles the localization, marketing, and distribution of the Western versions of Ys, The Legend of Heroes, and other Nihon Falcom titles, which fans often blame for the long wait times. In an interview with PC Gamer, Alan Costa of NIS America explained that the publisher has received the message from fans loud and clear, as demonstrated by their latest releases.
Faster localization, but not at the expense of quality
For example, Ys 10: Nordics will hit our shores on October 25, with just over a year to wait from its launch in Japan. That’s not a small amount, but we’re still talking about three months less than the timing of the previous chapter. And, again, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak hit our stores last month, but the sequel already has a release date set for early 2025, a situation that was unthinkable until a few years ago.
One of the characters from The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak
“I can’t speak specifically to what we’ve done internally to do that, but I can say that we’ve been working hard to make sure we can localize (Falcom games) more quickly,” Costa said.
“We recently announced that Trails Through Daybreak 2 is coming out next year, which is a substantial reduction in the timeline we had for the Trails games. And as you can probably tell, we were also working on Ys 10 at the same time.”
Costa added that at the same time, NIS America wants to maintain the high quality of translations, which remains the publisher’s priority. “You can expect a waiting period, because these games are published in Japan and we publish them under license,” Costa said. “But we want to reduce that time.”
“We want to get games out as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of the quality of the localization… Finding that balance is something we’ve been working on for years, and we’re getting better at it. So we hope to continue to see a decrease in the time between launch in Japan and the release of games in North America and Europe, as well as a high level of localization quality.”
