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Kotaku: The Curse of Kiseki: How One Of Japan's Biggest RPGs Barely Made It To The US

C

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
While a lot of this has been posted around in various Kiseki related threads over the past few years, Jason's done the good work of consolidating this game's maddening journey to the west.

One day in March of last year, video game writer Andrew Dice wrote out a check for all of his company’s money. He stuck it in the doorframe at his business partner’s apartment in Portland, Oregon, then went back to his own place. (They live in the same complex.) He closed all the windows. Then, as he tells it, he laid down on his bed and picked up a knife, preparing to plunge it into his chest.

He was interrupted by pounding on the door, he says: It was Robin Light-Williams, his partner. Dice thought for a few seconds, then put the knife down and let his friend in. They talked for a while, and Dice decided not to kill himself.

...

Up to that point, Dice and Light-Williams had spent nearly three years working on the English localization for said “bad project”—a role-playing game called The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter. It’s taken nearly half a decade for Second Chapter to come out in English, and those who have worked on localization of the game say it was a hellish undertaking. Given the size of the script—over three million Japanese characters—and the many obstacles the game faced on its route to U.S. shores, employees at the publisher XSEED saw it as their white whale. To describe SC’s localization as “challenging” would be like describing the Pacific Ocean as “damp.”

Trails SC finally came out last week in North America for the PC and, unbelievably, the PSP, Sony’s second-most-recent handheld gaming system. That it came out at all is nothing short of a miracle.
Click to expand...

It wasn’t long before the editors at XSEED realized just how much of a burden they’d put on their shoulders. At 1.5 million Japanese characters, the first Trails in the Sky was much bigger than anything they’d published before, more akin to a visual novel than a traditional RPG. There were hundreds of non-player characters, each with their own names and personalities and lines upon lines of dialogue to translate and edit. XSEED editor Jessica Chavez spent nine months crunching non-stop—14 hours a day, six days a week—just to get through it all.

“When I finally finished it I’d dropped ~10% of my body weight and was down to 99lbs,” she told me in an e-mail earlier this year. She said she cut off 18 inches of her hair “in some sort of retaliation for the headaches the weight of it had given me while working.”
Click to expand...

1501431198788808848.jpg
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“Falcom was still so disillusioned from the less-than-stellar launch of Trails FC on PSP earlier that year, they weren’t ready to commit to SC just yet,” Berry told me. Falcom also wouldn’t commit to greenlighting PC versions of FC and SC, which would be essential to make the finances work; everyone presumed they wouldn’t sell many copies on the PSP, but they thought maybe they could carve out a nice audience in the world of personal computers.
Click to expand...

XSEED’s Brittany Avery, a self-proclaimed Kiseki fangirl, played through all of SC multiple times just to check terminology and ensure that all the pieces fit just right. It was a rigorous process, exacerbated by all sorts of bugs and issues that XSEED has documented on their blog. (One of my favorites: random text blow-ups.)

1501431198866636688.jpg


“The more you play it, the more you QA it, the more issues you’re gonna find, especially with the text,” Berry said. “For example someone like Brittany here in the office that’s a huge Kiseki fan, the more she would dive into the text, the more she would want to make adjustments, saying well this isn’t quite right because in FC this happened, or this is foreshadowing something that’s gonna happen later in the game but it’s not written the right way.”
Click to expand...

More at the link. Again, mostly nothing new to fans who have been waiting for SC to come over for the past few years, but worth a read for people just learning about the series recently with SC's release last week.
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
By Jason Schreier. Way more at the link.

Kotaku said:
One day in March of last year, video game writer Andrew Dice wrote out a check for all of his company’s money. He stuck it in the doorframe at his business partner’s apartment in Portland, Oregon, then went back to his own place. (They live in the same complex.) He closed all the windows. Then, as he tells it, he laid down on his bed and picked up a knife, preparing to plunge it into his chest.

He was interrupted by pounding on the door, he says: It was Robin Light-Williams, his partner. Dice thought for a few seconds, then put the knife down and let his friend in. They talked for a while, and Dice decided not to kill himself.

“I’m doing fairly better now,” Dice told me last month, recounting one of the darkest memories of his life. “I still have some rough periods, because I’ve had rough periods since I was like 14 years old… But in March of 2014 I was feeling like I’d fucked up. I’d led us onto a bad project. I hadn’t formatted things correctly... I was kind of a wreck.”
Click to expand...
Source: http://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-biggest-rpgs-bar-1740055631
 
J

JaeCryo

Banned
Nirolak said:
He closed all the windows. Then, as he tells it, he laid down on his bed and picked up a knife, preparing to plunge it into his chest.
Click to expand...

I can count with one hand how many times people have killed themselves out of depression by doing that.

That was a cry for help.

Crazy story though. Interesting read.
 
E

epmode

Member
Kagari said:
Just got done reading this. What a horrible situation for everyone involved and even though fans demanded this game back and forth the current SteamSpy numbers are sadly nothing to write home about... http://steamspy.com/app/251290
Click to expand...

I hope this picks up, somehow. I'm really loving the game so far but it was disappointing to see how quickly it fell off the top sales charts. Haloween sale on release day? $30 versus $20? Both?
 
M

Mauricio_Magus

Banned
I'm so grateful about them releasing FC, SC and soon Sen no Kiseki 1/2.





TC when?


Kagari said:
Just got done reading this. What a horrible situation for everyone involved and even though fans demanded this game back and forth the current SteamSpy numbers are sadly nothing to write home about... http://steamspy.com/app/251290
Click to expand...

What? Why the fuck is it doing that bad?

For fuck's sake, everyone buy this god damn game. 30 BUCKS IS A STEAL for this amazing title.
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Kagari said:
Just got done reading this. What a horrible situation for everyone involved and even though fans demanded this game back and forth the current SteamSpy numbers are sadly nothing to write home about... http://steamspy.com/app/251290
Click to expand...

Yeah it's moving really poorly relative to their other games, even accounting for the amount of time they've been out:

falcomf2k0f.png


By comparison, Tales just came out at $50 and moved 78,347 ± 7,392 despite being pretty high up there on the list of console game drowned in anime sauce.
 
R

Roldan

Member
Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

It actually reminds me of a two part article that also talked about franchise localization, but with Dragon Quest/Warrior. It was equally good, but I can't remember where I've seen it.
 
C

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
Robert at Zeboyd Games said:
For some reason, they launched the game right when the Steam Halloween sale went live. It was actually really high up on the Steam Best Sellers chart early on.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was a rather unfortunate mistake, and certainly not XSEED's first time tripping up at the finish line. If I remember correctly, they launched both Akiba's Trip and Ys VI relatively close to different Steam Sales.
 
N

NinjaCoachZ

Member
Oh wow. I was aware of these games and thought they looked interesting, but I had them in the back of my mind.

Reading all this makes me want to buy the game just to support the localizers. This is such a sobering read.
 
M

MrDaravon

Member
I'd only sort of heard about a lot of this from GAF threads, I wasn't following it super closely since I still haven't gotten around to the first game (which we bought at launch on PSP, RIP) but holy shit. Also terrible to read about the gentleman nearly killing himself over it, Jesus.

On a related note, this article mentions all of the crazy bug squashing and how PSP patches aren't happening at this point; has anything crazy or broken been found on the PSP version? Once I'm done with the current game I'm playing I'm finally going to get to FC, and we have it on PSP so my hope would be to get SC there as well for portability as well as carrying over whatever you get for a save, but I've been afraid to look at the SC thread because of spoilers.
 
Q

QFNS

Unconfirmed Member
So glad that this game finally came out. Its too bad the development was so troubled, but I can only hope this paves the way for more of these niche JRPGs to end up on the PC.
 
O

Out_Of_Ammo

Member
Nice read. I'm glad XSEED was finally able to finish it, working on the localization of this game sounds like hell. I'm currently finishing up my PC playthrough of FC and will buy SC as soon as I'm finished. I hope the sales will pick up a bit.
 
H

Hubb

Member
As much as I love FC, I am putting all hopes for the continuation of this series on Trails of Cold Steel. I am really happy they decided to release SC, and I bought it to show my support. I just can't help but think they wanted to get the game out, there was little fanfare leading up to the release.
 
H

Hastati

Member
Maybe they would have better success crowdfunding their games? Seems to be be a small selection of very proactive and supportive fans in the West, maybe it would be more cost effective.

Edit: if crowdsourcing also involved crowd-translation ><

This is really sad.....
 
S

Se7enSword

Banned
I'm so happy that they released SC finally. I hope they can justify releasing TC and Ao/Zero as well, but unfortunately the sales look grim on Steam (Albeit, very early and unreliable). I don't know the numbers on GOG or PSN though.

I played more than my part at the very least, hopefully others support XSEED by buying it too.
Mauricio_Magus said:
I'm so grateful about them releasing FC, SC and soon Sen no Kiseki 1/2.





TC when?
Click to expand...
Needs more sales first
 
E

epmode

Member
Hastati said:
Maybe they would have better success crowdfunding their games? Seems to be be a small selection of very proactive and supportive fans in the West, maybe it would be more cost effective.

Edit: if crowdsourcing also involved crowd-translation ><
Click to expand...

Visual novels do this somewhat often and it works out for them. I think they'd have a good shot at it.

Problem is, Falcom may not approve.
 
S

Stone Ocean

Member
Kagari said:
Just got done reading this. What a horrible situation for everyone involved and even though fans demanded this game back and forth the current SteamSpy numbers are sadly nothing to write home about... http://steamspy.com/app/251290
Click to expand...
Can't speak for others but the price got botched big time in my region. Supposedly they're going to fix it today but right now the game is more expensive than fucking Zestiria for no reason whatsoever.
 
R

Robert at Zeboyd Games

Banned
Hastati said:
Maybe they would have better success crowdfunding their games? Seems to be be a small selection of very proactive and supportive fans in the West, maybe it would be more cost effective.
Click to expand...

Quite possibly, but good luck convincing a Japanese company that you should crowdfunding a localization. Even suggesting the idea might harm XSeed's relationship with Falcom.

I hope SC and the series as a whole do well. On-going stories with tons of text to translate with no AAA graphics to bring new people in is a hard sale.
 
N

Nyoro SF

Member
Well, all I can do as a consumer is buy and play the game, which I am doing. I really hope this game does well for XSEED.

Especially I expect to see support from everyone that complained about them delaying the game. Including the ones that pulled Tom over hot coals in the thread last time.
 
R

Robert at Zeboyd Games

Banned
Poetic.Injustice said:
Those SteamSpy sales are absolutely terrible.
Click to expand...

SteamSpy's not all that reliable for brand new games.

Surprised they want to keep localizing these games since Second Chapter was such a harsh project for all involved...
Click to expand...

Trails is one of Falcom's two biggest series (the other being Ys) and XSeed is a long-term partner with Falcom. If they could manage to get the series to sell even half as well as they do in Japan that would be a nice win for everyone concerned.
 
R

razgriz417

Member
I wasn't gonna pick this up until a steam sale (no way I'll get to it anytime soon) but man I think I'll support the translation team and get this tonight.
 
N

Nyoro SF

Member
Also, the owner of Steam Spy has said repeatedly that sales that are registered under ~30k or so aren't reliable numbers due to the statistical extrapolation his system does, so I wouldn't take Steam Spy to heart until a good chunk of time has passed.
 
S

SpaceDrake

Member
Kagari said:
Just got done reading this. What a horrible situation for everyone involved and even though fans demanded this game back and forth the current SteamSpy numbers are sadly nothing to write home about... http://steamspy.com/app/251290
Click to expand...

SteamSpy won't be remotely accurate for weeks, at least. Give it time.

Anyway, I... think it was a little overly-soapy in parts, misses the fact that Robin managed to translate the whole damn game even after I gave up the ghost (and sort of feels needlessly hard on him in places), and I feel like it kind of glosses over why the series bible/master reference document thing ended up being so divisive (and omits the reason I gave to Jason about why we "seemed fine" with it at the start). It does give a decent overview of the situation on the whole, though. This thing was a struggle for everyone involved, but I'm still enormously proud of my work on it.
 
O

Out_Of_Ammo

Member
How come localization for Trails of Cold Steel is going so much better though? Is the script really that much smaller? I know SC is a huge game but it seems weird that another game in the series would be so much easier to localize.
 
Z

Zhao_Yun

Member
Mauricio_Magus said:
What? Why the fuck is it doing that bad?

For fuck's sake, everyone buy this god damn game. 30 BUCKS IS A STEAL for this amazing title.
Click to expand...

Maybe a lot of those who bought FC haven't played it yet and are thus not interested in buying SC already? Or people are waiting for a sale (which would be sad)...
I hope the game releases on EU PSN soon, so that I can give them my money.
 
V

Vena

Member
Nirolak said:
By comparison, Tales just came out at $50 and moved 78,347 ± 7,392 despite being pretty high up there on the list of console game drowned in anime sauce.
Click to expand...

Novelty/piqued interest in an unknown. I still don't think title one of a series coming to steam for the first time ever is indicative of long term activity. And, I think, this is a woeful sign to that very fact. Kiseki opened strong on the first release under novelty, fans, and word of mouth of a pent-up/hidden away gem, but the second title/release really won't have much to gain off of either the first or third options and it will only be drawing on fans or converted fans.

Of course, this is doing worse than even other jRPGs of multiple releases so perhaps in this case it was completely mismanaged for mindshare on release.

I wouldn't expect the next Tales of Valkyria game to hit PC/Steam to do the same numbers as their first iteration unless they really hit it off with a strong community ala Dark Souls.
 
S

Shift Breaker

Member
I've recently just started playing the first game on the PSP, I had no idea that it's got so much text in it. That's both daunting and endearing. I don't know when the second will make it to the UK, but I might buy it at launch just to support future English releases.
 
W

wrowa

Member
Even if you don't have time to play these games, please, please, please buy FC/SC if you want to show the world that there's still a place for charmingly crafted JRPGs that aren't total creep shows.
 
L

L Thammy

Member
Scanning through the article, this actually does a good job of selling me on the series. Might as well support it on Steam.
Although, honestly, I won't get a chance to play it any time soon.
 
Jawmuncher

Jawmuncher

Member
Vena said:
Novelty/piqued interest in an unknown. I still don't think title one of a series coming to steam for the first time ever is indicative of long term activity. And, I think, this is a woeful sign to that very fact. Kiseki opened strong on the first release under novelty, fans, and word of mouth, but the second really won't have much to gain off of either the first or third options and it will only be drawing on fans or converted fans.

Of course, this is doing worse than even other jRPGs of multiple releases so perhaps in this case it was completely mismanaged for mindshare on release.

I wouldn't expect the next Tales of Valkyria game to hit PC/Steam to do the same numbers as their first iteration unless they really hit it off with a strong community ala Dark Souls.
Click to expand...

Still think the surprise release and lack of marketing hurt it more. I remember build up and such for tits1 on steam. Not so much for 2 aside from "wait it's coming out now?" After everyone had spent their money on tales.
 
S

Se7enSword

Banned
Zhao_Yun said:
Maybe a lot of those who bought FC haven't played it yet and are thus not interested in buying SC already? Or people are waiting for a sale (which would be sad)...
Click to expand...
Unfortunately this is true on both accounts, and then when you add the fact that it released on the very day Halloween sales started, it hurt it more than possible.

Also, i'm really saddened that people are overlooking this for being $10 more than FC despite all the amazing content and bonuses you're getting for $30. It easily has more value per dollar than the average $60 game. :(
 
M

Matt Attack

Member
I'm 20 hours into SC and it's been really, really fantastic. Whether we get any other Trails games (aside from the Cold Steel titles) or not, I'll always be grateful to everybody involved with the project for getting it out in the end.
 
D

Dragoon En Regalia

Member
Please don't take SteamSpy's early measurements for granted, especially when the site devs themselves say it won't be until weeks or months after a game's release.

Evidence of SC doing better than what some have cited in here suggest: the peak player count on Steam rose over the weekend, and Trails SC is currently in GOG's top-seller list. This game will have less sales vs. FC on principle of it being a sequel meant for those who have not just bought and played a little of FC, but have finished that game and now want more. XSEED knows this and priced SC higher to compensate, at least for now, and they put FC on sale, 50%-off, on Steam/GOG to help market SC.
 
R

Robert at Zeboyd Games

Banned
Out_Of_Ammo said:
How come localization for Trails of Cold Steel is going so much better though? Is the script really that much smaller? I know SC is a huge game but it seems weird that another game in the series would be so much easier to localize.
Click to expand...

It's a much newer game so there's probably a lot more support on Falcom's side. Probably taking up more of XSeed's resources as well since it has a better chance of doing well (3D and all that).

How many games are in the series?
Click to expand...

Depends on what you consider the series.

Trails in the Sky FC is actually the 6th Legend of Heroes game. Then there's three games in the Trails in the Sky series (FC, SC, TC), Zero no Kiseki, Ao no Kiseki, and then Trails of Cold Steel which has 3 games (3rd of which isn't out in Japan yet). A big reason why they skipped to Trails of Cold Steel is that they want to start releasing the new games in the series closer to when they come out in Japan as opposed to nearly a decade later like they did with Trails in the Sky FC & SC.
 
M

massoluk

Banned
I'll definitely buy SC, but right now, I have way too much on my plate. I have to finish Tales of Zestiria first, hopefully before Xenoblade Chronicle X hit, so I may be be able to squeeze SC in between.

Bad timing for release to me personally, wedged between a Tales and a Xeno games
 
K

Knurek

Member
Reposting from Steam thread...

In the fall of 2013, Dice started sending script files to Chavez, who quickly saw significant issues in what Carpe Fulgur had done. For starters, the file format was incorrect; Dice and Light-Williams had worked in text mode on a CSV-formatted file rather than the spreadsheet mode that XSEED and Falcom had requested. “The way they had it set up was three lines in three separate columns, and all three lines are supposed to be in the same cell, so you just need a hard line break,” Chavez said. “So I just had to cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste.”

It took her two months. Chavez would wake up every day, open up OpenOffice, and copy-paste thousands upon thousands of words, all the while making tiny tweaks and corrections as necessary. Cut, paste, cut, paste. “It was very tedious,” she said.
Click to expand...

Who the fuck does that instead of taking an hour to whip up Python script to convert it automatically?

Like, seriously, this is something a first year IT student will do for lunch money...
 
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