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[Soulflarz]

Is there like a list of people to send <3 messages to endlessly >__>

 

[Robert at Zeboyd Games]

Well, as the guy who made that trailer, I appreciate the compliment. But I also disagree with it -- we've had some pretty spectacular trailers these last few years, including countless awesome ones from Brittany (her Last Story trailer was incredible), countless awesome ones from Kelly (I really liked her most recent Blood Drive trailer, and am really pleased with what she was able to put together for our E3 Return to PopoloCrois trailer considering the game was still 90% in Japanese), and we even had Ryan step in to deliver a seriously kick-ass trailer for Earth Defense Force 4.1 recently (the EDF games are his babies, and he really brought it all to the table with that one!).

Trailer-making is a time-consuming process, though, so we usually stick with two per game, soooooometimes going with 3 (though very rarely), and even sometimes just one (much less rarely). So Ys VI really didn't get any less trailer time than any other titles, and the trailer it did get was a pretty good one.

As someone who is going to be involved with an RPG trailer in the near future, have any tips?

So I'm pretty confident that SC will do well for us -- the game's just so long, it'll take a while for word of mouth to spread. But when it does, boy howdy!

I definitely agree! I think we'll see something similar here to Freedom Planet - media mostly ignores the game, but the word of mouth is great and the game steadily goes on to sell quite respectably.

 

[wyrdwad]

As someone who is going to be involved with an RPG trailer in the near future, have any tips?

Uhh, I dunno. You're never going to do it justice, so don't even try, I guess -- just make something cool that you'd enjoy watching, and other people will enjoy it too.

(Also, greatly looking forward to the RPG for which you're making that trailer!)

I definitely agree! I think we'll see something similar here to Freedom Planet - media mostly ignores the game, but the word of mouth is great and the game steadily goes on to sell quite respectably,

As well it should, since Freedom Planet is DA BOMB. My pick for game of the year 2014, easy -- and soundtrack of the year, too. Can't wait for the Milla story mode + playable Torque update next month!

-Tom

 

[Zafir]

Damn, I knew the process was rough but that really makes it sound like such a disaster.

It's just a shame that it came out at such a damn poor time. I only got about 2/3 through FC on PSP due to stopping because I didn't want to get stuck on a cliffhanger ending. My intention was to play it all the way through on PC whenever SC was coming out. Sadly, at the moment I'm trying to get through Tales of Zestiria.

I still bought it on release, but it's going to be a while before I get onto it. D:

 

[Thud]

Well, as the guy who made that trailer, I appreciate the compliment. But I also disagree with it -- we've had some pretty spectacular trailers these last few years, including countless awesome ones from Brittany (her Last Story trailer was incredible), countless awesome ones from Kelly (I really liked her most recent Blood Drive trailer, and am really pleased with what she was able to put together for our E3 Return to PopoloCrois trailer considering the game was still 90% in Japanese), and we even had Ryan step in to deliver a seriously kick-ass trailer for Earth Defense Force 4.1 recently (the EDF games are his babies, and he really brought it all to the table with that one!).

Trailer-making is a time-consuming process, though, so we usually stick with two per game, soooooometimes going with 3 (though very rarely), and even sometimes just one (much less rarely). So Ys VI really didn't get any less trailer time than any other titles, and the trailer it did get was a pretty good one.

The most effective advertising for our games is and has always been word of mouth -- if a game is good, people will talk about it, and if people talk about it, people will buy it. We've tried other methods of advertising our games in the past, but ultimately, that's what ends up scoring us the most sales. (As it should be, IMHO. No sense "tricking" people into buying a game with a good trailer if the game itself doesn't stand on its own as something totally desirable to play!)

So I'm pretty confident that SC will do well for us -- the game's just so long, it'll take a while for word of mouth to spread. But when it does, boy howdy!

-Tom

Trailers are pretty awesome as a first impression, but most of the times it's the music that sells me.

For example, I was already sold on Ys VI with that amazing intro, played it like a million times on youtube. So knowing you guys localizing it made my day. One of my favorite games this year with Brandish. Ys Seven really made me a fan of this series. So disappointed Falcom didn't show anything of the new Ys this year.

I wish I could like Trails in the Sky as much as I like Ys hehe. Still I'm really grateful for all the work that's put into these games. Gonna try a second playtrough of FC on steam soon. I'll definitely buy SC in the near future. With most XSeed releases it's more a matter of 'when I'll buy it' than 'am I gonna buy it?'.

First I have to go through those scary loading times in Blood Drive .

 

[grumble]

Question, Tom: how much flex do you have with the translation? Do you have any creative license with the text? Are you able to tweak things like the maturity level, the tone, etc?

Ps: congrats on the release!

 

[wyrdwad]

Question, Tom: how much flex do you have with the translation? Do you have any creative license with the text? Are you able to tweak things like the maturity level, the tone, etc?

I assume you don't mean me personally, nor even this project specifically, correct? Because I barely touched SC.

In a general sense, we have a LOT of flexibility, but as they say, "with great power comes great responsibility." I think it's our duty as localizers to ensure that we stay true to the intent of the original Japanese. We're not making our own games, after all, but bringing someone else's to a new part of the world, so we seek to make the experience as smooth and natural-sounding as possible while also remaining as true to the creator's vision as possible.

So we would not adjust the maturity level of a game, nor would we change the tone. We could, and I doubt anyone from the dev side would complain (at first, anyway) -- but it would be horribly inappropriate for us to do so.

-Tom

 

[chaosblade]

The fact there isn't any bad blood between CF and XSEED over this is a good thing. Seems both sides made their fair share of mistakes. Some blame may even fall on Falcom for being hesitant to greenlight anything which ultimately led to some of the drama.

Also good that it was a learning experience for everyone involved, but hopefully it ends up being more than that - a successful release. I don't put any stock into the Steamspy numbers right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's off to a slow start for a variety of reasons. Still, hopefully it isn't THAT dire.

 

[z1ggy]

Ok, i'm nobody but thank you XSEED. I bought SC to support them. I love the first game, so yeah.

 

[SephLuis]

I assume you don't mean me personally, nor even this project specifically, correct? Because I barely touched SC.

In a general sense, we have a LOT of flexibility, but as they say, "with great power comes great responsibility." I think it's our duty as localizers to ensure that we stay true to the intent of the original Japanese. We're not making our own games, after all, but bringing someone else's to a new part of the world, so we seek to make the experience as smooth and natural-sounding as possible while also remaining as true to the creator's vision as possible.

So we would not adjust the maturity level of a game, nor would we change the tone. We could, and I doubt anyone from the dev side would complain (at first, anyway) -- but it would be horribly inappropriate for us to do so.

-Tom

Let me say that I thank God you have this flexibility. The little things you guys translate and even add (treasure chests lines are great) makes the game even more awesome.

I am telling it's praises to a few colleagues of mine, hope they pick up at least FC this week.

 

[coredecepts]

All the little bits of humor, like in the very early photography quest: "MUST DO IT MYSELF" crack me up and add so much personality. Big games with tons of quests and optional stuff tend to have uneven writing, but it's really not the case here. Everything is a joy to read.

 

[H.Protagonist]

You guys/girls are all incredible. Wish XSEED and all of your own individual ventures the very best fortune.

Thanks for not giving up, even if it doesn't set the charts on fire you made a lot of gamers very happy through your perseverance and hard work. =)

Cheers~ I say thanks to the fans too for not giving up on it and for always being super supportive. It's been a long road, but we all made it.

Spoiler

Thank fuck.

I'm so grateful that we got this game, and sorry to hear about all the suffering the localization team went through to do it. It really is miraculous that it even happened, given all the issues.

I really respect the work you all did here. It's amazing and I'm having such a blast with the game that I feel a bit guilty that everyone went through so much to bring it to us.

In case you ever encounter something like that again, CHAR(10) is a carriage return in Excel, and concatenate function will add the text contents of different cells together. I imagine OpenOffice has some analogous way of doing this, but in excel =concatenate(CellwithString1&CHAR(10)&CellwithString2...) in one column, and then pasting the results in another column as values could have saved you a bit of pain.

Trails is really a standout. So many games drop you into the centre of this crisis where you have to save everyone. In trails I get the sense of being part of the fabric of that world - not just some outside contractor called in to fix things. It's all the little interactions with people, their minor political squabbles, the mundane everyday details - basically, that huge mountain of text - that make it all possible.

Thank you all for enduring it. I hope you've all moved on to projects that are more conducive to happiness and mental health.

It's a...special series. A special, alcoholism-inducing series. It's good stuff and worth bringing out, though. Much appreciation for picking it up. I'm just glad I moved on to XN while others now get to experience Cold Steel (aside from a very minor part I did there). Heh. Suckers.

For, the info, thanks. Not sure what that is in csv or if it would even work given all the special exceptions Tom listed, but I'll hold onto it.

I see. Using that makes sense initially but it has a ton of problems that can crop up by relying on it. Translation order, if someone isn't tasked with translating system text or isn't given that text, lack of tools to properly use it, among other things. Tying it to work flow is just too messy and potential headache. The separate file is a far better idea because then you can do things like hand off chunks of text to a few different translators instead of all the files for someone to work on or to avoid compiling errors, etc.

It's good you're doing it now for CS. You can hand that off TermDB to translators, not just editors, allowing you to utilize more resources in the long term.

Well, maybe so if you have a lot of people working on said project, but in this case there was only one translator, so there'd be zero confusion, and it assures that the correct terms are used even in the raw translation. Editing passes are meant to catch misses, not wholesale fix, generally speaking. Naturally, when having multiple people work on a project (as you say and is the case with CS) a single touchstone is best, though.

heh

Haha. I wondered if anyone had come across this one yet.

I didn't mean to offend, sorry.
It's just that the article made it to be a bigger deal (two man-months of tedious work in a project that has been delayed and delayed) than what you say it was.
Really glad you have that work behind you, looking forward to playing the game somewhere down the line.

No worries. There wasn't exactly a whole lot of context given in the article, so it's no surprise it sounded kind of dumb. Oh well. I'm kind of resigned at this point that I'll be remembered as someone who abused the shit out of Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V for the rest of my life. [-_-]/

Seriously though, Xseed do need to learn how to market better. The release came out of nowhere all of a sudden and was released in pretty close proximity to a lot of heavy hitters.

Am grateful for all the hardwork put into this game though.

To be fair, no matter where it would have been put, people would complain. Delay it further and it runs against even more hard hitters. It is holiday season, after all. Delaying it more would have also meant either pushing CS back (and getting more shite for that) or truncating the buffer we've tried to put between them that people have been crying for (more unhappiness for fans here). People have also been clamoring for its release for, well, ages, so...we got it out.

As someone who is going to be involved with an RPG trailer in the near future, have any tips?

Harden your heart. I did one trailer at XSEED. I no longer have to do trailers at XSEED.

 

[Hours Left]

I really hope the sales come through for this game. It deserves every last one of them.

 

[ZettaiSeigi]

I have never played a Trails in the Sky game before but I think I'm going to pick this and the first game up on the PSN in the next few days. It's basically to support the people who made the localization possible (and for such heavy toll on their personal lives), but I heard they're also excellent games so it shouldn't really be an issue.

I hope that more people would also buy the game soon. I really enjoy my JRPGs and this might as well be a great addition to my currently small library.

And while we're at it, isn't there going to be a Falcom game for the PS4? Or did I just imagine that?

 

[Knurek]

Honestly, on some level I too want to see Gagharv re-localized despite the million hurdles standing in the way, just because the Namco versions were so poorly handled. Those games, Vermillion Tear in particular, deserved better than they got.

Hoo boy, though. You want to talk about hard sells... the only way I could see them selling at all would be as a three-pack of some sort of all the games together. Anything else would just result in head-scratching.

Just promote them as 'lost chapters' in the Baldur's Gate trilogy.
Instant best sellers on GOG.

 

[Psxphile]

And while we're at it, isn't there going to be a Falcom game for the PS4? Or did I just imagine that?

Yes, the next Ys title will be on PS4/Vita. They were originally targeting late 2015 in Japan but it seems to have been pushed back, probably to properly push Tokyo Xanadu.

 

[ZettaiSeigi]

Yes, the next Ys title will be on PS4/Vita. They were originally targeting late 2015 in Japan but it seems to have been pushed back, probably to properly push Tokyo Xanadu.

That's awesome! Thanks for the confirmation. I hope it's something I could play on its own as I've never played the former Ys games. I really want to but I just have very limited time for games right now. :-(

 

[Morrigan Stark]

Yes, the next Ys title will be on PS4/Vita. They were originally targeting late 2015 in Japan but it seems to have been pushed back, probably to properly push Tokyo Xanadu.

Has there been any news at all on this front? I haven't heard a peep since the initial reveal, which was a while ago now.

 

[Psxphile]

Has there been any news at all on this front? I haven't heard a peep since the initial reveal, which was a while ago now.

Nothing yet. FALCOM has been relatively silent on that front, but now that Tokyo Xanadu is out they should be getting ready to release more info soon. Maybe.

 

[Erheller]

Well, as the guy who made that trailer, I appreciate the compliment. But I also disagree with it -- we've had some pretty spectacular trailers these last few years, including countless awesome ones from Brittany (her Last Story trailer was incredible), countless awesome ones from Kelly (I really liked her most recent Blood Drive trailer, and am really pleased with what she was able to put together for our E3 Return to PopoloCrois trailer considering the game was still 90% in Japanese), and we even had Ryan step in to deliver a seriously kick-ass trailer for Earth Defense Force 4.1 recently (the EDF games are his babies, and he really brought it all to the table with that one!).

Trailer-making is a time-consuming process, though, so we usually stick with two per game, soooooometimes going with 3 (though very rarely), and even sometimes just one (much less rarely). So Ys VI really didn't get any less trailer time than any other titles, and the trailer it did get was a pretty good one.

The most effective advertising for our games is and has always been word of mouth -- if a game is good, people will talk about it, and if people talk about it, people will buy it. We've tried other methods of advertising our games in the past, but ultimately, that's what ends up scoring us the most sales. (As it should be, IMHO. No sense "tricking" people into buying a game with a good trailer if the game itself doesn't stand on its own as something totally desirable to play!)

So I'm pretty confident that SC will do well for us -- the game's just so long, it'll take a while for word of mouth to spread. But when it does, boy howdy!

-Tom

I just looked up the trailer for The Last Story, and wow, it really is good.

Spoiler

I still don't get how people can say that the Xenoblade dub is better than The Last Story's /rant

I don't think I've posted in this thread yet, so I'll say it here. Thanks, XSEED, for making this happen, and for making this the best release possible considering the circumstances. It's obvious how much effort and love is put into each of your localizations, and I don't think it's a coincidence that some of my favorite games are ones that you guys translated.

Also huge thanks to Carpe Fulgur for their work on SC. I enjoyed Recettear, and the writing in SC is really good. I'll be looking forward to whatever game you translate next!

 

[Dragoon En Regalia]

Hopefully Xanadu Next turns out much better for XSEED and Falcom on Steam/GOG, as it has novelty, could definitely get a better launch window than Ys VI/SC, and has very positive word of mouth overall. I'd love to it see a lot more people get into the game and realize how cool this developer is.

 

[zero shift]

As well it should, since Freedom Planet is DA BOMB. My pick for game of the year 2014, easy -- and soundtrack of the year, too. Can't wait for the Milla story mode + playable Torque update next month!

-Tom

Freedom Planet is in my top 10 of all-time. Best platformer ever made.

 

[Pranay]

Then you haven't been looking very hard, because we've been talking about it every chance we get! Especially on Twitter.

-Tom

You guys are getting decent organic like/followers but are not making full use of it especially on Facebook (since organic likes and reach are mostly dead on FB)

Ive seen your FB and Twitter account, you guys need to take these platforms seriously, if you really wish to promote your games and trust me it will give you guys good results.

Your strategy is basically is non existent on Social Media Platforms, you need to start putting good content, proper targeting and a specific tone to use social media platform better.

Its mostly awareness ---> action

where as it should be awareness -> interest --> desire ---> action giving each stage proper time.

 

[Steel]

Guys, remember, the PC market is more like a marathon. The game could doing better on long term.

Also, Tom, I'd like to thank your team for have brought the game to us after so many troubles. I'm really enjoying it so far.

Yeah, and to be fair, according to steamspy FC did 100k, so as people finish it SC should get more buys. However, it does sort of limit the number of possible sales. It will never sell better than FC, at minimum(to be fair, people are still buying FC though).

 

[Nerokis]

Yeah, and to be fair, according to steamspy FC did 100k, so as people finish it SC should get more buys. However, it does sort of limit the number of possible sales. It will never sell better than FC, at minimum(to be fair, people are still buying FC though).

I would like to see it partly as a "selling the brand" thing. It's good people can start the series with a basic confidence they'll be able to see out the main story. SC will never surpass FC, but perhaps it can boost it. Besides, FC itself didn't do so well out the gate (having to deal with its own disadvantages, of course, like being limited to the PSP). The PC version benefited from the fact that so much positive word of mouth had built up over the years. As people go through SC, hopefully it will continue coming up in threads, articles, etc., and settle into a solid place in the public consciousness. I can see SC standing out during sales and such things for a long time to come.