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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.
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.)
“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.”
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.