We’ve already pointed out in Trails Through Daybreak that there was a surprisingly long gap between the original Japanese release and the English localization, and publisher NIS America knows that this really needs to change.

Ys 10: Nordics is the latest installment in the franchise, and it’s already getting a speed boost, with three months less time between the Japanese and Western releases compared to Ys 9: Monstrum Nox. Usually, it takes a year to localize an episode of the franchise, which is no small amount of time. PCGamer caught up with NIS America’s Alan Costa, and the first question was whether the company would be able to get its foot in the door with translations, to which Costa immediately replied that it would!

“I can’t really talk about what we’ve been doing internally, but I can say that we’ve been working hard to make sure that we’re localizing [Falcom games] faster. We recently announced that Trails Through Daybreak 2 will be coming out next year, which is a significant shortening of the timeline that we used to have for Trails games. And as you can probably guess from the timing of that game, we were also working on Ys 10 at the same time.

You can kind of expect [a waiting period] by the nature of the fact that these games, you know, they’re released in Japan and we license them, but we want to shorten that timeline. We want to get [games] out as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of localization quality. Finding that balance is something we’ve been working on for years at this point, and we’re getting better at it. So hopefully we can continue to reduce the time between the launch in Japan and when [games] come out in North America and Europe, while maintaining a high level of [localization] quality,” Costa said.

Trails, which is also a Nihon Falcom IP, has a lot of text, so we’ve always heard that localization is not an easy task. That’s why it’s a surprise to see Trails Through Daybreak 2 coming to the West as early as early 2025. NIS America’s first Ys adaptation was 2017’s Ys 8: Lacromisa of Dana, but there was so much criticism of the translation that they reworked the whole thing, and the PC port was a flop. Since then, the company has been working with Peter “Durante” Thomann to get the ports right.

The company is taking it cautious, which is good.

Source: PCGamer