Falcom President Comments on Licensing Ys VIII to NISA and How Localization is Handled
When NISA announced they would be partnering with Falcom to localize Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana in the west, many fans were excited for the publisher to take on the action RPG title. However, others were concerned with the continuity of the series, since the previous titles were published by XSEED.
After the game’s announcement, NISA has been transparent in how they are approaching Ys VIII’s localization, by openly saying they “want to make sure it’s done properly, appropriately, and it respects what’s come before, while hopefully bringing it to a much broader range of people as well.”
To follow up with these claims and fan inquiry, DualShockers sat down with Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo to ask if he could share why he felt NISA was the right publisher for Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Kondo-san replied:
Specifically for this title, NISA came to Falcom with a really enthusiastic proposal. Their enthusiasm showed greatly in that proposal and offered things that were new and special that I had never took into consideration before, in terms of how they wanted to publish the game. It was because of that enthusiasm, and my desire to try something new, that I decided to leave it to NISA.
We followed up with asking how Falcom approaches localization and if they play a hand in the process, Kondo-san said:
When we license the game out, we trust that the publisher will do what is appropriate for the game in the region that they are in. That said, we make ourselves available to the publishers in case that have questions about anything in regards to localization and what’s in the game.
It was pointed out that Ys is not only in English, but it is also translated in Chinese and Korean.
NIS America senior associate producer Alan Costa added, “Falcom has made themselves extremely available to us during localization. We’ve always been sure to reach out to them and ask them when we don’t understand something in the script or want to see how it has been done in the past”
Furthermore, NISA is only one of several western publishers working on Falcom games, others include: Aksys, XSEED, and Mastiff. Translation and localization between publishers will not always be exactly the same, whether they are working on a Falcom developed title or not.
From Kondo-san’s statements, he is as confident in NISA as they are confident in their approach to localizing Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, which seems like a good fit for this beloved series.
Lucky you, hackncrazy . I got hooked on the series too via the PSP.
HIGHLY recommend getting it on PC- playing it with 60FPS and comfy keyboard controls is great. What difficulty did you play on?
In any case, be sure to try all the Ys games on Steam. They're not as fun as Felghana imho- but they're still great games on their own.
Also, hell! Ys Seven on PC. Very cool. I wasn't crazy for the changes it brought the series, but still willing to give it another try, especially with 60FPS.
Sure, there is, I used a gamepad.As for Origin, I really hope there is a way to play it with joystick. I don't want to play a game like this on keyboard.
Ys is my Zelda replacement and Legend of Heroes is my Final Fantasy replacement.Ok, just finished Ys Origin and I just want to know WTF is wrong with this world when masterful games like the ones in the YS Series are underrated in every way while things like FF receives all the spotlights?
For what I've played now, YS surpass pretty much every JRPG from the past 15 years in so many departments. The soundtrack is out of this world, the graphics are pretty good and, most of it all, the gameplay requires reflex, strategy and understanding how the game works.
It's a crime that this series doesn't get more recognition. Even if the rest is absolute shit, Oath In Felghana and Origin are far better than every Final Fantasy out there.
Nihon Falcom: "We want all of our games on Steam"
By Tom Sykes 2 hours ago
Great, because so do we.
This page on Steam is looking increasingly healthy, as JRPG-focused developer Nihon Falcom gradually ports many of its old (and less old) games to PC, and to Steam. Trails of Cold Steel is the next up, due in just over a week, but it seems the company has plans to release many more of its titles over the coming months.
Speaking to TechRaptor, in an answer translated by NIS America, Nihon Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo had this to say—in response to a query about whether the company was actively pursuing PC releases for more recent Nihon Falcom games:
"We have no hesitation about releasing games on Steam. Rather, given that we don’t have a large staff, we mainly have to rely [on] partners to help us realize a PC port. When we first started releasing games on Steam, we were initially unsure of whether or not players would want to play our older games. However, as we gradually released games on Steam and saw the very positive reaction that was much greater than we expected, we feel like we want all of our games that come out to [release] on Steam."
There aren't too many big games left that haven't made the leap to Steam, but one standout is Brandish: The Dark Revenant, the 2009 PSP remake of Nihon Falcom's old dungeon crawler Brandish, which finally received a North American release in 2015.
So yes, we can expect more Nihon Falcom games on PC in the future, which is excellent news.
Falcom is traditionally a PC developer. In that light, what's your view on Steam?
TK: All the people that I know that entered the company were really big fans of PC games, which is kind of why they started. However, in Japan the PC market gradually began to shrink. They were put in a position where in order to continue they needed to kind of shift everything towards consoles. We have a little bit of a hope that should Steam become more and more popular in Japan, that will give us an opportunity to return to developing games natively for PC.
Steam just recently became available in Japanese so that might finally help popularize it a little bit. Do you agree?
TK: Definitely that's the hope. If Steam would've been there to begin with, though, who knows if we would've even made PS4 games. When we were developing for Steam there was always kind of this grass is greener mentality about console gaming and, especially in Japan, the success of console gaming which is kind of what led us to challenge outselves to start developing for consoles in the first place. That ended up having a really positive impact as well, so it's kind of hard to say.