A full playthrough of Nihon Falcom’s Trails series will set you back about 600 hours. Spanning two decades and several consoles, the Trails series began in 2004 with Trails in the Sky: FC and currently runs about a dozen titles long.
But, it’s not like similarly-sized RPG giants Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, which (mostly) tackle new stories with each entry. Trails instead tells a long, complex, and politically charged story over many games. Sure, it can be clumped into smaller sub-series, each with its own beginning, middle, and end, but the allure is the overarching narrative unfolding across many games.
When you’ve got a story that big and interconnected, keeping tabs on narrative consistency is key. A lot of fans, then, were disappointed with last year’s Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter—a modern remake of the series’ first game from Nihon Falcom and GungHo Online Entertainment.
While the updated gameplay and visuals were popular, many noticed significant irregularities in the localization. Names were wrong, pronunciations were different, new terminology was used in the UI, and on and on. Consistency is key in a series where even minor side characters or random NPCs in one game can suddenly become plot-relevant in later entries, which doesn’t work if names keep changing.
These localization issues were a black mark on an otherwise popular remake of the beloved game. Until now.
This week, GungHo announced the release of a “Legacy Patch” that not only addresses some in-game bugs, but also introduces a major overhaul to correct the inconsistencies in the English, French, and German scripts, including new voice acting and some updated graphical elements. It shows a level of post-release effort rarely seen in the RPG space (where’s our Persona 5 relocalization, Atlus?).
“Alongside our partners at Nihon Falcom, our goal for this patch was to ease the transition between Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and later Trails titles,” GungHo wrote in the patch notes. “To achieve this, we prioritized updates to English terminology and pronunciations of terms based on how much they impacted continuity across the series.
“We felt this was an important step in our goal to honor the expansive world-building of Trails and make Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter an accessible starting point for the series.”
With the release of Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter just a few weeks away, GungHo seems, well, gung ho about not just respecting the series’ long history, but also continuing to provide support for Trails games. With mentions of later games in the series throughout the patch notes, GungHo is hinting at a strong desire to be part of Nihon Falcolm’s future commitment to Trails.
The bigger question, though, as localization company 8-4’s John Ricciardi posed on Bluesky, is: How did this happen in the first place, and what’s GungHo doing to prevent it in the future?
According to freelance translator Liz Bushhouse, the original localization was split between two companies, with one handling translation and the other focused on editing. Bushhouse also suggested the localization was handled by a smaller- and greener-than-usual team without a lot of experience on RPGs. “Like going from the frying pan to the flames of hell,” she said.
“They also, from what I understand, had around 5 months for the whole localization [including voice dubs],” freelance games critic James Galizio added. It’s such a short timeline that Ricciardi, who has worked on Japanese-to-English localizations since founding 8-4 20 years ago, called it “practically abuse.”
It’s worth noting that GungHo has created a separate update branch for the Steam version of Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, which makes the new bug fixes available without the localization updates. Forking future patches is no small effort. While I’m stumped about who would want to stay with the previous localization (especially since it’s likely to be inconsistent with Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter), there’s a vocal part of the video game community who considers any changes to a game to cross the line into censorship.
Presumably this patch branch is meant to head off any such accusations. Still, it’s doubtful the replaced names will be available as a choice in 2nd Chapter, so it’s hard to imagine that branch having much longevity.
Terminally online gamers will no doubt continue this argument about the semantics of direct translation versus localization and where this project falls on that scale, but it’s nice to see a publisher like GungHo correct its earlier mistake as it charts a course for Trails to finally find the mainstream success it’s long deserved.
