NIS America says Trails and Ys RPG fans won't have to wait so long for future English releases: 'We want to bring that timeline down'

Few game communities have had to learn patience like Japanese RPGs fans. Series like Nihon Falcom’s Ys have historically taken well over a year to see an official English translation. Yet the latest entry in the series, Ys 10: Nordics, is slated to launch worldwide three months quicker than its predecessor Ys 9: Monstrum Nox did compared to its respective Japanese release. According to publisher NIS America, it's a sign of things to come.

During a recent digital showcase of Ys 10: Nordics, I had the opportunity to ask NIS America’s Alan Costa if we should expect to see faster turnarounds on translations for RPGs such as this in the future. His response was to the point: «Yes.»

«I can’t really talk specifically to what we’ve done internally to do so, but I can say that we’ve been working hard to make sure that we do localize [Falcom games] more quickly,» Costa explained. «We recently announced Trails Through Daybreak 2 is coming out next year, which is a substantial cutdown in terms of … the timeline that we used to have for Trails games. And as you can probably guess based on the timing of this game, we were also working on Ys 10 concurrently.»

The Trails series, which is also developed by Nihon Falcom, has garnered a reputation for being difficult to localize due to the enormous amount of text in each game. This is why many fans of the series were surprised to see NIS America announce that Trails Through Daybreak 2 would release in early 2025. It dropped the news just one day after Trails Through Daybreak launched worldwide.

«You can kind of expect [a waiting period] by nature of the fact that these games, you know, they’re released in Japan and we license them,» Costa said. «But we do want to bring that timeline down.»

That said, Costa stressed that regardless of how fast NIS America can localize a particular game, quality is the top priority.

«We do want to bring [games] out as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of the localization quality… Finding that