At approximately 1.5 million Japanese characters, Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is officially done being localized into English, thanks to the gargantuan efforts of Xseed.
While Xseed editor, Jessica Chavez (she has her good days and her better days), barely survived the experience with a sliver of her HP bar still in the green, she managed to muster up the courage to tell of her grand localization adventure nonetheless.
Such bravery. On the Xseed blog, Jess writes:
Trails in the Sky… What can I say? It’s long. It’s so long that many companies have avoided localizing it for years (the body count has always been off-putting for some reason). Conflicting reports put the total game text at ~1.5 million Japanese characters, but all ‘I’ know for certain is that I worked from home 11-14hrs a day, 6 days/week, lost 7lbs, cut off 18inches of my hair and used the XSEED twitter account to further the cause of bacon on more than one occasion. In the end we had to employ a total of 3 translators, 1.25 editors (myself, and Tom had to jump in the last month to help me finish chapter 4) and one or two other helpful Sora no Kiseki experts that didn’t mind spontaneous Instant Messages asking about whether or not certain characters would be at home saying things like, “Lo! I am hoist with my own petard!”
Wait, did we say “done”? The truth is, she won’t be entirely done until the game is out in the wild (sometime in March), and she’s working on another project alongside this one. That said, you could probably make her life a little easier, by sending her messages to the effect of “Plz be my waifu!!” on the Xseed Twitter.
Published: Feb 12, 2011 03:02 pm