Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: Trails and Tribulations

Many gamers aware of the PSP’s predicament back in early 2010 knew Xseed was going to run into problems when they announced their initiative to localize many Falcom games on the system. Not necessarily because the PSP didn’t have an audience for them — they were niche games aimed at the small audience that stuck with the system — but because the localizations of a few of them would require some serious work. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy consists of games that have some of the most text to ever grace a Japanese RPG, especially the second game. In a reasonable timeframe, it would take at least until the end 2012 to finish releasing the trilogy on PSP. The question is: would the PSP last long enough for that, even among niche audiences?

Considering the most likely (i.e. realistic) scenario, the answer to that question is “no”, even if you’re being optimistic. This means Xseed is going to have some trouble in localizing them.

This is the first game.

Unfortunately, the current scenario is even worse than that. The PSP is near death even among niche audiences at this point, and there’s no way Xseed could feasibly release the second game on the system sometime next year with how extensive its text translation and localization are. When you add XSeed’s Tom Lipschultz’s admittance that the first game didn’t meet sales expectations, a scenario where the second game can get localized looks impossible. With the first game not selling well and the second game requiring more money and time to localize, you can understand why their investors aren’t enthusiastic about them going forward with the franchise.

Of course, calling the game The Legend of Heroes did it no favors. Not because the name is generic, but because it immediately associates itself with the abhorrently ported and localized Gagharv Trilogy from Bandai Entertainment. As bad as they were, at least they managed to get the entire trilogy out over here despite the second game underperforming; though they didn’t have to face the troubles of a dying platform.

But that doesn’t mean Xseed is giving up. No, they’re trying to find a scenario where the second game could be feasibly released, with a plan that isn’t suicidal. That, of course, means they couldn’t possibly release it on PSP at this point. So where? The most feasible option for such a huge undertaking would be PC, especially since a version already exists on that platform. Xseed could also afford to take a while to localize it since it’s a platform that (a) everyone owns and (b) will never die. Xseed realizes this, but problem is that Falcom has no interest in assisting with the localization of any PC games, and the company no longer has any internal programmers.

This is the second game. It’s possible you’ll never play this.

As much as I like Xseed, I hate to admit that it’s apparent that they didn’t have a cohesive game plan in mind when they undertook these localizations; the TitS trilogy especially. And they can’t go the PSN-only route either since they can’t even put the Japanese version on there because of the way it was programmed — the game covers UMDs, and requires going back and forth through them depending on the area the player is in. Not to mention games don’t sell well enough on PSN for them to generate much profit.

Both XSeed and Falcom are trying to rally fans to help in marketing it to others and maintain hope that the second game will get localized, but that also has the potential of backfiring on a massive scale. If it does, Xseed could have some incredibly upset fans to deal with if they have to eventually announce that there’s no way they could profit from it its localization.

So yeah, there isn’t any positive news about the second chapter, or all future LoH titles. The fact that the fourth game — which works as a follow up to the TitS trilogy — is getting an enhanced port for Vita doesn’t help matters much if Xseed can’t even get to the second. (And that port’s site isn’t linked to Falcom’s website, which is curious). You have to give some respect to Xseed for being crazy enough to undertake this (along with many other games), but it’s possible they took on a little too much here.