Cognition Dissemination: NIS America’s PAX South Panel Was Fine

When NIS America announced a panel for the soon-to-be-concluding PAX South, fans set their expectations for new announcements high — too high, in fact. They flat-out said they’d announce The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III for PC there, good news on its own, but others were expecting announcements for new localizations. Their current upcoming lineup is a little thin, after all.

Unfortunately, this panel wasn’t for that kind of news. NIS claimed through an announcement email sent to the press that they’d have “information that has never been revealed, along with new announcements.” You can’t blame some fans for getting a little too excited with that, even though the announcement made to the public downplayed the potential for big news. The announcements they made were still worthwhile.

The PC version of Trails of Cold Steel III will arrive on March 23rd, just a little over two months from now. The port will be handled by Engine Software and PH3 Games, both of which are good at what they do.

Engine Software has handled ports to multiple platforms, but especially Nintendo Switch ports like the Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch remaster and 2.5D horror game Little Nightmares. They’re also handling the Switch port of this very game, and handled the PC version of killer7, also published by NISA.

PH3 Games, meanwhile, was formed by Peter “Durante” Thorman, well known for fixing the PC port of Dark Souls within hours after its release. Expect this version to at least be on par with the ports of the previous two games, and perhaps superior to the PlayStation 4 version.

The PC port of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana received a significant update just after the panel concluded, also courtesy of PH3 Games. The overall performance has been significantly improved, along with the graphical quality, button inputs, and user interface, as explained in detail through the instruction booklet-length patch notes. An experimental co-op mode was also added, where two players can use characters simultaneously. But “experimental” is the key word here. It only works when two characters are active in the party, and is not an officially supported mode, so expect hitches. That they went through the effort of working on and adding it at all is alone exemplary.

The original Ys VIII PC port was well criticized when it first released in April 2018, which contained all sorts of performance issues and more. It had the pleasure of ruining the reputation of NISA’s PC ports after the polished efforts XSeed provided for previous Falcom titles. Now, the port has finally reached a better-than-optimal point, with results so good that fans are willing to forgive them.

Assigning this port to a new developer to fix after nearly two years shows how all the fan complaints got under their skin, and how they’re seriously committed to addressing longstanding issues they’ve had. But this shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise for a company known for publishing and localizing niche Japanese games that will live or die depending on how faithful their fans are. It’s as good as when they went through the large effort of fixing the original Ys VIII’s localization on PS4 and Vita after it released with a thoroughly underwhelming one.

The final announcement was for a physical release of Game Freak’s non-Pokémon Switch RPG Little Town Hero, previously released on the eShop in October. It will be available through the “Big Idea Edition” collector’s set, which will include an artbook, poster, lapel set, and the original soundtrack. Some NISA fans are questioning why this is happening, since it wasn’t the most well-received game this developer has been involved with in recent memory — this in a time when Pokémon Sword and Shield released. But it will likely sell for the novelty of a physical release.

This PAX South panel didn’t deliver has hard as some fans expected. One set was hoping for more announcements of localizations for more recent Falcom titles, such as Ys IX: Monstrum Nox and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, but there might be a good reason why they didn’t do that. Only a few months have passed since Cold Steel III released, a game loaded with text. They don’t have unlimited resources, so it will take time for them to finish the next Falcom project. They also could be waiting until the PC and Switch versions of CSIII are available before announcing the follow-up. Another set of fans was hoping for game announcements like a new Disgaea project, but those are more likely to happen from the Japanese Nippon Ichi Software parent company first, while NISA will later announce it for a localization.

NISA tends to hold a streamed press showcase in the early months of each year, and this panel clearly wasn’t a replacement for that. That’s where they could make bigger announcements, potentially including localizations of titles released by NIS and Falcom. But these PC announcements were fine for now, which should reassure them that NISA is taking current and future ports seriously.