The interview's part of GOG's JRPG Days sale.
You can also check out the first part of the interview here, talking about censorship woes and Japanese naming conventions. It's largely a repeat of what Tom @ XSEED's said for years now, and I just don't find it that interesting to bring up at this point.
Last week we released Zwei: The Arges Adventure, and it feels like you had a great time working on it. Can you tell us more about your work on the game and how you approach localizing its brand of humor?
Tom: I've been talking about this quite a bit over on our Tumblr(/shamelessplug), but that's mostly because I can't shut up about this game! I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's the most fun I've ever had translating anything, owed entirely to the wonderful Japanese writing from Falcom. You can tell the devs just let loose here, casting away all their inhibitions and just writing whatever the hell they wanted, and the end result is a beautiful cacophony of bad puns, blunt proclamations, pure snark, and fourth-wall-breaking.
Ys VIII is the first game in the series that you did not publish – and which prompted an official apology for the localization (which is getting completely redone for the PC release). What's your take on what happened there, and what can developers do to avoid those mistakes in the future?
Ken: Based on the very active release schedule that publisher had at the time, one can only guess that the localization team wasn't given the time and resources needed as they were forced to meet a hard deadline for most likely financial reasons (since September is the end of a fiscal quarter for most companies). That was likely compounded by them shipping a total of four titles within four weeks of each other, one of which was the absolute localization beast Danganronpa V3, which would have required tons of their resources and have taken priority as it's been one of their top-selling franchises for years.
The localization team over there is capable of putting out good work if given the proper support, as I'm sure they will prove once the new localization patch is released. This is true of most teams and projects, but sometimes harsh financial realities don't afford people that luxury, so I'm not really sure there's an easy answer on how to fix it when time and/or budgetary constraints get in the way of passionate people trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities.
Finally, have you thought about expanding into other languages (i.e. Chinese, French, Russian, German, Polish)? After all, jRPGs have a dedicated audience all over the world.
Ken: We would like to localize into as many languages as possible in addition to English, especially for our PC releases which are worldwide, but the large amount of text in JRPGs can make that quite challenging.
It's definitely something we're looking into, but we can't make any promises just yet.
You can also check out the first part of the interview here, talking about censorship woes and Japanese naming conventions. It's largely a repeat of what Tom @ XSEED's said for years now, and I just don't find it that interesting to bring up at this point.