Of course, now that Xseed has lost CS3 they can finally start working on the Crossbell games, right?...Right?
There are several hurdles about the Crossbell games that combine to make them a pretty unappealing commercial project for any localizer, be it XSeed, NISA or other party.
- For one, they're PSP games in an era where even the PSP's successor is no longer considered a commercially viable platform, which means they'll need to be ported from scratch. (Joyoland's ports are old, not particularly high quality and the ones who programmed them and would be relied on for technical support only speak Chinese, which is why XSeed commissioned their own ports for Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta instead of trying to adopt and provide support for Joyoland's work) Obviously this can be done, but it significantly raises the costs of the project.
- Both Zero and Ao have very large scripts. It would require a long and thorough translation and editing effort. Which also brings along costs.
- These raised costs for the project are a problem because neither of the games are what we'd consider visually appealing these days. Even if the publisher put whatever high-def assets Falcom has into the game, it'll look on par with the Sky games at best. Trails in the Sky FC had the good fortune to release on Steam back when JRPGs were very rare on the platform, but that's no longer the case these days. Zero might just sell about as well as Sky SC did and Ao about as well as Sky the 3rd did if we're lucky. That might not recompense the costs of both the mammoth translation plus the porting job.
- Another factor that will drive the sales down is the fact that both games have fan translations, which drives their commercial viability down further. While die-hard fans will still buy the games full price on day 1, more casual players who really wanted to know what happened in Crossbell but who already played through the fan translations might not want do that since they barely replay games anyway and will either wait for a 50% off sale or not buy them at all. Companies can't dismiss the absence of the "I want to know what happened"-factor in their cost-benefit analysis.
Back when 3rd was being localized, Brittany already pointed out these factors and why they were a major hurdle. That was when XSeed was still considered Falcom's only western publisher. There was one argument that could be made for XSeed taking on the Crossbell games and that was long-term viability and the idea that the sales of each individual Trails game would slightly boost the sales of the others. If Falcom had said: "We really want you to localize Zero and Ao and if you do, you can have first dibs on Cold Steel III, IV and eventual future Trails games", an argument could be made that even losing money on Crossbell would be compensated by sales from more recent titles with more modern appeal.
Falcom, however, has shown they have no plans to keep the Trails franchise with one particular publisher and will simply auction it off to whatever party offers the most money. This also means there likely won't be any incentives for western publishers to take on high-risk/low-reward projects for long-time benefit, since Falcom's eyes might start wandering again a few years down the line.
If XSeed had any incentive to take on Crossbell before, that's certainly gone now that NISA's taken the second half of the Erebonia arc. Would NISA be willing to take a probable financial loss for long-term maybe/possible benefits? I don't know, but my hunch is not any more than XSeed. I'd love to be wrong, but for the time being, I'm not really taking NISA's vague comments about being "aware" of the Crossbell problem as anything other than PR talk.