NISA is a terrible publisher and I'm always amazed at how willing people are to put up with their shit. I guess that's what happens when they have a franchise you like hostage and you have no other recourse.
This is the company after all that, with their first Falcom title in Ys VIII released a translation that was verging on sterile and machine translated at times together with a supremely shoddy port. The situation was so bad that the CEO had to apologize and they had to retranslate and report the game. Like how does a company that leads with this get so much credence?
Just recently they released ports of other games that straight up didn't work on Switch and they banned users from their twitch stream chat for trying to inform others of the problem. When CS4 came out people who preordered certain versions on PS4 couldn't get the game for days. They raised the prices of all their games on steam sometimes up to 100%, with intended effect right after a summer sale to drive fomo purchases on top of changed regional pricing. And they threw Disgaea 6 out at $70 to the worst launch the series has had on PC. I can't find it now but there was a laundry list of every shitty thing NISA has ever done with their properties and this isn't even scratching the surface.
I'll continue to support OG falcom releases and the inevitable 4chan fan translations but am happy reducing my interaction with NISA published products to an absolute minimum or going to the second hand market instead. If that kills the franchise in the west so be it. But it won't, because fan translations were never a big deal and their reaction is unjustifiably disporportionate.
I can't believe some of the excuses in this thread. The CLE port 'stole' marketshare from NISA? Basically none (like 10%, reflecting maybe < 5000 copies) of the reviews are in English. If that's a make or break chunk of users, even assuming nobody double dips, the series shouldn't by all rights be localized in the first place. It's a patch you need to find on 4chan and/or jump through hoops to use a spreadsheet. It's one platform and requires purchasing a non-English version of the game. People will pirate the game more? People who would pirate the game were likely never gonna buy a NISA release regardless and equating piracy to lost sales is just inherently flawed, especially with a fanbase as devoted as Trails where people will often double dip to show official support for the games. If anything you're more likely to see spite piracy of NISA releases from the (again) sliver of people leveraging fan translations.
The sheer contempt that NISA has for fans to not even entertain some kind of dialogue when most of their upcoming Trails slate of releases is only possible because of fans is flabbergasting. It just exposes their hypocrisy: happy to use fan translations when it makes business sense, excessively litigious as soon as they expose how frankly unacceptably poor NISAs turnaround time is compared to every other publisher out there. Even when CLE does the localization after development its far more prompt than anything NISA does. And no other company gets like this with fan TLs. When Live a Live came out, Squeenix didn't go around issuing takedown requests on the old fan TL. If that's too old, back in the day Nintendo wouldn't even go after fan Pokemon TLs ahead of the Western release. The github projects and forum threads for those games are still up! Like it's legit insane that NISA is more litigious over a more niche product than Nintendo was with fucking Pokemon.
The absolute irony of all of this is there is a trivial way for NISA to fix this and it's exactly what they're doing with Nayuta: buy the rights to distribute the Japanese game globally. Put it on Steam years ahead of the official launch with no marketing. Let fans do their fan translations regardless and don't interfere, and down the road NISA can patch in their official script + do the other console releases and the actual marketing cycle. Nayuta already has a fan translation patch available based on the PSP fan TL and NISAs script will supersede that eventually, but in the interim they're not fucking over hardcore fans that just want to play a damn video game.
