Tom

We meet again!

Remember on that post where I talked about working on the Wizardry remake how I said it'd be a while before I would have anything else to talk about? I forgot this game was coming out so soon after that! So I'm gonna talk about it now! Surprise: after chipping in on Reverie a few years back, NISA had me back to help translate the next Trails game by way of Trails through Daybreak, the first entry in the latest story arc!

Unlike Reverie, where I mostly handled a bunch of side quest and NPC dialogue, this time I got my hands dirty and handled one of the main story chapters in addition to all of that other stuff, so you'll definitely run into my handiwork throughout the game. As is series tradition, this was another gargantuan script to churn out into English at over 2 million Japanese characters total. But between my killer team of fellow translators and editors and easily some of the best project management I've ever seen in my time in the business, I feel we managed to churn out a hell of a script that people thankfully seem to be taking to, which is always a relief.

I can't speak for anyone else on the team, but this will probably be my last ride on the Kiseki train for the foreseeable future. Nothing at all personal, I'd love to come back and still do even more! It's just how the scheduling cookie ended up crumbling. Regardless, Reverie and Daybreak, which I pretty much worked on back-to-back, more or less consumed two entire years of my life. For as much as it can feel like the work on these games is never-ending when you're in the thick of things, they were nevertheless a genuine rock in my life as I was going through a lot of turbulence in that period in the background between my long-delayed Japan move and some various other personal matters that also ate up a lot of my time and emotional energy in my off hours. Always having more dialogue to write and edits to collaborate on these projects went a long, long way to keeping my spirits up during the more uncertain months and I'll be forever grateful to the support and generosity that was afforded to me by my coworkers and project management. I will perhaps always feel like a bit of a guest staying in someone's house working on these games compared to Tales, but my work always felt appreciated and embraced every step of the way, so it was a genuine honor to get to pitch in as much as I have.

Regardless, if you plan on playing the game yourself, I hope you enjoy it! Every singe person on that team gave this game their utmost and then some at all levels of the project and it's exciting to see such a storied series take its first English steps into this new arc on such sound footing. Now I really won't have any more credits to share for probably at least another year, but at least I'll be able to bask on this genuine high note.

Talk to you again about work stuff in 2025, probably!

So a new Switch port for Ys: The Oath in Felghana came out a couple months ago in Japan. I haven't seen a whole lot of chatter about it online in any language and I'd brushed it off thinking it was another DotEmu joint like the Origins port, but after a friend informed me that not only did DotEmu seemingly have nothing to do with this release, it runs more or less rock solid and boasts some modest, if nice extras, after getting back from Tokyo, I bought a copy using some spare store points I had lying around and... yeah, it's probably the best and easiest way to play this game portably now and it still kicks ass! Near 100% smooth FPS barring some brief drops during effects-heavy boss fights, voice acting that I assume is carried over from the PSP release, and optional updated character portraits that, in my opinion at least, are more tastefully done than what was seen in, say, the Vita ports of the Trails in the Sky games, even if there's maybe still a bit of an aesthetic clash with what's still very much so a mid-2000s Windows game at heart.

But my favorite extra, one that I'd completely overlooked until said friend informed me, was that it also lets you play the entire game with either the PC-8801 or X68000 soundtracks for Ys III (which Felghana is a remake of, for those unaware), which is a great touch! I've procrastinated on playing the pre-6 Ys games over the years because I just used to not be too keen on how the bump combat works. I still want to give them another proper attempt in the near future, but for now, this is a fun compromise as someone who's only familiar with the really famous tracks from those old games when Yuzo Koshiro was on music duty. I've been playing through the game with X68k soundtrack this time around and it's a good time; this footage below of a PC version mod that achieves the same thing demonstrates exactly how the game looks and sounds in practice. (Edit: Apparently the VO and bonus soundtracks are all things that got implemented in the Steam release a few years back, so I guess this one of those Falcom re-releases where they've gone back to maintain parity with Xseed's improvements. Thanks, @Ligana5!)

Less important, but equally novel to me is the fact that they've now added combat barks to Adol so he yells every time he attacks and while on the face of it, I could take it or leave it, it turns out he's voiced by the same guy who plays Bren in EX Troopers and has those exact same yells and inflections. So now every time Adol opens his mouth, I think of my dumbass anime son who likes eating hamburgers like some kind of Space Jughead and, y'know, there's worse things to be reminded of.

Anyway, Oath in Felghana, as great as it's ever been and now you can play it portably at the proper framerate without having to deal with Steam Deck compatibility issues. There's no English option in this release and no announcement for a localization yet as far as I'm aware, so maybe stick to one of the other versions if you haven't played it before. But if you know the game or it being in Japanese is no problem for you, then rest assured, they did right by this game, and I hope Falcom gets around to at least doing Ys 6 in this same manner if circumstances prevent them from redoing Origin again.

It's past midnight on release day in the west coast in the US, so now's as good of a time as any to announce my first new game translation credit in over a year: Trails into Reverie, from none other than Nihon Falcom and NISA! Yep, after years of swearing I'd always stick to playing this series in English because it'd be too much jargon to have to relearn from scratch, by god, they not only got me to walk back on that, they roped me into one outright with some of my favorite people in the entire industry and I had a blast working on it!

Unlike the last couple of games I've worked on, I worked in a bit more of a support capacity for this game, so you'll mostly only encounter my work in stuff like NPC chatter and side content rather than the main plotline, which was in very capable heads among big-time lore heads. But with a script as hefty as this (over 2.5 million moji, a series record!), you'll still absolutely find me in plenty of places. I'm especially proud of the work I put into the goofy magical girl shmup minigame you can play inside the True Reverie Corridor, which made for a fun couple of days to work on. Please give it some love and attention if you pick the game up, it's my kind of dumb.

That said, perhaps shocking nobody whatsoever, my "biggest" contribution to this game is probably all of the VR(-optional) beachside dating content you can indulge in while playing as Rean. For reasons I'm sure nobody else can imagine, there was no debate whatsoever who would be tackling that stuff once it came time to dig into all that. Tokimemo or Amagami it's not, but in the one game in this particular arc without any off-brand Social Links otherwise, I'll take it. I definitely had some good, cheesecakey fun writing a lot of that content, too; not a day has gone by since then that I don't miss getting to write Musse in her prime as a heathen. 😩

Anyway, all told, it was a genuinely fun project to work on with a lot of people I'd been chomping at the bits to collaborate with for years and it was a genuine honor to help localize the last game in an arc that's become very near and dear to me since belatedly taking the plunge back around 2018. This is definitely not the game to start with if you're new to Trails, but for the rest of you who have been waiting for this, I hope you enjoy it! All the TLC you've come to expect from these localizations remains intact and there's some fantastic English writing in it from the other team members that I think people are gonna be chewing on for years, if I do say so myself.