How Trails in the Sky was localised: the XSEED years

In May 2010, XSEED Games announced it had acquired all three Trails in the Sky games. The first warning came quickly: First Chapter's script held roughly 1.5 million Japanese characters of text, and editor Jessica Chavez spent nine months editing it, by her own account working fourteen-hour days, six days a week, losing a tenth of her body weight in the process. The PSP edition shipped in March 2011 to warm reviews and, in XSEED's words, disappointing sales: the "large undertaking, low payoff" ratio, the company later acknowledged, would have put them out of business if repeated. SC, announced as certain, slipped year after year.

The rescue came in stages. In September 2013 XSEED re-committed publicly, confirming a PC release of the first game (which arrived July 2014, its ageing code substantially rewritten by programmer Sara Leen) and outside translation help from Carpe Fulgur for SC. When Carpe Fulgur's Andrew Dice stepped back amid a public struggle with depression, XSEED finished in-house; Chavez additionally spent two months re-formatting translation files delivered in the wrong structure, line by line. SC shipped on October 29, 2015, and the 3rd followed on PC in May 2017. XSEED then localised Cold Steel I and II (2015, 2016) before the series' English stewardship passed to NIS America in 2019, making the Sky trilogy the founding document of Western Trails fandom and of the series' reputation for scripts that break localisation teams. The numbers behind that reputation are gathered on the script page.