So it’s been a very long road to get here, but finally the launch of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC is imminent. Looking back at the release of the first game on PSP in early 2011, we only had 9 people at XSEED – 3 people in executive/admin, 3 people in sales/marketing/PR, and a paltry 3 people in localization. It was a miracle that our localization team was able to handle the first game at all considering the volume of text in the game, not to mention all the other releases we were working on at the time, and the only way to get it done was to have our po’ main Trails editor, Jess (aka H.Protoganist), work from home for the final 6 months so she could edit it essentially 24/7 without worrying about commute times.
We’re a very different company now with 15 people, 7 of whom are dedicated to localization with another 2 to 3 from the marketing side who can pitch in when needed, but after the original title launched to lower sales numbers than expected, it was quite a daunting thought to jump right into the more-than-double-sized sequel with such a small team. This is where Carpe Fulgur stepped in to take that initial burden off of us, helping to lighten our load when there were doubts as to whether or not the series was worth continuing considering the huge amount of time and resources required for such potentially low rewards. And despite the many bumps we’ve had along the way during this extremely long localization process, we shall forever be grateful to CF for at least laying the initial localization groundwork at a time when we were not capable of doing so ourselves.
This doesn’t mean the Trails SC saga is over, as despite all the efforts made by our miracle programmer Sara, thousands of people will be getting ahold of it with a countless variety of PC setups soon, and even though it runs fine on all the PCs it’s been tested on, there are bound to be problems that we haven’t seen before. Thankfully, she is up to the task and will be watching the forums intently as soon as it launches for reports of any issues, so you may need to be patient with us as hopefully any final kinks get worked out in the days after release.
As for the PSP release, unfortunately we couldn’t get the European PSN listing up at the same time as the North American one, but we’re hopeful that it won’t be too far off as we’re in the final testing process now. The PSP version should have less chance of anything catastrophic happening (fingers crossed as I believe this may be one of the few, if not the only PSP game released digitally where data from 2 UMDs had to be merged together and offered as a “bundle”), but the tradeoff will be that any text issues cannot be addressed easily post-launch the way they can in a PC release (and as hard as we tried to double-check all text in-game, it proved to be almost impossible given the volume – have mercy on our souls).
In closing, we’d like to thank all the fans for your extreme patience all these years, as you’ve been waiting to see the continuation of Estelle and Joshua’s tale. The entire team here at XSEED feels equal parts relief on finally getting the game out the door, and sheer terror that the game is cursed and some kind of new epic disaster is bound to happen…but I guess we’ll find out together just how things turn out.
The game launches next Thursday, October 29th on North American PSN, Steam and GOG.com, and if you want to take a look at a trailer and some screenshots, you can check out its newly launched website here:http://www.trailsinthesky.com/sc/
I hope you all enjoy the game, and thanks for standing by us during this whole process.
Ken
Team Leader at XSEED Games (aka AngrySalesMonkey)