// KOTAKU — GAMING
Trails In The Sky 1st Chapter’s Mistake-Filled Localization Is Finally Being Fixed One Year Later
A full playthrough of Nihon Falcom’s Trails series will set you back about 600 hours. Spanning two decades and several consoles, the Trails series began in 2004 with Trails in the Sky: FC and currently runs about a dozen titles long.
But, it’s not like similarly-sized RPG giants Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, which (mostly) tackle new stories with each entry. Trails instead tells a long, complex, and politically charged story over many games. Sure, it can be clumped into smaller sub-series, each with its own beginning, middle, and end, but the allure is the overarching narrative unfolding across many games.
When you’ve got a story that big and interconnected, keeping tabs on narrative consistency is key. A lot of fans, then, were disappointed with last year’s Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter—a modern remake of the series’ first game from Nihon Falcom and GungHo Online Entertainment.
While the updated gameplay and visuals were popular, many noticed significant irregularities in the localization. Names were wrong, pronunciations were different, new terminology was used in the UI, and on and on. Consistency is key in a series where even minor side characters or random NPCs in one game can suddenly become plot-relevant in later entries, which doesn’t work if names keep changing.
These localization issues were a black mark on an otherwise popular remake of the beloved game. Until now.
This week, GungHo announced the release of a “Legacy Patch” that not only addresses some in-game bugs, but also introduces a major overhaul to correct the inconsistencies in the English, French, and German scripts, including new voice acting and some updated graphical elements. It shows a level of post-release effort rarely seen in the RPG space (where’s our Persona 5 relocalization, Atlus?).
Sky 1st Chapter translation makes me sad byu/FerretFaerie inFalcom
“Alongside our partners at Nihon Falcom, our goal for this patch was to ease the transition between Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and later Trails titles,” GungHo wrote in the patch notes. “To achieve this, we prioritized updates to English terminology and pronunciations of terms based on how much they impacted continuity across the series.
“We felt this was an important step in our goal to honor the expansive world-building of Trails and make Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter an accessible starting point for the series.”
With the release of Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter just a few weeks away, GungHo seems, well, gung ho about not just respecting the series’ long history, but also continuing to provide support for Trails games. With mentions of later games in the series throughout the patch notes, GungHo is hinting at a strong desire to be part of Nihon Falcolm’s future commitment to Trails.