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The Legend of Heroes: Trails Series - Localization Blog #2

Hi, kids!

This is Brittany, Localization Producer at XSEED, editor/graphic text monkey/what-have-you for Trails in the Sky the 3rd, and current head for the Trails series in general. I’m very eager to write this blog, because it’ll be full of updates for FC, SC, and the 3rd.

Let’s get the 3rd’s status out of the way: schedule-wise, we’re currently doing great! When we announced this game last year, I was dead set on getting it out by spring 2017, so I’m very proud to say that goal is being met. Trails in the Sky the 3rd is coming to PC in English on…a date you’ll find out very, very soon.

Barring typos or odd QA hiccups (which can happen when “smashing” PSP and PC code together to get the best of both worlds), the game is in pretty good shape and we’re right where we need to be. It’s cleaning up very well.

               | QA is a sexy time and I won’t let you take it away from me.

I’d like to start by properly warning Trails newbies first: please play Trails in the Sky’s first and second chapters before playing the 3rd. Heck, please play them before even reading this blog! Although the 3rd is not a “third chapter” since the Estelle and Liberl’s story wrapped up with SC, this story still relies on knowledge gained by playing those two games. Internally, I’ve said before that the 3rd has only one target audience: people who’ve played both Trails FC and SC. Cold Steel fans will understand some of the lore dumping, but other details will be quite lost on lost you. Though, hey, if you want to purchase it anyway and help support my coffee fund, I ain’t gonna stop you. (Please buy it and play it later. I’m desperate, here.)

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Localization Blog #2

Hey, guys,

This is Brittany, Production Coordinator at XSEED. You might remember me from one of my past blogs regarding the Trails series—not as an editor, but as a staunch supporter from the shadows. Or a rabid, downright unbearable fan, as the actual editors for Trails in the Sky FC, SC, and Trails of Cold Steel might say.

There was a point in Cold Steel’s localization—say, a month or so before voice recording—where the editors at the time realized they wouldn’t be able to finish editing the game and work on 10,000 lines of audio at the same time. Maybe if they chose not to sleep, which I suppose is acceptable, but the company as a whole thought better of that. It was the first time anyone on the team had worked on a game with so many voiced lines, and they were plenty focused on polishing the text in the game before they realized that recording was around the corner. Having plenty of experience working with voiceover (one whole time in the booth for Lord of Magna: Maiden Heaven) and a convenient opening in my schedule, I went right to work. We had our E3 2015 early build of Cold Steel sitting around with the raw English translation, so I spent every night after work playing to make sure I had context, then spent much of the day organizing voice files for our recording studio’s convenience.

Now, Lord of Magna had around 1,600 voice files, and they didn’t really require anything special; filters like echoes weren’t required, and “hard limit” audio files—files that are required to be within the exact same time as the Japanese audio—were only the grunts and cries from battles, so it was fairly easy. Trails of Cold Steel? Not so easy.

Before we even get to the point of sorting out voice files, who said what, and all that jazz, I’d like to take a moment to remind everyone: this is Trails. It’s seven games so far, every game connects within two and a half-ish years, and characters from three, four, five games ago love to randomly show up and say their piece. There were close to 60~ characters to record, some big and some small, for Cold Steel, and we had to consider who we already worked with for the 30~ characters throughout the original Trails in the Sky games before my time…or even if those actors were capable of reprising their roles after doing a dozen battle grunts or so five years back.

I also had to consider who was in Cold Steel II, even though we weren’t recording right away (which characters would be returning? Could we justify bringing back some actors if they had fewer lines in the sequel?). Some characters were just prevalent enough throughout the series to deserve their own unique voice even if they were saying 30 lines that could be recorded in 15 minutes in one game. Others, we couldn’t be sure if they were going to ever make a major impact in the series at all.

To keep track of everything for myself and the recording studio, I made a giant list of every character who’s ever been voiced in the series (even the games we don’t have the rights to), their chances of returning, and listed my “dream actors” or actors already cast. This made figuring out who to cast a lot easier, since now the studio could think ahead of time about who would be around for the potential long haul if the series remains successful in the West.

<Soooo many numbers>

After that, it was time to figure out just which files had special filters and which files had a hard limit. Both of these were as time-consuming as one might expect, as no “master list” detailing which files had what was available to us. Much of the first week spent with the voices was simply me listening to each and every line from 9 AM to whenever I couldn’t take it anymore and went home (6-8 PM). Every time I heard a battle echo, a voice booming through a megaphone of some sort, or any one of the dozens of random sounds that clearly needed to be added post-processing, I had to pause, make a marking next to the audio filename (e8v16301, e8v16302, e8v16303, etc.), note what type of filter it was, then copy that file into a folder dedicated to that specific filter. Really, there was no other way to do this. It took days.

As a huge voice acting fanatic, I can assure you, even the biggest fans will find this process monotonous as all hell.

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Localization Blog #1

Salutations, true believers!

It’s been quite some time since I last bestowed upon you one of my verbose blog posts – almost a year, in fact! Since finishing up work on Story of Seasons, I’ve spent this year working on the sprawling, expansive project that is The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. It’s been a busy time all the way: this project has taken the full attention of two editors (myself and Young Kris, my star pupil), Brittany the Lord of Kiseki, and assistance from almost everyone else in the office. If it can be said that “it takes a village to raise a child,” then this game is certainly a child that all of XSEED Village pitched in to bring to fruition.

I’d like to take this space to sort of ruminate on some personal thoughts about the game, the experience of working on it, and how I’ve tried to bring you a good localization. Hopefully, in doing so, I’ll enlighten you about some things it took me a while to understand about the game, and offer some insights into the process.

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter - Localization Blog #2

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

           Back in March 2015, Ryan put together a master Google Doc of all the text in Trails in the Sky Second Chapter for the start of internal QA on the project. As I watched cells being added in real time my first thought was one of pity for the other testers who would soon have to comb through these lines. While everyone knows about SC’s near-legendary size, it’s another thing to actually have to work on it. The Kiseki series is not for the faint of heart, and as the document passed 89,000 rows (nearly three times the number of rows for Story of Seasons) my computer blue-screened trying to load it. This was to set the tone of the QA cycle for the next four months.

The Bad

           Things started off well enough. Working from Australia I was unable to see the text as it might appear in game, but combing through the files allowed me to sweep for issues quickly and double-check notes I’d made during the editing phase. When the first English PSP build became available at XSEED, however, things were looking a bit…off.

           Text-wise, a lot of issues that came up were of the garden variety ‘lost in display translation.’ Ellipses would revert to zenkaku ellipses (a single full-width character) instead of their intended three single dots, heart marks and music notes showed up as blocks, tildes would float like tiny seagulls, and unable to use quotation marks in the game (as it was an unsupported character), single quotes were instead eaten in almost every cell where they began a sentence. What seemed fine in file did not necessarily transfer cleanly to either PSP or Steam windows. Grimly, QA poured through file after file to yank things into line with how they actually displayed on screen. One even decided to go through all 1400 files and wipe any and all instances of extra spacing off the map. “Pretty or Death,” was their rallying cry against these aesthetic annoyances.

           Another dreary, unexpected chore included realigning text when it turned out that some of the limits we were working with were not quite right. For example, since a number of items, monsters, and system text messages were used in both FC and SC, their descriptions had been duplicated for consistency in SC. Unfortunately, SC’s limits proved to be slightly more conservative than FC’s, and a frustratingly large number of these lines had to be reworked.

[Three character spaces less = a lot of rewriting or adjusting]

           Spacing issues aside, text would also randomly inflate, windows refused to share space with each other, and for reasons no one was ever able to understand, a single letter was shaved in half on an innocuous quest.

[In a just world, ‘weirdo’ would be blown up here as it refers to Olivier]

[Capel window fail]            

[WHY???] 

           Such a large game also made for a devil of a time when it came to consistency. Naturally, terms that crossed over from FC had to be matched, and terminology had to be internally consistent as well, but even the most casual-seeming words/stylistic choices had to be checked to make sure they lined up. Was it “O-okay” or “O-Okay” for stuttering? *Pant Pant* or *pant pant* for SFX? Did Private Brahm give Faye gloves or mittens in that entirely optional and forgettable NPC quest in FC?! A great deal of effort was put into confirming that these lined up across the board.

           The sheer weight of all that text also had a telling effect on the QA testers. It wasn’t unusual to find tiny pleas for help worked into the margins of the Google Doc, blunt exchanges on name choices regarding fish, or jokes so bad that you could be 100% certain the bug had been logged well after work hours.

[This wasn’t even the worst one]     <CLICK HERE FOR LARGER SIZE>

  [We are professionals]                     <CLICK HERE FOR LARGER SIZE>

           Stability-wise, the PSP version also wasn’t without a few hiccups. Our trusty outsourced QA team vetted the game for the usual compliance, graphical, crash, and collision issues, but one glitch refused to go away. While it took some effort, an external QA member found that if he tried hard enough, he could wedge Estelle into a narrow space in the Central Factory Archives. When he asked whether or not it was possible to not be eaten by bookshelves in this section of the game, we checked with the dev team. After much deliberation, their consensus was that it seemed best to leave this one be rather than mess with the code. Belatedly, I waived the bug on the master list, noting, “It’s a feature.”

[Friday challenge? Friday Challenge!]

The Ugly

           While the PSP team was drowning in text checking and carnivorous shelves, the PC team was embarking on their own adventures. Sara, our PC wizard, has been waging something of a rolling battle against random menu crashes, warp zones, and mysterious enemy behavior. She’s had to adapt the code in a number of places to fix control issues, and even Frankenstein FC code onto SC to make things function properly. In Chapter 1, one of the Beta testers found out that when quartz was equipped in the seventh slot of any character’s orbment it would fall out of the inventory once you entered battle. This resulted in a crippled playthrough of the chapter that affected all party members. An entirely new setting of difficulty was spawned from this bug before Sara was able to fix it. The Beta testers slogged their way through in the meantime, but they soon encountered amazing new graphical anomalies and deadly purple mists to hinder their progress.

           For the PC QA team during this stage, checking text or actually playing the game as intended and not some kind of RPG version of Dante’s Divine Comedy wasn’t possible a lot of the time. Bosses would appear mid-conversation and refuse to move, black voids would swallow whole parties, and unseen enemies would attack you in the unlikeliest of places.

“I was amazed at how many invisible monsters tried to kill me in the Central Factory.” – Beta Tester

[Seems like it’s a deathtrap for everyone, really…]

[The Bracer Guild in Bose became a gravitational singularity]

           For Kelly, one of the in-house QA testers, just progressing through a single chapter became an exercise in futility as she found herself imprisoned in buildings populated by glowing purple doorways to nowhere. In particular, she found that EVERY door in the foreign embassies had the strange purple mist effects.

           “After playing, I realized the truth,” she related somberly. “The embassies in Grancel were actually portals to hell, and I was stuck there for all eternity.”

[There is no escape]              <CLICK ME FOR MIST IN ACTION>

               Other glitches were harmless, but defied logic, and have been frustratingly difficult to root out for our long-suffering programmer.

[When glowing balls of light start coming out of the backsides of NPCs, you know you have problems]

[Everyone on this project went loco]

[I couldn’t even begin to tell you what happened here]

The Good

           Random wormholes and glowing balls of light aside, it’s not all bad. We’ve had two dedicated teams consisting of a mash of internal XSEED QA, an external QA house, and series experts throwing themselves at the tide of text that have contributed endless hours to making sure that when you guys get SC it’ll be a memorable experience for the right reasons. Of particular note is the extra effort that’s gone into updating and connecting the games (FC, SC, and Cold Steel). As work was drawing to a close on the editing side of SC, a lot of discussion was also being had on the direction of the series as a whole. This was always in the back of our minds, but it became especially important as work on Cold Steel began. After all, with the Trails series, even the most innocent of terms can become incredibly significant in later games.

           To nail down the most important of these (some 2000+ key terms, items, people, etc. at a rough count), the team consulted with Falcom and a number of series experts. The outcome of this was that some things from FC proved to have greater meaning than previously known, and some current SC terminology would have to be updated. It was also decided that, moving forward, the original Germanic naming conventions would be used. Such was our in-house Kiseki nut’s determination to normalize all conventions that even location names barely mentioned in passing like “Hamel” from FC would be updated to “Hemel.” These changes were applied both retroactively to FC’s Steam version, and incorporated into SC before and during the QA period, and we hope that fans will nerd out as much as we have over the rich lore that has been lovingly poured into this game*.

 *We also overhauled the military structure of the entire Liberl Royal Army to make it functionally correct. Just because. Dedication or madness, you decide.

“Do ducks exist in Trails?” – QA Notes Attached to Bug #309

           In addition to the overarching series updates, the removal of typos was also a priority. A sincere thanks must be given here to Danielle and the external QA team for their dedication to adding missing punctuation, fixing bad cut and paste jobs, and doggedly running an endless regression cycle to check everyone else’s changes. Some typos found during the QA were truly inspired, though, and it was almost a shame to fix them:

[Queen Alicia:  “I am counting on you…to balance hose  scales.”]

[Zane: “Yes…the end of the unavoidable path, if you use any marital art purely for combat.”]

           Overall, it was a grueling few months, and in just a couple more we’ll be at the finish line. Please, please let us be at the finish line…

The Future 

           And…that’s pretty much it. You’d be shocked to realize that a pretty big part of the wait now involves us waiting around for things ourselves. For those not in the know, XSEED as a publisher is purely in charge of the text and reporting bugs we find—creating graphics, inserting the English text, and fixing the bugs we report during QA are all on the developer’s side. That’s not something exclusive to us, but fairly normal for the game publishing industry as a whole. The developers know their own source code best, after all! We do program the PC version on our end, however, and it’s worth noting that our programmer loves to add things like HD graphics, widescreen, content previously unavailable for the PC version, and other such quality of life improvements. Trust me, the magic she works up on our PC titles is always worth it.

                  - Jess (XSEED Foreign Correspondent, @HProtagonista)

And finally, an actual glimpse of the future. Please look forward to it.

Steam Achievements (Tentative List)

Breakfast Safari

Odyssey of Anton

Baby, Come Back

Master Fisher

Master Chef

League of Extraordinary Bracers

Penguin de Samba

Doom Baker

Ramblin’ Gambler

Blue Knight

That Damn Recipe

“Blorf”

Bounty Hunter

<Fin~>

If our Steam icon artist gets too busy to continue her role, Kelly has offered to assume the duties. Pray to Aidios, people. Pray like you’ve never prayed before.

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RIP Christopher Lee.

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I want more strength… Enough strength to capture the demons that bring suffering to this world, and lock their souls in hell.

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“Elemental Charms” is today’s tee on www.Qwertee.com going live in just 15 minutes!

Get this great design now for the super price of £8/€10/$12 for 24 hours only.

Be sure to “Like” this for 1 chance at a FREE TEE today, “Reblog” it for 2 chances and “Follow” us for a 3rd chance (if you’re not already:) Thanks Guys!

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Hey, Trails fans!

This is Brittany again, Production Coordinator at XSEED. So. Yes. The rumors were true. Every time the words “Trails of Cold Steel” showed up on news sites, we were giggling like preschooler dorks because we knew it was a real thing that was happening. On the flipside, we were...

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Bird lands on a page about itself.

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The Netherworld's Heroes (†)

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44 - Disgaea

Been having a fair amount of fun with this series lately. Team attack, go!

Reference: https://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3r7lySvcM1qesvy7o1_r1_500.png

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