@thewildcard: I feel conflicted about XSEED not translating VIII. On one hand I think the company deserves a lot of credit for making the series relavent in the West again, and for bringing over actual Falcom developed games instead of ports made by other studios, but I also feel the translation quailty of the Ys games has never been that remarkable from XSEED. Oath and Origin are based off fan translations and the scripts for Seven and Celceta were pretty bland and dry, although they may have been that way in Japanese too. I think XSEED's work on the Trails games have been fantastic, and I won't want anyone else to work on future games in that series, but I think it is entirely possible for someone like NIS to do just as good a job if not better with Ys.
Full disclosure before I dish out my opinion: I'm friendly with a couple of people who work with Xseed in varying capacities, so feel free to take my opinion with as many grains of salt as you like. I myself have otherwise never worked for them as a translator.
Anyway, the only Ys I've played much of in Japanese I believe is Seven, but I'd argue that those scripts aren't particularly literary in their native language. It's not abysmal or anything, it's perfectly competent, but it's pretty dry stuff overall in Japanese. I think a lot of superfans would agree that Ys' strong points outside of its gameplay are in its overall lore and world building and not so much its moment-to-moment conversations. They're there to help keep things moving and help lay down some atmosphere, which is probably for the best considering what those games are going for with their gameplay.
All this is to say that sometimes with projects like that, there's only so much you can spruce up in translation. Having worked in the trenches in localization for a while now, the number of Japanese games that have really good writing already are, I feel, still pretty far and few between, even in genres that are ostensibly supposed to be rooted in it like adventure games and visual novels. Most are at least semi-okay like Ys and some are outright terrible for various reasons, but the good stuff is rare enough to getting to work on that level of material is always genuinely refreshing. Knowing that, there are certain things you can do in translation to make those okay and badly written games more uniformly polished, but it's hard to put out truly inspired material if you don't have that initial base to work with, those character dynamics and relateable happenings that initially draw you in as a translator and a player. I certainly do my best to have my own fun with that material where I can, but at the end of the day, when it's not creatively your baby, so to speak, from the game's very inception, it's very tough to write a mindblowing translation when the underlying material you're given doesn't even support that proposition in Japanese. There are absolutely localizations that I feel are better written than their Japanese games, but it's either because the Japanese was already great and got that much more writing polish in localization or the original Japanese is just so aggressively bad that the only way to go was up.
Think of it like this: Xseed is a really small company. They employ freelancers to help with a lot of the core translation work, but the main crew that does the editing work and gets the game ready for release is, I think, no more than like a dozen people strong. People have their specialties, but they're going to have their hands in a little of everything. If Ys' English writing sounds dry while Trails can come out really strong, I think that alone says volumes about the base quality of the original Japanese writing in those games when the people working on them are otherwise by and large the same. None of this is to criticize the people who have worked on the translation side of Ys games, I've talked to some on Twitter and they all do good work, but Trails is by and large on a whole other level with its Japanese prose, which makes the potential that much higher for the English script to be equally as memorable in turn.
One thing to consider about Ys VIII switching ships to NISA, though: a friend who knows those games much better than I says that VIII is extremely referential of the past games' lore, seemingly more so than is typical with an Ys game. This puts NISA at a pretty severe disadvantage for several reasons; not only will they ideally have to have translators that are either intimately familiar with the series or at least really good at their research, but if that game makes specific call backs to previous in terms of specific lines or terminology, they're not inherently going to have access to the previous games' localization files to consult, if they even recognize those references to begin with. Certainly, Xseed isn't obligated to hand over any of its work to NISA if they're not going to be paid to be involved in this new game's localization and while Falcom probably still has that data on hand, they're such a small company still that I've noticed telltale signs over the years that would indicate the amount of manpower they can devote to localization support is usually incredibly small. (Indeed, the only reason the Trails games run as great as they do on PCs in English is because a lone programmer at Xseed did the reprogramming herself.) That's not to fault Falcom; they do well, but essentially have to always focus on new games for the Japanese market in order to stay afloat first and foremost. This means that there may be times where NISA is on its own when dealing with certain issues and while, speaking from experience, they're not impossible hurdles to overcome, that minimal support can impact the final translation quality that can be achieved, especially with a release date that's not that far around the corner by localization standards.
Hopefully all of that makes sense. I have my suspicions as to why this switch probably happened, as Xseed people have indicated they didn't give this game up voluntarily, which I'll just say bodes interestingly for this game and the business politics behind it.
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