One day in March of last year, video game writer Andrew Dice wrote out a check for all of his company’s money. He stuck it in the doorframe at his business partner’s apartment in Portland, Oregon, then went back to his own place. (They live in the same complex.) He closed all the windows. Then, as he tells it, he laid down on his bed and picked up a knife, preparing to plunge it into his chest.
He was interrupted by pounding on the door, he says: It was Robin Light-Williams, his partner. Dice thought for a few seconds, then put the knife down and let his friend in. They talked for a while, and Dice decided not to kill himself.
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Up to that point, Dice and Light-Williams had spent nearly three years working on the English localization for said “bad project”—a role-playing game called The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter. It’s taken nearly half a decade for Second Chapter to come out in English, and those who have worked on localization of the game say it was a hellish undertaking. Given the size of the script—over three million Japanese characters—and the many obstacles the game faced on its route to U.S. shores, employees at the publisher XSEED saw it as their white whale. To describe SC’s localization as “challenging” would be like describing the Pacific Ocean as “damp.”
Trails SC finally came out last week in North America for the PC and, unbelievably, the PSP, Sony’s second-most-recent handheld gaming system. That it came out at all is nothing short of a miracle.
It wasn’t long before the editors at XSEED realized just how much of a burden they’d put on their shoulders. At 1.5 million Japanese characters, the first Trails in the Sky was much bigger than anything they’d published before, more akin to a visual novel than a traditional RPG. There were hundreds of non-player characters, each with their own names and personalities and lines upon lines of dialogue to translate and edit. XSEED editor Jessica Chavez spent nine months crunching non-stop—14 hours a day, six days a week—just to get through it all.
“When I finally finished it I’d dropped ~10% of my body weight and was down to 99lbs,” she told me in an e-mail earlier this year. She said she cut off 18 inches of her hair “in some sort of retaliation for the headaches the weight of it had given me while working.”
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