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The Legend of Heroes franchise, otherwise known as the Kiseki or Trails series, has received some major news. After years of being ignored by localization companies, NIS America will finally be bringing Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure to English-speaking audiences. Fans might be aware that both of these titles have had unofficial English patches created by the fan translation group Geofront, who has just revealed that they've partnered with NIS America to use their work as the basis for the official localization. Multiple members of the Geofront team expressed their excitement over the deal through an announcement post on their site, though they also mentioned that this means the fan-translation patches will no longer be available on their website, asking fans to support the official release, now that one is happening.

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Trails from Zero will be releasing in the fall of 2022 for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam and Epic), while Trails to Azure will be releasing in 2023 for those same platforms. In addition, NIS America will also be bringing The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails and The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie west as well.

Source

 

[AttackOtter]

Bro, they're takin' years to make these, when they're already fan translations? Absolutely come on.

I don't like NISA as a company at all, but there's a lot more that goes into official releases than just inserting a translation and being done with it.

All the ways they reverse engineered the PC version in order to make it the best possible version of the game can't just be used wholesale in the localization unless they licensed the Chinese PC port that was used as a base for it and the Japanese PC release. And even then, those changes would have to be made again using the source code of that port.

And it's more likely that they're porting the PS4 Kai port to PC rather than using that one, which will throw up a lot of hurdles in its own way.

And on top of that there'll be editing passes, QC, making adjustments to the source code, testing, bug fixing with more source adjustments, more testing for every time they have to do that, then they have to port the game to multiple consoles, each of which will need its own round of testing and adjustments.

The fan translation can be released because they already spent years reverse engineering the existing PC port and PSP version in order to accommodate their translation, you just haven't seen how long it actually took behind the scenes.

 

[eriol33]

I don't think I have the time to play all of those legend of heroes games. should I?

 

[LunarRXA]

Been reading a bit about localization. Fan translations have always been something I've been incredibly curious about. I love knowing that there all sorts of passionate gamers willing to bring games from one audience to another!

 

[DannX]

I'm happy this is happening, I played the first Trails of Cold Steel and really enjoyed it. Haven't had the chance to play any other in this series but it's been on my radar for a while. Great to see so many more coming to the switch too.