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General discussionXSEED Interview + AMA: The challenges of bringing Japanese games to Western markets (114 posts)(114 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted February 24, 2017
It definitely takes more than just a long flight over the ocean.

Japanese games are largely governed by a particular aesthetic approach, while at the same time offering a unique perspective in storytelling and gameplay mechanics. It's what makes them instantly distinguishable from their western counterparts, why we're so fond of them, and why we gathered them together for our current <span class="bold">Kawaii Sale</span>.

But some of these differences can also make their transition to the global market challenging. Ken Barry, executive Vice President of XSEED, is one of the people whose mission is to overcome those obstacles and bring some of the most popular Japanese games to the rest of the world.

What are the main challenges of bringing Japanese games to the Western market?

I would say cultural issues as they pertain to text are still a major challenge, though to varying degrees for each project. As a recent example, our parent company Marvelous put out a game called NetHigh for Vita in Japan not too long ago where the gameplay focused on solving puzzles a la the Ace Attorney games, but instead of solving cases in a courtroom you’re trying to reveal the true identity of people on the internet. Our hopes of being able to localize it were quickly dashed once we realized that most of the puzzles were based on Japanese puns and wordplay using written kanji characters which often have multiple meanings. Seeing that it also had a lot of text displaying from top to bottom rather than our way of reading from left to right sealed its fate of definitely not coming to the West.

The rest of the world seems much more receptive to everything Japanese these days but there are still things keeping the markets apart. What are those differences, in your experience?

I know this is something that’s been examined before, but the Japanese culture is much more tolerant of sexuality while graphic depictions of violence are frowned upon, whereas here in the US we are very tolerant of violence but much more conservative when it comes to issues concerning sex. This is a huge fundamental difference in the videogames being created in Japan, and their culture also having an affinity for cute and innocent-looking things and then often combining that together with sexuality can be quite shocking at times, resulting in such things as Hello Kitty sex toys.

Which are the necessary adjustments that you usually have to make for the jump to be as smooth as possible (subtitles, game names, dubbing, etc.)?

There is no single element, you have to factor all things and consider how best to immerse the player in the world created by the original developers that happen to be of another culture. For example, all our Senran Kagura games have only the Japanese voices in them because not only were we extremely lucky to get them, but also because we weren’t quite sure how the sexual nature of the content would be received in the West when first bringing over the series years ago. Seeing something lewd happening onscreen and hearing a girl say something in a different language while the sub-title “Don’t touch me like that” appears is very different from hearing a girl in English verbally expressing her objections.

Are there any kinds of games (due to genre of theme) that you can't really see making that jump in the foreseeable future?

We always thought the “otome” genre geared toward female players that often involves developing a romantic relationship with one of the many male characters would be difficult, but we’re not quite so sure anymore. We continue to get fan requests for this kind of game, so it’s one that we wouldn’t mind testing out in the future at some point to see if there really is a market for it or not.

Can you share with us a story about a game that you handled and things took an unexpected turn along the way?

Well, we published a cute game on 3DS a while ago called Lord of Magna: Maiden Heaven that was by the producer of the Story of Seasons series and being made by the Rune Factory developers, and sure enough playing the first few hours it was just as cute and adorable as we had expected it to be given the pedigree. So I start pitching it to all our retail partners as our next family-friendly 3DS title because I’m expecting an ESRB rating of Everyone 10+, only to find out months into the project from our localization producer that there’s a totally gratuitous scene at a hot spring where the lead character, who had been a very nice and caring guy with nothing but love and respect for all the girls working at his inn until then, somehow gets convinced by his buddy to go sneak a peek at the girls as they bathe. This results in a completely out of place 30-second animated cutscene featuring the girls in the hot springs together, and we were lucky to get away with a Teen rating. Needless to say I had to go back and revise my sales pitch on the title to more of a “coming of age” type of story.

--AMA coming up!--
But that's not all! If you're looking to learn more about the intricacies involved in this process, make sure to tune in today, Friday, at 6PM UTC. We're holding an AskMeAnything session with XSEED's Localization Producer, Tom Lipshultz, right here on the forum!
Post edited February 25, 2017 by maladr0Id
Posted February 27, 2017
Great interview! Very interesting.
Posted February 27, 2017
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kohlrak: if the characters wouldn't be old enough to play the game, why are they being presented in those situations? To make another reference to Dead or Alive, wasn't Sweeden's representative character (Marie Rose) banned because of the borderline sexual nature of the game and the fact she looks 12 but is listed to be 18 years old in the west (to be fair, they were handling Marie carefully enough that i actually made her my main character)?
Are you asking why (Japanese) men find teenage girls more attractive? Because that's probably the main reason why you have characters who are so young.
Posted February 28, 2017
This discussion and thread gets me hopeful for future Japanese Ports. Best of luck to the developers, publishers, and poeple working here at GOG. :)
Posted February 28, 2017
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JayBDD: Do you have any idea of how satisfied Falcom is with the sales of Trails in the Sky FC and SC on PC, and how much of an impact those titles' sales might have on the possibility of seeing more titles from the Tales series coming to PC?
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Erpy: Given that Falcom is having Aksys producing a PC port of Tokyo Xanadu and having NISA produce a PC port of Ys VIII:Lacrimosa of Dana, I'm getting the impression they've started taking the PC market a lot more seriously. (the same is true for JRPG developers in general, most of the Final Fantasy games and recent Tales games have been made available on Steam)

Within a few months, 5 out of 7 Trails games (not Tales) will be available in English. 2 of those are currently console-only, but since they use an engine that supports the Windows platform and both Tokyo Xanadu and Ys VIII run on that engine, there's a fairly realistic chance of Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 2 getting ported at some point or another. The console versions were received fairly well in the west.

The 4th and the 5th game, the only ones currently missing after the 3rd game comes out in a few months, are in a rather odd situation since they're PSP games (a dead system) that were given Chinese PC ports by a 3rd party developer in China. (who's currently getting them greenlit on Steam, but those will probably be region-locked to Asian countries) Falcom back-ported the Japanese script into the PC version of the 4th game and sold it domestically, but haven't done so with the 5th game yet. (the two form a duology)

In order for the 4th and 5th game to come out in the west, Falcom would have to backport the Japanese script back into the PC version of the 5th game as well and then hand them over to XSeed, presumably with the Chinese developer's blessing. It's a bit of a clusterfuck businesswise, which is a shame.

Brittany from XSeed mentioned that the best thing fans can do on their part to ensure more Trails games is buy the 3rd. That game will be the first Trails game that's exclusively released on PC in the west, so it'll be a good indication of how feasable additional games would be.
I'm so pissed that Falcom would allow such a garbage localization company like NISA to handle any of their games, esp with NISA's atrocious track record of not being able to release a game that's actually stable without any game breaking bugs because they are too inept to even code properly, let alone localize properly. NISA has been on my blacklist for years but I love the YS series so that is going to be a VERY hard sell for me.

The way I see it, Nihon Falcom has always taken the PC market seriously. Every Legend of Heroes game, outside of the most recent 2 (3 if ya wanna include Trails of Cold Steel III) have a Microsoft Windows port, usually being the original base. The way I see it, Nihon Falcom are still one of the only Japanese game devs that actually actively develop games on PC. The YS series is a lot more spotty, though, sadly.

I really am definitely waiting for the third chapter of the Trails in the Sky trilogy to drop. And hopefully with that, that'll give them more incentive to pick up the first 5 games as well as the Trails to Zero and Trails to Azure games that were skipped over to see how well Trails of Cold Steel would do before adding on another massive project. Just one Legend of Heroes game is ridiculously ambitious but XSEED has been working on both Trails in the Sky SC and Trails of Cold Steel I and II nearly at the same time. It's crazy the kind of punishment they go through for these games, which is the reason why I support XSEED as much as possible, including buying both the GOG and Steam versions of the Legend of Heroes games and the YS games currently released on both platforms.
Posted February 28, 2017
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Erpy: Given that Falcom is having Aksys producing a PC port of Tokyo Xanadu and having NISA produce a PC port of Ys VIII:Lacrimosa of Dana, I'm getting the impression they've started taking the PC market a lot more seriously. (the same is true for JRPG developers in general, most of the Final Fantasy games and recent Tales games have been made available on Steam)

Within a few months, 5 out of 7 Trails games (not Tales) will be available in English. 2 of those are currently console-only, but since they use an engine that supports the Windows platform and both Tokyo Xanadu and Ys VIII run on that engine, there's a fairly realistic chance of Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 2 getting ported at some point or another. The console versions were received fairly well in the west.

The 4th and the 5th game, the only ones currently missing after the 3rd game comes out in a few months, are in a rather odd situation since they're PSP games (a dead system) that were given Chinese PC ports by a 3rd party developer in China. (who's currently getting them greenlit on Steam, but those will probably be region-locked to Asian countries) Falcom back-ported the Japanese script into the PC version of the 4th game and sold it domestically, but haven't done so with the 5th game yet. (the two form a duology)

In order for the 4th and 5th game to come out in the west, Falcom would have to backport the Japanese script back into the PC version of the 5th game as well and then hand them over to XSeed, presumably with the Chinese developer's blessing. It's a bit of a clusterfuck businesswise, which is a shame.

Brittany from XSeed mentioned that the best thing fans can do on their part to ensure more Trails games is buy the 3rd. That game will be the first Trails game that's exclusively released on PC in the west, so it'll be a good indication of how feasable additional games would be.
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Dizzy_Gear: I'm so pissed that Falcom would allow such a garbage localization company like NISA to handle any of their games, esp with NISA's atrocious track record of not being able to release a game that's actually stable without any game breaking bugs because they are too inept to even code properly, let alone localize properly. NISA has been on my blacklist for years but I love the YS series so that is going to be a VERY hard sell for me.

The way I see it, Nihon Falcom has always taken the PC market seriously. Every Legend of Heroes game, outside of the most recent 2 (3 if ya wanna include Trails of Cold Steel III) have a Microsoft Windows port, usually being the original base. The way I see it, Nihon Falcom are still one of the only Japanese game devs that actually actively develop games on PC. The YS series is a lot more spotty, though, sadly.

I really am definitely waiting for the third chapter of the Trails in the Sky trilogy to drop. And hopefully with that, that'll give them more incentive to pick up the first 5 games as well as the Trails to Zero and Trails to Azure games that were skipped over to see how well Trails of Cold Steel would do before adding on another massive project. Just one Legend of Heroes game is ridiculously ambitious but XSEED has been working on both Trails in the Sky SC and Trails of Cold Steel I and II nearly at the same time. It's crazy the kind of punishment they go through for these games, which is the reason why I support XSEED as much as possible, including buying both the GOG and Steam versions of the Legend of Heroes games and the YS games currently released on both platforms.
You're mistaken about one thing. Falcom hasn't been a PC developer for nearly a decade. After their last PC game flopped, due to the Japanese PC games market cratering, they dropped their PC development section completely and they haven't released any PC games since. The PC versions of Trails to Zero, Trails to Azure, Ys VII and Memories of Celceta were all made by a Chinese 3rd party developer. (that developer ported them because consoles were illegal in China at the time) Since the Japanese PC games market is still non-existent for any games other than MMORPGs and VN's, I don't see Falcom picking up PC development any time soon. Their domestic market is still their primary market and there's simply no domestic incentive for them to invest their limited manpower into PC versions. That's why the latest PC versions of Tokyo Xanadu and Ys VIII were outsourced to western publishers instead of doing it themselves. That's probably also why XSeed was passed up for Ys VIII; XSeed doesn't have the capacity to port games themselves while NISA does. It's a shame for XSeed, but that's probably what sealed the deal.

The reason XSeed jumped straight to Cold Steel 1 and 2 wasn't because they wanted to see what would work before picking up another large project. They did it because Falcom specifically urged them to (due to the Vita and PS3's lifespan slowly running out) and if they hadn't taken the games, Falcom would have given them to another publisher instead.
Posted February 28, 2017
Typical US Ignorance the WESTERN MARKET == USA and nothing else

99% of the "Problem" is the Repressed US that rather see a split skull and gore than a bit of naked skin
and also their constant refusal to accept that they are not the International but simply one country
Posted February 28, 2017
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REALDarkling: Typical US Ignorance the WESTERN MARKET == USA and nothing else

99% of the "Problem" is the Repressed US that rather see a split skull and gore than a bit of naked skin
and also their constant refusal to accept that they are not the International but simply one country
Have you seen what the US actually IS buying? No, it's different, because European countries typically outlawwhat we accept, but don't buy, in the US. Just so you know, i have a copy of said game. Look at GTA (violent, but the sex related content is more accurate than the violence), elder scrolls (check the mods!), etc. Sex doesn't bother us: child porn (even if they aren't real children) does.

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kohlrak: if the characters wouldn't be old enough to play the game, why are they being presented in those situations? To make another reference to Dead or Alive, wasn't Sweeden's representative character (Marie Rose) banned because of the borderline sexual nature of the game and the fact she looks 12 but is listed to be 18 years old in the west (to be fair, they were handling Marie carefully enough that i actually made her my main character)?
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mirek83: Are you asking why (Japanese) men find teenage girls more attractive? Because that's probably the main reason why you have characters who are so young.
That question is basic biology. But, why, when we know it doesn't go over well with a good part of the customer base, do we flirt with that line? Some of the stuff is getting to the point of almost pedophilic proportions.
Posted February 28, 2017
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Erpy: You're mistaken about one thing. Falcom hasn't been a PC developer for nearly a decade. After their last PC game flopped, due to the Japanese PC games market cratering, they dropped their PC development section completely and they haven't released any PC games since.
That's not entirely true. One thing you must understand is that Falcom didn't actually distribute their own titles (aside from their mail-order system) - all of it was done by Softbank. When that company backed down from selling their games, Falcom was left with no choice but to move to consoles, since they had no means to sell games on their own, but with Sony as a partner this problem was solved.
Post edited February 28, 2017 by mirek83
Posted February 28, 2017
Sorry, you're right. Seeing that it's been a long time they've done a PC game and even the "Windows 8" editions of their games have merely a handful of compatibility tweaks in the exe-file rather than the full-fledged overhaul that Sara from XSeed gave the western releases, it's probably still fair to say Falcom's PC programming department is defunct for all intents and purposes.
Posted February 28, 2017
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REALDarkling: 99% of the "Problem" is the Repressed US that rather see a split skull and gore than a bit of naked skin
The fuck are you talking about? Porn is huge here.
Posted March 01, 2017
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REALDarkling: 99% of the "Problem" is the Repressed US that rather see a split skull and gore than a bit of naked skin
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tfishell: The fuck are you talking about? Porn is huge here.
yes, but theres an outcry from SJW,s for each game with naked skin or sexy poses
Take Owerwatchs Tracer forexample.
Aperantly there was huge deal that tracer showed a sexy pose
http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/28/11321138/overwatch-tracer-pose-removal

So, even if the porn industry is big, there still seams to be issues whenever special cases are up.
Dont ask me why this happens though.
My only guess is that sjw,s have double standards.
Post edited March 01, 2017 by Lodium
Posted March 01, 2017
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EndlessKnight: Does anyone understand what he means by "Graphic depictions of violence are frowned upon"? Is Mr. Barry referring to video games specifically? For decades, video games and anime from Japan have been filled with graphic depictions of violence, so I am curious as to what he means.
Most likely violence involving guns. For all the violence in Japanese games, cinema, theater, manga, anime - it is most often martial arts, hand-to-hand combat or swords, bows, staff, magic and the like.

DragonBall, Fist of the North Star, Seven Samurai (All Akria Kurosawa films), Fairy Tail, Naruto, Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, King of Fighters.

Now, that doesn't mean all. Resident Evil, Godzilla, Gunslinger Girl, Old Boy, Hard Boiled, Yakuza, but a lot of the stuff they do with guns is fantasy/sci-fi setting - Robotech, Gundam, shmups - very little is like the stuff I mentioned above, real-world violence in which the gun is the weapon.

They don't do WWII shooters, or modern warfare shooters, battlefield shooters.

You really don't see a lot of Japanese media featuring other humans being killed by a gun. RE series is zombies, Shmups are against aliens or ships most of the time, Robotech, Gundam is blasting other tech, Godzilla is a monster.
Posted March 01, 2017
SJWs are safe to ignore, they'll raise a stink and organize boycotts if you don't comply with their irrational demands, but I've found a lot of great stuff just by looking for what they're pissed about and giving it a shot.

The customers don't care what Anita Sarkeesian, or any of her ilk, says about a game. If anything her faux outrage and purposeful misrepresentation of almost everything is going to sell more copies than the Christian Coalition did for Ozzy albums.
Posted March 01, 2017
Great answers from the XSEED team!
Now gimme some jap classics (not "just" Falcom ones ;D) drm-free. Pretty please?

Who wouldn't say "NO WAY!" when checking, uh, Contra on the frontpage?!
Posted March 01, 2017
Personally, I'd love to see the Zero Escape games here. The first two are being released Steam later this month.
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General discussionXSEED Interview + AMA: The challenges of bringing Japanese games to Western markets (114 posts)(114 posts)
(114 posts)