What could this possibly mean?!
Greetings, Warriors of Xanadu!
We’ve come to make an announcement.
Licensing.
k i t a .
Yes.
You read that right.
Ys vs. Trails in the Sky is getting an official localization, against all odds. But we’re very happy this is happening.
We were approached by refint/games for rights to the translation. More information will come from them in time, so keep an eye out.
At the time of writing this, Ys vs. Trails is planning to be available on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. There will be cool features such as rollback netcode — a staple in modern fighting games. Very exciting. Please look forward to it!
In the meantime, here’s some words from the team.
ErrantSquam
Hello! To re-introduce myself, I worked on the graphics editing for Ys vs. Trails. I was formerly in the V Sector, but we’ve pretty much ‘disbanded’, and went our separate ways. Though we did all come back when refint/games approached us.
I’m still amazed this humble project is about to reach greater heights. Initially, it had started out as a fun passion project, because I was playing the Mandarin fan-translation of the game, and found a few lines amusing. Naturally, I had to share that with everyone else.
Things happened™, and the group was brought together to share this quirky, one-off fighting game to the world. We did end up translating from the original Japanese, too. It’s pretty cool that a fan-translation in one language ended up spawning another, though!
Now, the refint/games team is redoing the graphics from scratch, and I’m sure they’ll do a better job than the low-resolution PSP textures I had to work with. However…
…I’ve been invited to draw Steam achievement icons for Ys vs.! There will be seventeen achievements from me in total — fifteen smaller ones, and two painted renders. I volunteered to do a little more out of passion. I spent a lot of time tweaking the achievements to be readable at both tiny and large resolutions, and I tried to squeeze in a few references I think folks will enjoy. (If you end up thinking it’s a bit too much, that’s okay, too).
Special thanks to Choojermelon and Schtolteheim for bouncing ideas with me. Schtolt is Geis’ number one fan, so I had to make sure I did the character justice.
I’m not sure what the other artists are up to, but I hope you enjoy the hard work that went into the icons. These icons have become a staple of official Falcom localizations, and I’m thrilled to be included.
Please look forward to the game, and support the official release if you can! Now I’ll pass it to Livi.
AnonymusAxolotl
Heya! Livi here, the other half of leadership in Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga and general team jack-of-all-trades. Seriously. Programming and video editing are the only pies I didn’t stick my hands in.
It’s honestly surreal to think a nearly two-year endeavor that admittedly started on a whim has come to this point.
It’s a very important game in my life that kicked off a lot of good stuff. It came with hardships, of course, but I’m still so happy to be given this opportunity and have the team’s effort be immortalized in a much more official way. Though we’ve all been doing a variety of different things since then, it does bring me joy to be able to come back together to see the game off, considering this game opened some very interesting doors for the team.
It’s exciting for the possibility of our work reaching a wider audience, and would love for people to experience the admittedly odd story and quirky gameplay—all with a new coat of paint and some wonderful polish brought on by the team to breathe some new life into an often overlooked experience.
Still, this is the culmination of years of work on many people’s behalf. So I hope you guys will enjoy this game, whether you’ve played it before or not, and appreciate the new little things it’ll bring forth.
Let me now pass it on to someone with a strong relationship to this game that wanted to say some words. Let’s hear it, Schtolt.
Schtolteheim
Hey there! This is Schtolteheim from the Geofront whatever-sector, I’ve lost track. I served as the lead QA tester on the original project, and I’m stoked to see the game getting the worldwide release it deserves! The PC version of the game comes with some key improvements over the original, and I can’t wait to give them a try myself.
I feel like a lot of the game’s potential as a fighter was held back to some extent by the platform it released on. The idea of a fighting game with Ys combat just makes so much sense! But being PSP-exclusive with no online multiplayer really hurts, as it restricts players to local sessions, janky Adhoc Party rooms on PS3, or complicated Parsec setups. The PC release, however, completely overhauls the game’s multiplayer functionality to support modern rollback netcode, so you can play with anyone, anywhere, anytime! I also really appreciate the performance boost that comes with the PC release, as the game was already stretching the PSP to its limit — four-player battles on certain stages really made the framerate chug. Hooray for modern machinery!
I think this release will really help the game find a wider audience — and for the audience the game already has, it’ll make the game much more accessible. There were a lot of hurdles to jump through just to play with your friends on PSP, even with our patch; despite that, the game still found a dedicated group of fans who loved what they played and wanted to share it far and wide. Special shout out to Naptec, who’s put a ton of work into documenting this game’s quirks — and GOD, it was tough keeping this secret from them all this time! I’m hoping they’ll have plenty of new friends to play with online, and I hope you, dear reader, will jump in and join us!
(Just don’t pick Mishera. Please. She scares me.)
Conclusion
That concludes the words from the team! You’ll have to wait for refint/games to release more details on the project. We hope you support the official release of Ys vs. Trails, and we have our fingers crossed that this will open the door to more official localizations in the future.