Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns - Localization Blog #1

Howdy, everyone!

I’m writing from down on the (localization) farm with an update. The past two months have seen a bevy of releases, from Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity to Xanadu Next, but there hasn’t been much news on one of our biggest titles, STORY OF SEASONS: Trio of Towns, after the pre-order bonus capybara plushy announcement.

I’m one of the newest members of the XSEED team—though this is my third time working for the company (long story)—and I’ve been guiding Trio of Towns from the editing phase through QA testing. My super senpai Brittany strongly encouraged me to write a localization blog (or 10), so I thought I’d take a quick break from the text farm to give you all a brief introduction to this new, enormous entry in the series.

…And I mean enormous. This Japanese text for this game is around 2 million characters, making it easily the biggest title in the series’ 20-year history. (For comparison, the last Story of Seasons title had 1.7 million characters.)

That’s a big number, and maybe a little hard to wrap your head around. Consider these two things:

1. We expect full-time translators to complete 125,000 characters a month.

2. As with past titles, we created a spreadsheet containing all text in the game. See localization blogs about the last Story of Seasons title and Trails in the Sky Second Chapter for more on this. For the latter title, in particular, the spreadsheet was too large to use. We solved this problem for Trio of Towns by making TWO spreadsheets.