For my money, the biggest announcement of the August 27 double dip of Nintendo shows was actually tucked into a sizzle reel for Western consumption. During the Partner Showcase, the announcement of Trails In The Sky: The 1st led off the first of two different sizzle reels, presumably to keep the combined show under 45 minutes. Still, the game that was a chief reason why I asked for a PSP literally as its successor was launching in Japan is now going to be playable portably on modern hardware with all of its features intact.

Presumably this remake will come to Steam as "verified". It's Cold Steel I & II that are currently "no".

But the reason why I was worried this day wouldn't come was due to the publishing situation. The game's page isn't live on the Nintendo website yet, and the Partner Showcase only credited the game to original developer Nihon Falcom. When Trails in the Sky was originally published in 2011, it was localized by XSEED (now Marvelous) as per the above screenshot. This remained true with other Trails games until 2017, when NIS America took over localization for all of Falcom’s major releases (the Ys and Trails series), starting with Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. Although a lot of the staff who localized Trails games crossed the metaphorical parking lot, XSEED still owned the rights to the actual text and wasn't going to give them up.

So now we have a remake being announced - from the ground up - and it debuted in a worldwide Direct presentation. But who's going to localize this?

The simplest explanation is that Falcom decided “fine, I'll do it myself” and set to work, but that doesn't seem likely. Falcom has, at most, 75 full time employees, and this would represent their first time ever taking on a project for worldwide distribution on multiple platforms without outside help. And Trails in the Sky is in no way a short game. There are experienced fan translators - NIS America hired a group known as the “GeoFront” for the 2022-23 Crossbell duology (Trails From Zero/Trails to Azure) - but would Falcom bother working with fan translators even on a contract basis? Most likely not.

The second possibility assumes objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and that NIS America is handling the localization. Since NISA has already revealed their next Trails release (Trails Through Daybreak II, early 2025), they may not want to Osborne Effect the game with a highly demanded remake. As such, they let Falcom take the lead on it for now and then they can announce a distribution deal once Daybreak II is out. They could give the game a new translation using their own teams and wouldn't have to worry about the old XSEED localization. On paper, this is the most likely option.

There is a third possibility, though - it's secretly a Marvelous (nee XSEED) project. The terms of the agreement with NIS America and Falcom have never been disclosed publicly, but the NISA projects have had some rough patches on occasion. The original localization of Ys VIII comes to mind with its "big hole". Maybe Falcom is making a deal for the original localizations not on modern consoles (or, let's face it, handhelds) with Marvelous to just get them out and be done with it.

A few other possibilities exist, though we can discard some parties immediately - specifically Nintendo themselves. If it was a Nintendo published game, the Direct identifier would have said Nintendo instead of Falcom. (The last three Partner Showcases have had examples of this: Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes with Koei Tecmo in June 2022, Endless Ocean: Luminous with Arika in February of this year, and Fitness Boxing 3 in this week's showcase.) And the whole point of this is to get Trails in the Sky on PS4/5 and Switch. Falcom has worked with other localizing companies as recently as last month with the Switch version of Tokyo Xanadu ex+ from Aksys Games, or going a little farther back DotEmu for Ys Origins. Heck, Falcom has released at least a dozen games this year with D4 Enterprises - though that was legacy work from the 1980s in the EggConsole line of retro releases. Still, if they wanted to make a splash with a modern title, this would certainly do it.

I honestly can't believe that Falcom would hire enough contractors to do a ground up remake like this: they do one original game a year with a miniscule-by-modern-standards team, and the rest of the versions get outsourced. But as the Switch winds down, the Falcom Trails train is going to keep rolling along - likely with help. Don't be surprised if we get Sky 2nd and 3rd chapter in 2026 or even 2027 either: 2nd Chapter previously released for the PSP in North America in October of 2015, or a full three and a half years after the PSP successor launched outside Jaoan and several months after the PSP successor was left for dead by Sony. Backwards compatibility is a hell of a drug.