This past week NIS America made a series of welcome announcements. Four games from the iconic Trails JRPG franchise are going to be localized for release in English and released between 2022 and 2023. Fans previously feared three of those games would never be localized. Details are now being shared regarding how NIS America plans to deliver four massive localized JRPGs within the next several years and a big part of it appears to be working with fan-translators for two of the projects.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure were originally released in Japan in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Since then, due to a lack of English localization, both games have had fan groups translate the games, instead. NIS America has now announced that it's working with the fan group Geofront, using the group's English translation as the basis for the two games' localization.
Geofront's localization won't be used verbatim. Instead, the implication is that NIS America will use the fan translation in order to accelerate its own process for localizing the games. NIS America obviously has its own standards for localization that a group of fans, regardless of how talented they are, may not have considered. That said, NIS America is said to have gone above and beyond to involve all of those involved in Geofront's translation in the official release.
To be clear, this is also a compromise. NIS America could have very easily legally targeted Geofront's translations rather than worked with the group. Instead, the agreement that Geofront and NIS America were able to come to works best for both parties. The result is that Geofront's translations of Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure have already been taking offline and won't be republished. But Geofront sees it as a moment to be celebrated, as now its work can be shared across the world.
One detail that hasn't been made clear is whether or not NIS America will be compensating those who worked on the two Legend of Heroes fan translations. Obviously, everyone who worked on the projects at Geofront did so with no expectations of being paid for it. However, NIS America now profiting off of it would raise some eyebrows. NIS America is hopefully offering some degree of recompense for the work Geoforce did -- the work NIS America is now using itself.
To all of the fans of Trails and Geoforce's translations, the group wholeheartedly encourages everyone to support the official releases of both Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure. They're still some time away from release, so Geoforce asks Trails fans to continue being patient.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero releases fall 2022 on PC, PS4, and Switch. The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure releases in 2023 on PC, PS4, and Switch.
Source: Geofront