Luminous Arc 2 brightens North America in November

I really enjoyed the first Luminous Arc, so I was happy when I saw the e-mail from Atlus stating that this one would be localized. It’s pretty lame that they gave the exclusive story to IGN though. I would have liked to download the intro in high-res without having to pay for IGN Insider.

Spencer - I love your site, you do top notch work.

I have major problems with articulation myself, but sometimes in some of your stories I don’t understand exactly what you are saying

Specifically this line “but the quote from Luminous Arc 2 was a disheartening reference to the Xseed/Marvelous partnership.”, I feel like I missed a sentence here, what quote was in Luminous Arc 2/ what are you referring to?

“The good news is the costly voice acting project of Luminous Arc 2 is green lit and scheduled to come out this November”

Again I feel like I missed something, what was the bad news?

@Chuck: I’m with you. Being a grammar nazi myself, I spot typos and half-finished sentences in most Siliconera posts. But since this is the best source for videogame news I don’t complain too much. Still, I too would like to know what exactly Spencer meant by this.

I didn’t type the quote, it’s one of the “lost” parts of the Atlus chat I had last weekend. I asked if they were going to localize Luminous Arc 2 and the response I got was a disheartening, Xseed and Marvelous have an agreement so we don’t know. It was something like that, but all along Atlus was really working on it.

Wow actually surprised by this news. Mainly because I didn’t think Luminous Arc 2 was going to come out here, sure it was more popular than luminous arc 1 in japan, but I just didn’t see it as financially viable.

Well I’m getting more curious about xseeds 2 mystery releases.

BTW, who here thinks the DS is the true RPG console successor of this generation. Whatever you’re viewpoint is, it sure seems that the ds is getting tons of rpgs (quality of those are questionable I agree).

Spencer I think you need to make an article about what you think about the 360’s chances in japan. If its selling so badly why does the 360 get so many jp rpgs? Is it because the developers think the game will sell more units on the 360 due to its US popularity. If thats the case, are they foresaking their Japanese consumers? I’m really confused over whats happening this generation.

I would understand another japanese console taking sony’s place, but it makes me hesitant to be glad about the 360 rpgs. I want rpgs, but the 360 sure isn’t known for their rpgs. Are rpg nuts like myself going to give in and just buy a 360 (I already have one btw).

@spencer

Well maybe they working on it when the xseed/marvelous news broke out, and they honestly didn’t know what was going to happen to their product. They probably didn’t want to say anything if Marevlous didn’t talk to them about the status of their current acquisition beforehand.

@byrc - I doubt it. The interview was last Saturday. They were probably just keeping the announcement as a secret until this week. Publishers do these kinds of things all the time so you have to read in between the lines, but the response from Atlus felt like a “no” instead of a “well see…”.

Well either way great fucking news!

If only atlus left the JP voices.

I love atlus, but why can’t they be like NISA and leave the JP voices.

I’ve heard that it was some sort of issue outside their control (in persona 3’s case), but if NISA can do it with all their games, why can’t they?

byrc: I would guess that it’s because:

1) NISA generally publishes games made by their parent company, and therefore, they can just ask the JP voice actors to agree to give NISA rights to their voice in the NA games.

2) Strat-RPGs are smaller than a massive P3 sized RPG, and therefore, dual audio will actually fit on the disc.

Spencer: Any chance on another LA interview with questions from the fans this time?

Ummm can’t agree with you there somedude.

Look at games like Mana Khemia and Ar Tonelico, both had tons of voice acting and both are not strat games.

Aside from that, Luminous Arc is a srpg and doesn’t have that much voice acting.

NISA will be releasing Disgea and Rhapsoday on the DS with all the JP voices intact.

Now concerning point 1, NISA has released many non NIS games. They’ve released tons of Banpresto and Idea Factory games with both english and JP voice.

Again why is it that Atlus can’t do this, it really confuses me. I still love atlus and their recent Dubbed games have been pretty decent, if not exceptional, except with Luminous Arc 1, which was just plain bad.

Byrc - those were all cd games though, where you have so much space, that compressed audio is fine. For a ds game chances are it dual-language would require them moving up to a bigger cart size thus increasing the costs of production substantially(this thing is already on a 1 gig cart and the game costs $39.99!)

@ byrc

We’re still waiting for info about the that. IGN reports that Disgaea for the DS will only have English voices while Rhaspsody will only have Japanese songs due to the DS’s limitations.

We’ll see in the future what they can do, but don’t always hold that matter for now. So far, NISA has done dual, but this is the first time they are dealing with the DS, so let’s see if they actually can pull it off.

@Byrc - The Japanese voice acting has to be individually licenced. They don’t automatically get it when they licence the game, if I recall correctly. A lot of the time using the English voices only helps to cut down on overall costs of games that might not make a lot of money in the first place. Also, I don’t want to start an argument here on this sensitive issue, but Japanese voice acting isn’t as high in demand as people would have you believe. From my experience, the only ones who demand it are otakus on the Internet. I’ve never met anyone off the Internet who wanted these voices. Very rarely can an Internet minority (even a very loud one) prop up a multi-nationally released game by themselves. You also need sales from casual fans, who don’t care about Japanese voice acting at all. I personally can’t stand Japanese voice acting. With every other girl yelling “KYAAAAA” over every little thing, and deep manly voices being given to 12 year olds at random, I much rather prefer a good English dub, to be honest. I’m really glad that companies like Atlus U.S.A. think about fans like me when they decide what to do with voice acing. Oh, I think Nintendo of America and Sony Computer Entertainment America have rules that state the game must have an English track on most games if there’s a sizable voice track present at all, although I’m not 100% certain about that. Maybe someone else here can tell you more about that.