Since forming a publishing agreement with Falcom, Xseed had a stream of PSP games from the Japanese publisher including Ys Seven and The Legend of the Heroes: Trails in the Sky. "They have been a very good partner of ours," praised Ken Berry, Director of Publishing at Xseed, during an interview with Siliconera.
The partnership also changed how Falcom’s titles were handled outside of Japan. Xseed licensed a fan-translation to expedite the release of Ys: The Oath in Felghana and Falcom handled the localization programming in-house.
"You know, they’ve actually gone in and localized everything themselves, which is new for them," Berry explained. Before working with Xseed, Falcom titles were brought over by companies like Konami and Atlus which released a DS port actually developed by Interchannel in Japan. "All of their other projects that hit the US before, they’ve always left the programming or the porting to another company and quality did suffer a lot of times. We let them see a new model where they are localizing it to put out the best product possible."
"At the same time there is a tradeoff is that if they are too busy working on other products, like they are right now, the flow of games sort of slows. They’re a small company and they are working on so many new products right now they don’t have time to assign a programmer on localization for us. That’s slowed up a little bit, but we think as soon as they finish up with some of their products they are working on now, hopefully we can get back to localizing some of their titles." Falcom is currently working on The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Blue for PSP and a PlayStation Vita launch title they’re being awfully quiet about.
Xseed can handle six to eight decent size titles per year. I asked Berry how many games Trails in the Sky counts as. He laughed for a second before saying, "Yeah, that would take up about half of that capacity, to be honest with you."
