Last month, I discovered The Legend of Heroes series, a long-running JRPG franchise that I only just picked up on with its latest PSP release, Trails in the Sky. These games are notorious for a focus on narrative as evidenced by absurdly long, text-heavy scripts. Curious about the process behind translating such a huge project, I asked Xseed and was put in touch with Jessica Chavez, the publisher's senior editor. In this interview, the charming Chavez shares the horror and struggle of such an overwhelming project, reveals the staggering total number of hours she spent working on it, and breaks down at the prospect of translating the sequel.

Approximately how long is the script for Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky? How many words?

I’ve spent the last month trying to forget this bit of info…

Well, according to some erratically scrawled notes carved into my desk, Trails in the Sky clocked in at somewhere around 1.5 million characters (“characters” being Japanese kanji). That’s roughly equivalent to 3 hefty RPGs or a 600-800 page novel in English.

How long did this project take from start to finish? About how many hours do you estimate that you worked on Trails?

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is by far the longest we’ve ever spent localizing a game. From start to finish it straddled three separate years from November 2009 to February 2011 and was a real marathon run for everyone involved. But while translation started in November 2009, my role as editor didn’t really begin in earnest until March 2010, because I was still preoccupied with Lunar: Silver Star Harmony at that point. After Lunar was in the clear, I was able to focus my horrified attention on Trails for the next three months. During that initial period I slogged through system text and the prologue and realized belatedly just how impossible it would be to meet the deadline at the current pace. So, from June to December of 2010, I deprived the L.A. Transit Authority of my company and worked from home to squeeze out some extra hours.

Here’s a simplified breakdown of those “extra” hours:

First three months (cool blue)  + Crunch Time (danger red) =

(~8 hours/day    X      5 days/week      X      3 months)  +

(~12 hrs/day     X      6 days/week      X      6 months)    =  ~2208 hours

2208 hours =

How many other people were you working with on the translation for Trails?

Trails in the Sky required the usual ritual sacrifice of company personnel with the addition of a chubby house cat, plus a few extra warm bodies. The main team consisted of four people: one in-house editor and three translating guns for hire. John Sears (our initial Sora no Kiseki expert) served as the vanguard of the operation and tackled the system text, the prologue, chapter 1, and a bit of chapter 2. He was relieved in June 2010 by Jeff Nussbaum, who worked in tandem with Chris Cruz to defeat the remaining million or so characters (Japanese kanji), and while these gentlemen were merrily burning out their corneas, I served as the lead editor (with help from our other in-house editor, Tom, during chapter 4). Being lead editor generally entails a lot of rewriting, formatting, bleeding eyes and cursing. I did this for the latter nine months of the game’s localization process. And finally, though contributing nothing of value to the project, the aforementioned cat served as a kind of gelatinous moral support.

Trails in the Sky turned out to be too mighty to be defeated by a skeleton team in the end, however, and QA [quality assurance] was only managed by roping Tom in once again as well as stealing a guy from marketing (sorry, Ken!). I should also mention my long-suffering manager, Kenji, who had to facilitate all communication between us and the dev team in Japan as well as juggle the master submission and other delightful bureaucratic processes.

Where do you start on a project this massive? How do you go about scheduling something like this and making it happen?

Xseed didn’t really have a blueprint for scheduling such...titanic games until Trails in the Sky came along. Normally we look at an old schedule for a similarly-sized game and extrapolate from there. Translating and editing the text is, of course, the main chunk of space allotted in a timetable, but you also have to budget for QA (bug checking), master submission, ESRB, nervous breakdowns, etc, etc. With Trails in the Sky it was almost comical how little our other games compared to it. In the end we only had one marker to hit: Make the end of the fiscal deadline (March 2011) or die trying.

What are some of the challenges of a huge translation project like this?

Hmm.... Well, probably the biggest challenge for any game this size boils down to stamina. Can you last through six-plus months of grinding yourself stupid? The gaming crunch, a legendary time period of exquisite pain and emotional immolation in our industry, usually only lasts a couple of weeks. Unfortunately for us, Trails required six straight months of it in order to make deadline, and following that we had to dive right into QA and ESRB. It was the kind of experience that makes you forget what sunlight feels like. In the end I was mentally pretty toasty and the only way I felt I could shed some of the stress was to physically remove about a pound of hair from my head. Six months of hard crunch is worth about 18 inches of hair by my estimates then.