Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns – 2nd localisation blog post, more screens

30 December 2016 Lite_Agent Marvelous, Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, XSEED

A few weeks ago, XSEED posted the very first localisation blog post for Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, featuring some screenshots in English. If you haven’t already, make sure to check it out by clicking here!

Yesterday, XSEED posted the second localisation blog post, with some pretty interesting details about a particular aspect of this game’s localisation, and of course more screenshots in English.

First, John from XSEED starts by sharing a rather amusing anecdote about him helping a farmer friend dig up sweet potatoes in Japan. After that, he shares details about an important aspect of Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, which is farmland. Unlike in the previous title, all farmland is concentrated in a single area.

And while it’s true that you don’t have to fight for field space with anyone, you do have to earn expansions to your fields and your farm. John also mentions the Farm Circles: special buildings you can place in your fields, in order to improve your crops. Another thing you need to pay attention to: diversifying the output of your farm, which is essential to progressing in the story.

A major part of the game consists in building your bonds with the trio of towns, which is done by participating in festivals, greeting townsfolk, and completing part-time jobs (which fills up the Town Link Rank). Shipping crops to a specific town allows you to easily increase your rank, which then allows you to take on story quests (where you help villagers improve their towns). What’s more, you can make yourself a lot of money that way!

When you first begin in the game, your stamina is pretty poor, and you need to replenish it often: the meals served at Westown’s Garden Grill are a great way to do so.

John from XSEED gives us a few examples of things you can do on your farm:

plant rows and rows of corn;
grow fruit trees;
harvest mushrooms and paddy crops like wasabi and rice;
have bees;
raise livestock.

Finally, the localisation blog post goes over an interesting aspect of Japanese people’s worldview. In Japan, strawberries, melons, watermelons and pineapples are all classified as vegetables, and it’s indeed the case in the Japanese version of Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. Naturally, this caused issues during localisation:

In other cases, the simple solution as localizers would have been to reclassify these crops in their descriptions, writing “fruit” instead of “vegetable.” However, in Trio of Towns, “vegetables” and “fruits” are categories that are counted separately in things like shipping totals. This issue was managed by renaming the categories themselves from “veggie” and “fruit” (which, in Japanese, was actually “fruit tree”) to “Field Crop” and “Tree Crop.” We were then able to describe crops in the same category as fruits or vegetables in the item description text. I know that “Field Crop” and “Tree Crop” aren’t perfect, but they were the best we could come up with after a lot of discussion, and I’m satisfied with them as general categories.

In Lulukoko, there’s a special event where you can give fruit to the villagers, and you get fruit in return. But if you give them fruits that are actually classified as vegetables by the game, then you don’t get any reaction from them (and no fruit either)… talk about confusing!

Unfortunately, simply changing the names of the categories was not enough here: they also asked the development team in Japan to make it so that the four “vegetables” (strawberries, melons, watermelons, and pineapples) could be gifted to the villagers during the event.

What this localisation blog post shows is that localisation is not as straightforward as it seems, and that’s it not necessarily in games with a deep story and lots of dialogues (such as JRPG) that the most complicated issues can be found.

Finally, here’s some screenshots for Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns in English: