Note: You need a Weibo account to get full access to this interview.
Translator: Hansuke
Editor: Lanju
There is still more than a month to go before the official release of the 35th anniversary latest work of the "Ys" series, "Ys X: Nordics". Recently, Nihon Falcom's Chinese version from the publisher Clouded Leopard Entertainment invited a reporter from Bonfire to the headquarters of Clouded Leopard Entertainment located in Tokyo, to try out some of the contents of "Ys X", and to have an in-depth interview with the CEO of the company, Ms. Yuen-Yuen Chen, and Mr. Shiro Kawauchi, the COO of the company, and discussed some of the experiences and insights of Clouded Leopard since its establishment four years ago, and also talked about interesting news related to the Chinese market. Thanks to the efforts of many involved parties, the Chinese version of "Ys X" will be released on September 28th, the same time as the Japan release, so that fans of the series can enjoy the fun of the game on their "long vacation".
Prior to founding Clouded Leopard Entertainment, Ms. Yuen-Yuen Chen was the head of SCE's Chinese Localization Center, and she led the localization of most of the PS3's Chinese-language games, such as Final Fantasy 13, Yakuza 0, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 2, and so on. It's fair to say that Ms. Chen and her team were responsible for many of the official release of the Chinese versions of games that were released at the time - some of them were even made available in Chinese on her own recommendation, including Demon Souls, the first original Souls installment in the series. Shiro Kawauchi, who was the General Manager of SIE Korea, is also a key figure with in-depth knowledge of the Asian market. Both of them have their own division of labor to assist each other work at Clouded Leopard Entertainment.
The following is a compilation of the content of this interview.
Reporter: Ys X will be officially released in a little over a month, what are your most concerned about this work?
Yuen-Yuen Chen/Rei Watanabe: The simultaneous release with Japan is the most important thing, and this is also the first time that Falcom is releasing a new installment in a long-running franchise onto the Switch at launch. Many gamers may think that having a simultaneous release is an simple task, but in reality it's not that simple. Kondo mentioned this a lot of the development issues in a interview, and the Chinese version also encountered them as well, but fortunately we received a lot of help from Nihon Falcom and they shared their resources, so that players from China can enjoy the fun at the same time as Japanese players. In addition, we were able to get Ys X a simultaneous release for the Switch players thanks to a lot of constant communication and full collaboration with Falcom.
Kawauchi: Personally, I think the most noteworthy thing is the simultaneous release of the Chinese version. In fact, when I first heard about Ys X getting a simultaneous release, as the COO of the company, I thought it would be very difficult, but thanks to Falcom's full support and the efforts of its internal team, we were able to respond to the expectations of Asian players.
Reporter: The Chinese version of Ys IX encountered some problems at the beginning of its release, were there any new optimization patchs added during the development at that time?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: "Ys IX" is the first work we launched after the establishment of our team, there are many members from the former SIE Chinese Localization Center, and we encountered a lot of problems that we hadn't encountered before after we started to focus on after its release. After getting a lot of feedback from Chinese players, we've pinpoint and completely fixed those problems, which we want to avoid that awkward situation won't happen this time around. Although the addition of the PS5 and Switch platforms made the workload much more heavier for the internal team, we made a lot of adjustments to the process and it's technology during its development in order to minimize the future problems.
Reporter: Aside from the issue of localization requiring a rush proficiency, were there any other difficulties encountered during the development and localization process?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: The reason why there are two different release times of Kuro No Kiseki and not being simultaneous was because of the changes to the new engine. Unlike many other companies engines, Falcom's engine is developed in-house, and it took time for our development engineers to get used to it. Now we had enough experience with these type of issues from Kuro No Kiseki to finally feel confident that we could optimize and do it within simultaneously pace. If the new in-house engine continues to change in the future, that's likely to still affect the overall schedule, and of course the amount of text as well. But I'm pretty confident in that regard, as I've done a couple of million texts at Sony, but the development side of the game will need to be figured out and how we will adapt it like its our own.
Reporter: How many employees does Clouded Leopard have now, how many of them are in Japan and in Taiwan? How is the work distributed among you?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: We now have 43 regular employees, most of them are concentrated in Japan which they are 29 of them, while for Korea they are 13, and Taiwan is only responsible for publicity and news development from Ms. Wang. These employees include QA, localization, physical production, marketing, logistics, and so on. A normal publisher wouldn't have so many people because we outsource only a small part of it to the localization, and we do most of it ourselves. Most of our employees, whether they are localizers or QAs, already had a lot of professional experience before joining Clouded Leopard, which has allowed our company to grow all the way up to this point in just four years.
Kawauchi: The biggest change within Clouded Leopard between Ys IX and Ys X is that the number of employees has grown significantly, with former SIE employees forming the backbone of the company, and now even more talented people are joining us after that.
Reporter: Are there any major differences in distributing games across Asia and what is your experience with its work?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: It is indeed true that the strategy will be adjusted to the preferences of each region. When I was at Sony, I had a better understanding of the Asian market, and after I set up the company, I came into contact with the Korean market, which turned out to be different from what we had initially thought, and we will consider how we can do better. Kawauchi will give us a professional answer on the Korean market.
Kawauchi: I was the general manager of SIE Korea for three-four years, so I have some understanding of how to sell games in Korea, while also bringing personal experience in managing the entire Asian market. Currently our team has minimum to having knowledge of the game markets in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea, which is our main target points.
Reporter: What kind of attitude does Clouded Leopard hold towards indie games and what kind of support can you provide to indie developers?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: Indie games are a market we pay a lot of attention to, and we participated in the BitSummit, a indie game show in Kyoto that took place a while back. Indie developers have a lot of interesting ideas, but they may lack experience in "how to turn those ideas into games", so we have professional support in this area, and we can also help them port their games to Switch, PS5, etc. We will continue to look for suitable indie games in the future. But at the moment, our main focus is on distributing Japanese games globally, including localization and other supports.
Reporter: Is there any difference in difficulty between localizing in Chinese and Korean in games?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: The difficulty of the two is completely different. For Korean, similar like Japanese, it is a phonetic transcription and the characters are quite long, even longer than Japanese, while for Chinese, it is quite shorter than Japanese. Therefore, it is necessary to make targeted adjustments in the production of the game UI and other aspects duirng its development, and to avoid problems such as text being out of place in the text box.
Reporter: For more of its popular IPs, Falcom also launch some additional events and others, does Clouded Leopard have related plans like Falcom?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: Some Chinese companies and Falcom have direct contact in their cooperation, we will provide relevant support in our cooperation, but also not even be directly involved, such as the recent Falcom jdk Band performance in China. In addition, when "Kuro No Kiseki II Crimson SiN" are on sales in South Korea they had done some unique showcase of their promotions for their stores(pop-up stores), I hope that there is an opportunity to be organized like those in China.
Performance: Kiseki No Kiseki IV Falcom jdk Band Live Asia Tour 2023
Reporter: The main business of Clouded Leopard Entertainment now is to distribute some Japanese games in Chinese/Korean, has it ever considered registering a company in China and bringing the best works from China to Japan?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: Of course, if there are suitable companies which we are welcome to get recommendations. When we chatted in private before, we joked that we would like to fly to Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing and other cities in China one after another to find suitable fits to bring those games from China to Japan to be distributed for the their audience, same thing applies the other way around as well.
Reporter: Some of the games released by CLE have Chinese Dub, such as "Onechanbara: Origin", what kind of consideration is this? What type of games will have Chinese Dub?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: The main consideration is how much players need voice acting. A lot of the lines in Onechanbara: Origin need voice acting to express their personality, and we feel that it may be difficult to understand some of the drama in Japanese Dub only; while Earth Defense Force may not be able to get some of the fun and drama without dubbing, so it will be prioritized in this case. It's not like Ys X didn't consider adding Chinese Dub, but it's better to be on the safe side and prioritize the simultaneous release than to add dubbing which it will make it impossible to have a simultaneous release with the Japanese version.
Reporter: It's been almost four years since the founding of Clouded Leopard Entertainment, from behind the scenes to take to center stage, have you made any changes in your mindset?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: It's true that before, I was basically working behind the scenes, taking over the works provided by Sony and localizing them to the best of my ability. Now, even though I'm not involved in localization process, I have to be involved in more things, including company management, strategic planning, etc. I used to be able to work 24/7 with my headset on, but now I can't like I used to. ...... Occasionally, someone will tip me off and say, "The president is back! (laughs).
Reporter: In order to get simultaneous release of game, how far along in the development process can you start to intervene?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: In the case of Ys X, for example, we asked Falcom to tell us what we could do to prepare for the game when it was about 60 or 70% of the way through its development. We've been working on the Chinese Localization of this game for about five months now, and it's not quite finished yet.
Reporter: What is Clouded Leopard's attitude towards the Steam platform? How do you determine whether or not a certain title will be released on Steam?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: Most of the time it's the companies decision. Nowadays, a lot of Japanese companies also consider Steam, as well as deciding whether to publish in Asia or globally. Our main mindset is that we want players to be able to play our games no matter which platform they are on, and although we will try our best to gain them for it, the final decision is still up to the company themselves.
Reporter: What do you know about the market in China?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: Chinese players often provide us with valuable advice, such as "Shin Hayarigami" which a lot of people ask, which also at the same time let us understand what the needs are from Chinese players. Chinese players have a wide range of hobbies, how to let more players play is what we need to consider, and there is even a request for all Falcom games to be launch on a handheld. Mobile games are a market we are interested in, and the handheld game market in China is also very wide, so we will consider it more when we accumulate more development experience.
Reporter: Are you satisfied with the sales performance of Falcom's Chinese version, after all, it's actually a niche market.
Yuen-Yuen Chen: It's kind of met our expectations, but human beings are quite greedy (laughs). At the beginning of the 2000s, when it was only released on the PC platform, many of Falcom's works sold around 200,000 to 300,000 range or even 400,000 to 500,000 in China, and I hope that our current works can also reach such a goal.
Kawauchi: China's huge market is very attractive to the entire industry. Due to the background of CLE, our earliest works were mainly for PlayStation, and then we added the Switch and PC versions, but other than that, mobile/handheld games were a part of the market that we didn't get to touch at all. Falcom's games are commercially successful, but we won't be satisfied easily.
Reporter: The Korean market is relatively unfamiliar to Chinese player base. Compared with the Chinese market, what are the characteristics of the Korean market?
Kawauchi: The proportion of PC players in Korea is somewhat close to that in China, the number is relatively small, but the loyalty of PC players is relatively high. The Korean game market has some inherent limitations in that decree, before many hardware are quite slow than in other places, as long as the hardware and software can be simultaneous as soon as possible for it to be launch, the local players will give a strong response. For example, the PS4 was released earlier than in Japan, and they were very happy with that. After all, it was often in a situation where it was launching later than the rest of the country, but now it's simultaneous or even earlier.
Reporter: What's the best-selling title since the founding of Clouded Leopard Entertainment?
Yuen-Yuen Chen: It would be "The Legend of Heroes: Hajimari No Kiseki". As for user reviews, " The Legend of Heroes: Kuro No Kiseki" is the one with the positive reception.
Reporter: Please leave a message for the Chinese audience!
Kawauchi: I have worked in other places besides SIE, and I've been to China many times, and I feel that everything in China is huge itself, including the roads, the cities, the buildings, and so on, and I can feel that there are a lot of potential gamers here, and I would like to ask the Chinese players to support Clouded Leopard evermore.
Yuen-Yuen Chen: Four years ago when the CLE was founded, Chinese players gave us a lot of supportive feedback, the Chinese market is an absolute need to take the game market seriously, Chinese players really love their games, and they support Chinese localization work, which we are quite moved by it. In the past four years we have actually encountered a lot of setbacks, but the thought of this gives us the motivation to continue to move forward, that I thank you all personally. We are still a small company, what we can do is very limited and I hope to provide more good works under the premise of our limited capacity. Whether it is for the home consoles or other platforms, we will provide with better services and I hope you guys provide us more of your support!
Comentarios