This past March, North Americans were treated to PSP title Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky by developer Falcom and publisher XSeed games. LoH: TiTS is an entry in one of Japan's biggest RPG franchises, despite the West collectively knowing little about it. Trails in the Sky is the first chapter of a three-part subseries, which presents XSeed with a little bit of a problem.
XSeed's own Tom Lipschultz recently spoke with Siliconera about the status of the very lengthy second chapter. He said that while the company is in fact working on the title, its middling sales and huge workload force it onto the back burner. His words were:
All I can really do is assure you guys that progress is… slow, but existent. There’s still a mountain of work left to do, though, and we’re still on pretty shaky ground with this title.
The first game hasn’t exactly turned out to be a top-seller for us so far (despite overwhelmingly positive feedback from fans), which means we really can’t justify prioritizing the second (especially given its insane length). But we’re not giving up! We still plan to move forward, slowly but surely, until the project either gets done or becomes completely and totally unfeasible – whichever comes first. If series fans want to hurry us along, they’ll need to convince more people to buy the first game so we can have more funding to hire more people to work on the second, and have bigger numbers to convince our investors that Trails 2 is worthy of being prioritized.
As it stands, it’s still too early to give anything even remotely resembling a viable release date – and we certainly can’t just focus all our attention on it until it’s done (as so many fans keep suggesting!) or we’d end up going out of business long before anything came of it.
This represents a case of a game getting great reviews and having a very loyal following, but said following being decidedly small. We see this dilemma also pop up from time to time with Tales games. Good luck and Godseed, Xspeed. Wait I messed that up.
