NIS America announced on Thursday at their press event that Ar tonelico III: The Girl's Song that Pulls the Trigger of World's Demise will be localized in the United States as Ar tonelico Qoga ~Knell of Ar Ciel~ . The game has been estimated to be released in Spring 2011. Although the game was not present for play testing and no video footage was shown, we did get to sit down with the game’s localization manager, Ryuta Sato to address some of the questions and concerns some of our readers had.First off, many fans will notice the name change, Sato explains:
“We didn’t want players new to the series to think they would need to play the first or second game in order to understand what is happening in Ar tonelico III. In Ar tonelico, the game has its own language called Hymmnos, and the word qoga means final or end in Hymmnos. As this is the third and final game in the series, we thought this would be an appropriate title.”
In regards to English voice overs, Sato reassures that they are doing their best to fit as much of the English audio into the game, space permitting. The game will, of course, feature dual audio and contain the full original Japanese voices.
Name changes were a touchy topic. Sato admits that for the localization of Ar tonelico II, the staff did not understand the Hymmnos language very well. For the localization of the third game, he has taken the time to personally learn the Hymmnos language. In this case, some words and names that were changed in the previous games have been reverted backed to the original in order to keep their meaning.
As for quality assurance, Sato realizes that the game may not be perfect and some problems or mistake could potentially appear. In this case, since the game is being released for the PlayStation 3, NIS America will be able to release downloadable patches to fix the game.
As for downloadable content for Qoga, Sato can only comment that he hopes they will be able to release them in the future.
