JRPG developer Nihon Falcom is best known for their flagship series, Ys and The Legend of Heroes. Among their English-speaking fans, their games are also known for having a long wait between their Japanese releases and their English releases. After Tokyo Game Show 2024, Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo gave his thoughts about localization using artificial intelligence. While it’s good that Kondo wants to decrease the wait between the original release and localization, generative AI is riddled with problems.

Tokyo Game Show 2024

2024’s Tokyo Game Show was held last month, and one of the booths was showcasing lines from Nihon Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes: Kai no Kiseki -Farewell, O Zemuria- translated using a new AI model called ELLA. ELLA is a joint venture between Digital Hearts, a Japanese company that offers multiple game development services including localization, and Rozetta Corporation, a Japanese software development company that focuses on translation through artificial intelligence. The booth showed original lines from the game, with proposed translations where visitors voted on which translations felt truest to the spirit of the original lines. Kondo also participated in the survey, as well as being interviewed by 4gamer, which is a subsidiary of Digital Hearts.

ELLA can tell a given character’s personality traits and relationships with other characters, and when it’s given a line of dialogue or text to translate it generates 5 different options to pick from. The promotional video on the official website says that the company’s linguists select the best result. In an interview with 4gamer, the manager for Digital Hearts’ Global Business Division, Shinji Yamashina, said that ELLA isn’t an external tool, instead only used at Digital Hearts.

Long Waits for Localization

English-speaking fans of Nihon Falcom’s games have often had to wait multiple years between the Japanese releases of their games and their English localizations. This is especially true of Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes series, which often features a lot of dialogue, though Ys games have also sometimes suffered from this. Ys Origin, released in Japan in 2006, didn’t get its worldwide localization until 2012. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky was released in Japan in 2004, but its first English localization wasn’t released until 2011. During Falcom’s 40th anniversary concert in June 2021, it was announced that Trails From Zero (released in Japan in 2010) was getting an English localization in 2022, along with three other Trails games.

In recent years, localization of Falcom’s games has begun to speed up. Ys X: Nordics was released in Japan last year, and its English localization is releasing this Friday. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III was released in Japan in 2017, and its English localization was released two years later. Kondo speculated in the 4gamer interview about using AI to be able to decrease that timeframe to only 6 months between releases, or even having the translated versions of games released simultaneously with their original Japanese releases.

The Problems With Generative AI

The problems with generative AI have been documented for some time now. One of the most prominent issues has been raised by artists and writers online – how is the AI being trained? Training a large language model, or LLM, requires a substantial amount of training data. However, acquiring that data is difficult to do in an ethical manner. Creatives online have noted their work being used to train these AI models without their consent. Even larger companies haven’t been immune to this, as seen with Getty Images suing the creators of Stable Diffusion last year. Digital Hearts has not shared information about how ELLA was trained.

Another issue raised with generative AI is its environmental impact. Well-known LLMs like ChatGPT have been found to have significant water and electricity consumption, both with regards to training the model as well as with having “conversations” with it. Neither Digital Hearts nor Rozetta Corp. have spoken about the concerns around AI’s electricity or water consumption, or about whether ELLA also has these issues.

Of course, another problem with generative AI is its tendency to “hallucinate,” or present things in its responses as being true or real despite being neither. An innocuous example from earlier this year was when multiple generative AIs incorrectly told users that the word “strawberry” only contains two r’s. On the other hand, lawyers have been fined or suspended for citing non-existent case law because ChatGPT told them the cases were real, and Google’s Gemini AI was suggesting glue in pizzas when the cheese wasn’t sticking. These “hallucinations” have been particularly troublesome in academic settings. Yamashina said that he believes “hallucinations” to be beneficial for the purposes of localization.

Kondo’s Comments

As part of his interview with 4gamer, Kondo spoke highly of the potential for AI to speed up the translation process. When asked about fears about AI taking away human jobs, he likened it to the 19th-century Luddite movement in England. He did acknowledge that translation still needs a human touch but emphasized that speeding up the process with AI appealed to him from a management perspective. Kondo also stated that he empathizes with the employees at Nihon Falcom who worry about AI using their designs or drawings and that their situation is different from translation.

Final Thoughts

While it is encouraging to hear that Nihon Falcom’s president wants to work towards making the localization process not take as much time, it’s concerning to see generative AI touted as the ideal method to do so. There are many problems with generative AI, from how the models are trained to the quality of results they return.

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