"Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter" key art.

Falcom/GungHo Entertainment

Falcom and GunHo Online Entertainment have announced that Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter will launch on September 17 for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Switch.

Interestingly, those who preorder the game in Japan will receive a HD remaster of the original version of the first game, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. However, this bonus is not available in western regions. Why?

While unconfirmed, it most likely has to do with localization rights. In the west, both the Trails in the Sky remake and Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter are published by GungHo Online Entertainment. However, the rights to the original Sky trilogy are probably still under XSeed, who localized them years ago. As a result, it’s unlikely that the HD remaster could be included outside of Japan at all without XSeed’s approval.

Given that XSeed hasn’t handled the series in almost a decade, I wouldn’t blame the company if there wasn’t any urgency on its part. After the release of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II, parent company Falcom decided to go with NISA for future Trails localizations, including this year’s Trails Beyond the Horizon For the Sky remakes specifically, Falcom chose GungHo to publish them.

The publishing and localization rights for the Trails series has been all over the place. It’s also why you probably haven’t seen more remasters or modern ports of the first several Trails games outside of Japan and Asia. Kadokawa partnered with Falcom to release PlayStation Vita versions of original Trails in the Sky and Crossbell duology games in Japan and Asia, while Clouded Leopard Entertainment publishes Trails games in Asia outside of Japan for Falcom.

This is supported by the fact. Another series that XSeed used to localize for Falcom was the Ys series, which NISA also took the reigns of when it started to publish Trails games. XSeed still owns the rights to several older Ys games, such as Oath in Felghana and Memories of Celceta. They recently received modern ports in the form of the Ys Memoire remasters, and XSeed is the publisher of those while more recent entries like Ys Nordics are published by NISA.

Now, this is all speculation on my part, but I think I’m making sense here.

Falcom also has a new game called Kyoto Xanadu, which is due out this summer. The previous game, Tokyo Xanadu, was actually published by Aksys Games instead of NISA or XSeed in the west. It’s currently unknown who’s publishing Kyoto Xanadu outside of Japan, though. The world of publishing rights is truly puzzling.

It’s a bummer that overseas players like myself won’t ever see that HD remaster preorder bonus. In any case, I’m excited to check out Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter when it launches in September. You can read my review of the Trails in the Sky First Chapter too.