It is the day where 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim activates and deploys, a product that would have been a challenge under normal circumstances, but turned into a colossal undertaking considering everything that has transpired.

A thread.

I actually had the honor of visiting Vanillaware some time ago when the title was still in production, and the illustrious George Kamitani himself gave me a product overview of we'd ultimate be delivering.

I have to admit, at the time I didn't quite understand it...

Which meant it would be difficult to clearly communicate to users what it was. This held in true in Japan, and has also held true for the West. It's something you play and then understand, not the other way around.

And that was just the beginning...

We knew the narrative would be complicated and we used this opportunity to partner with our friends at SEGA Europe to try out a different localization paradigm than we usually deploy for EU Languages: Translate into FIGS off the direct JP translation, not the final English edit.

This paradigm has some benefits and risks:

In this approach, EU lang is not reliant on the speed or quality of the English edit, they can engage earlier and be more resilient against edits (churn) on the English.

However...

The EU language teams must have a creative vision for the end localization because raw translation is not ready for prime time. If you just translate a raw English translation from Japanese again into German, it will not go well.

We had a whole system set up to link these teams.

Another challenge was that even though we knew the game would have a complex narrative... it was even more complex than we expected. This caused us to need more time than we originally anticipated to polish everything up, and put futher pressure on the back end of the project.

In addition, 13 Sentinels dialog structure is very unique, with lines that would normally be filled into a text box being cut up into short lines displayed one at a time. This creates rhythmic, order, and timing challenges that have to be considered.

On top of all this, we had committed to doing a English voice over. As you may or may not be aware, even the Japanese voice over was being adjusted up until the last minute in Japan, and this impacted us as well because the details of the voice over were in flux until very late.

And then finally, COVID19 hit right when we were spinning up our voice over. But the release date had to be held, so the SOA production team dug in deep to reconfigure all our normal processes with our voice studio and actors to accomplish the recording remotely.

On the other end, our production group worked closely with Vanillaware and Basiscape and our QA teams to work through the challenges of building a finalized text-only game, while preparing and testing a patch that would ultimately bring the game up to full spec.

From the commitment from Vanillaware to the lovingly crafted experience, a retro story within a retro story, to the audio talent at Basiscape, to our international language teams here at SOA and SOE, to our voice actors and studio staff, and of course testing teams...

13 Sentinels is a culmination of an international team of crafts-people demonstrating their best.

If you are a connoisseur of interactive content, you owe it to yourself to play this game.

Thank you to the entire team!