When a game ships out the door, it’s very common to see patches to address various issues players have. It’s quite another to see a company admit they screwed up a foundational element, and commit to re-doing it. But that’s exactly what happened when NIS America announced JRPG Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana would get a complete re-retranslation, after weeks of critics and fans roasting its localization.

“As soon as a game comes out, you are just hitting refresh on OpenCritic and Metacritic and seeing what everybody has to say,” said NIS America senior associate producer Alan Costa, who’s heading up the game’s re-translation, during an interview recently. “Initially, when we'd hit sites and see the scores, we'd go ‘Oh, that's an eight. That's a nine! That's fantastic!’ But consistently, we saw reviewers saying ‘Great game, shame about that translation.’”

Though admirable NIS America would admit such a catastrophic failure and try to do right by fans, how did it happen in the first place? How does a game ship like that?

“It has come to my attention that the quality of the Ys VIII localization has not reached an acceptable level by our own standards, but most importantly by yours,” said NIS America president and CEO Takuro Yamashita in an unprecedented press release .

Ys VIII was a huge deal for NIS America, the Western branch of Japanese developer Nippon Ichi. As a studio focused on localizing Japanese games, ones made by their parent company and by others, landing the rights to the new, ambitious, and story-focused Ys helped put an exclamation point on a banner year for NIS America, who also localized Danganronpa V3 in 2017_._ Importantly, it was the first major Ys game translated by NIS America; previous entries had been handled by one of its competitors, XSEED. Fans were already nervous about the change.

It seemed to be a bit more than that, as evidenced by a hardcore fan compiling a long list of problems with the localization , largely focusing on how awkward the writing comes across. While not gibberish, it didn’t exactly, uh, flow. One of the funnier examples is how the game translated an area called “Crevice of the Archeozoic Era.”

“It became apparent pretty quickly that there was some major issues with the tone,” said Costa, “with the language used. From what I could tell, there was nothing that was translated incorrectly, it was just extremely dry.”

But when Costa became aware of the reaction, he turned on the game.

Costa has been with NIS America for years, and once worked in the publisher’s localization trenches. In the leadup to Ys VIII’s release, he’d been traveling the world doing interviews and promotion with the person who’d written the story for Ys VIII, Nihon Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo. The localization team who’d handled many other games was in charge of finishing Ys. This was how the process worked.

Critics pointing out the localization was a huge red flag for NIS America. The company is used to fans taking issue with one decision or another—it’s the nature of working for a company specializing in localizing Japanese games—but it suggested the fan backlash would be worse. That proved true, as fans picked apart mistake after mistake.

Costa quickly had a conversation with the head of NIS America, who roped the Japanese developers at Falcom. Falcom was aware of the script criticisms, but according to Costa, left the decision on what to do next to NIS America. Though some fans have conjectured Falcom pushed NIS America into the change, Costa called such theories “patently false.”

What does seem obvious, however, is how the choice to re-translate was fueled by the NIS America bottom line, for a variety of reasons. Conspiracy theories aside, it was their first time on Ys, and they screwed it up. Not only did that reflect poorly on the fans who’d supported them, but it could taint future business opportunities for NIS America. If they weren’t seen as a studio who could honor the games they were working on, they could lose projects. As more and more Japanese companies handle their own translations, the ripple effects may have hung around for years.

“That pie is getting smaller and smaller,” said Costa. “It's very important to us that we deliver on our promises and we deliver a high-product. It wasn't an ideal situation at all, but it did, at least, give us an opportunity to show our sincerity and our belief in a quality piece of work.”

Of course, that still doesn’t answer the core question: how’d it happen?

“Honestly speaking,” he said. “I don't know why.”

The re-translation has lead to a re-examination of the company’s internal processes, specifically addressing how nobody spoke up about problems with script along the way.

“What's really important is to really be true to what the creators wanted and to make sure it matches the tone of the game."

“I don't know if certain individuals didn't really understand their role within all of it," he said. "I don't even know if if the QA people thought ‘Maybe it's not my place. These guys translate, my job is to look for bugs and inconsistency and grammar and the grammar looks good. I'm not entirely sure. I don't think we can pinpoint one thing. If anything, it's all of those things.”