Atlus Discuss Luminous Arc 2 Translation

Atlus recently discussed translation issues with the forthcoming western release of Luminous Arc 2.

Luminous Arc 2 washes up on shores on November 18th, 6 months later than Japan, and the translation team have been busy working on the interface, and making the experience clearer for English-reading folk.

I heard the difficulty in Luminous Arc 2 is tougher than the first game. How is it more difficult?

Clayton: Last game you could walk around and spam healing items for easy XP, but in this game your item carrying capacity is very limited. In addition, you’ll also no longer gain a full heal when you level up, and there are some battles that are back-to-back missions that will penalize your party members if they were KO’ed in the previous fight.

It’s not like Luminous 2 is going to wiping the floor with experienced SRPG players (You can get that challenge from online multiplayer.) but I think Marvelous and Imageepoch wanted to make a series that used humor, polished artwork, and voice acting to attract people who wouldn’t normally play an SRPG, or who had tried them before and didn’t like the steep learning curve. I think that they were able to accomplish that, and, this is key, still provide an experience that was satisfying to veteran SRPG players, even though it may have been a little on the easy side.

So, while the first game was sort of an SRPG “primer” for new players, the second one bumps the difficulty up to the level of a standard SRPG. So if someone can get through these two games, they’ll have graduated past the learning curve, and they’ll be ready to embrace the world of SRPGs.

Other than localization did Atlus make any other changes to Luminous Arc 2 like further adjusting the difficulty?

Sammy: In terms of game difficulty, we believe that the enhancements from the first game were clear and suffice, so no real change there. Our main focus localization-wise was to make the user interface clean and pleasant to read. There are many parts of the menu that we adjusted, but I won’t bore you with the minute details!