When Fire Emblem: Three Houses launches for Nintendo Switch next March, it will not be localized by excellent localization firm 8-4, the company confirmed on its Twitter account. While they, of course, couldn’t say anything beyond them not doing it (meaning we don’t know who exactly is handling the game’s localization- it might be Nintendo and Treehouse themselves), this comes as a bit of a blow.
See, 8-4 localized Fire Emblem Awakening, which was a fantastic localization with great writing and sharp dialog, and sensible choices made in translating the game over for western audiences. They also worked on Echoes last year, which is arguably the best written Fire Emblem game there has been. On the other hand, Nintendo themselves handled Fire Emblem Fates, and that game’s localization was an absolute mess, with extremely poor writing and voice work to boot.
So, this doesn’t fill me with confidence about Three Houses– Fates‘ awful writing was one of the reasons I could not enjoy that game. Hopefully, whoever is handling Three Houses does better than that.