Since my suggestion is somewhat self-explanatory by the topic title, I think I'd like to elaborate why I think it'd be great to have as soon as it's feasible. According to a friend of mine in Japan, the recently translated PS3 release of Terraria is beginning to become quite popular in groups they belong to. I get the general impression that Starbound would be a natural fit for that market. I noticed that it's more than possible to dress up like Reimu from the Touhou Project just from the character creator, which wouldn't go unappreciated by that group. The beautiful hylotl outfits and furniture will also go a long way to letting them feel like they can make anything. Likewise with the glitch, since medieval european styling is practically synonymous with classic JRPGs. Having Japanese gamer support could be a major benefit, since overall they're very good at content generation and showing their appreciation in art and spread of good word across many tightly-knit circles. Because I know someone might bring up fallacy that western games can't easily find an audience in Japan, I want to preemptively say it's flat out not true. Gaming publications have printed misleading articles to that effect because of Microsoft's previous inept attempts at courting the Japanese market. Minecraft and Skyrim have a very strong Japanese following, and as I said anecdotally I've heard Terraria is beginning to pick up speed in the last few days since its translated PS3 release. Starbound's in a good position to eventually ride that fire, if Terraria turns out to become popular.
Starbound looks like it has a fair bit of story, but it doesn't look too heavy in that regard. Translation jobs become really difficult when there's a lot of dialogue or characters engaging in rapport. I'm still kind of amazed that someone made Gyakuten Saiban (Phoenix Wright) work outside of Japan.
Starbound has massive amounts of text. It'll be probably translated collaboratively post-release since the devs just don't have resources for it.
I think they're planning on adding different languages post-release. In that case, Japanese would definitely be supported eventually.
This may be post-release but for a game like Starbound multi-language is important. Also the compatibility with the latin characters that Terraria didn't had when launched that complicated a lot chat. I hope it's not by user-made mods, believe me there are huge mad errors and things that destroy how immersive the gameplay is in many user-made translations.
I couldn't imagine how they would convert the in-game font style they are using into Japanese, haha I'd love to see it happen though
When making this suggestion, I definitely understand it's not a light undertaking and that Chucklefish already have their plates full. It's also too early to speculate on how Terraria will do in Japan given it only saw a translated release a week ago. But if it does find a following, they definitely should feel included in the Starbound community. Incidentally, the Terraria translation was done by Chunsoft. Maybe they could do Starbound? Though I've not had a look at the translated Terraria yet to say how it came out. There's no question about the love put into their release though.
