The pain of a project with too much work and too few people

- Carpe Fulgur's Andrew Dice

Localization can be tough -- especially when the game you're working on has more text than War and Peace. In fact, it can drive people almost beyond endurance.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC may be obscure -- but it's beloved by fans, and finally released on PC and PSP last week after years of effort to render its complicated and lengthy story from Japanese into English.

A new story on Kotaku reveals the surprising story of its localization -- and the the tremendous effort required to finish the game and get it into fans' hands.

"When I finally finished it I’d dropped ~10 percent of my body weight and was down to 99 lbs," localization editor Jessica Chavez tells Kotaku, while Andrew Dice, who worked on the game's translation until a falling out with its publisher, says he felt like he'd "fucked up" his company by getting involved with the project at all.

It's a compelling tale of the lengths some projects drive people to, and worth a read.