Those who were hoping for Summer Lesson to get localized for the western market will be saddened to hear that the odds of that happening appear to be slim.

In an interview with Siliconera, Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada went on the record and explained two reasons on why bringing it over to the west would be very difficult.

The first reason would be due to the amount of new lip syncing they’d have to do for various languages. From the interview:

It’s difficult because lip syncing to do this properly for each language would be a lot of work. You really need this to be perfect to have immersion in gameplay[…]To do that for all of the languages would be quite intense with the scenarios themselves because the length would change with each language. That makes it quite difficult to localize.

The second (and most telling) reason is what he says is the “current climate” in the western market. He says:

[…]When you think about the current game situation and the climate in different countries where you have to have characters from every different race or nationality, someone else would say ‘mine is not included,’ which is the climate we currently see with games. Since there are people who can’t set aside the game and the actual problems in society, I don’t want open that can of worms.

There is a silver lining however, as Harada says that if there is a strong enough demand for it in a particular region, it would make a western release more likely.

Summer Lesson is set to release in Japan on October 13th, 2016