The February 28th North American release for Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns is rapidly approaching, and now localizing studio XSEED Games has taken to their developer blog to explain why localizing the game’s DLC is an issue.

In the blog, XSEED detailed the four free patches that were added to the game in Japan post launch, including:

• A new bachelor and bachelorette: Stephanie the contest MC and Woofio. Yes, Woofio the contest judge in the dog suit. This includes new resident and romance events for these characters.
• A few new events such as your father coming to visit and getting together with friends of the same gender for a meal.
• The ability to have a child with the game’s secret marriage candidate.
• A new “performer” story (Which are similar to the TV channels in the previous Story of Seasons).
• A new pet, Cheburashka, a Russian cartoon character that has a presence in Japan.
• New costumes, including ones based on Lest and Frey from Rune Factory 4.
• New reaction dialogue for different outfits and pets from bachelors and bachelorettes.

The studio noted that one of these patches is massive, containing over 200,000 Japanese text characters. This is the equivalent of an entire game’s script in some cases, to which the company simply can’t afford to translate it and release it for free.

XSEED notes to localize this content it would cost “upwards of six figures,” considering that “over half of which is programming and QA costs.” Going even further, they said the required funding and development work is roughly capable of almost releasing “a full other title.”

The last batch of DLC launched back in December of last year in Japan, at the same time the English version of the game was undergoing QA testing and had its localization submitted as well. Coming from this, XSEED said it’s impossible to include this content in the main release, to do so would mean delaying the release by months.

XSEED said that to localize the content and mitigate costs, they have to charge $3.99 per DLC patch, with them combining the first and second patches into a single release. This would reduce the number of post-launch DLC patches from four to three.

Finally, if they charge for the DLC, they won’t be able to include Cheburashka, due to licensing issues. Even if they offered him for free, they aren’t guaranteed the license in North America indefinitely.

XSEED is asking fans to reach out to them via social media, email, and so on to voice their opinion on the DLC.