Before the show, we wrote about what it takes to bridge Asian and European gaming markets. Gaetano Mele, our Sales Account, has now spent 17 and 18 September on the floor at Makuhari Messe. This is the show’s 30th anniversary and its first five-day edition, and what he brought back is worth setting out for anyone planning a release beyond their home market.
4-minutes read
In short: AI has moved into real production pipelines, publishers are letting people play rather than just watch, and the business programme treated international expansion as the main story. Each of these changes what localisation has to do.
AI is now in the pipeline, not just the pitch
The most visible theme was Artificial Intelligence, and what matters is where it now sits. C&R Creative Studios is showing games and an anime project made with AI technologies. That points to use inside a creative pipeline, not an experiment kept in a lab.
Hardware tells the same story. G’AIM’E is presenting gun-style controllers with AI built in to reduce latency. At Gamescom, Gaetano had already seen bHaptics vests that use AI to turn in-game events into physical feedback for shooter players. TGS also gave AI its own technology pavilion, covering AI-assisted design and virtual assistants.
Gaetano’s advice is to stay measured. For many players and developers, AI is still a sensitive subject, so how a studio talks about its AI use matters almost as much as how it uses it. For localisation, the implication is straightforward. The more content is generated or assisted, the more it needs a human to check tone, references and cultural fit before it reaches players.
New releases: familiar worlds you could actually play
Publishers used TGS to put controllers in people’s hands. Koei Tecmo brought five playable titles, and Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember now has a March 2027 release date. Square Enix offered playable demos of Final Fantasy VII Revelation and Final Fantasy Resonance, with Revelation dated for April 2027.
SEGA and ATLUS backed revivals and new bets. Persona 4 Revival is a remake of Persona 4 Golden, and Crazy Taxi: World Tour is the first major entry in the series since 2002. They also showed newer projects such as Stupid Never Dies, all part of a wider SEGA and ATLUS line-up built around demos and stage events.
From a localisation desk, one point stands out: returning IP arrives with a memory. Fans know how a character speaks, what a spell is called and which joke belongs to which scene. Localising a revival is less about fresh translation than about continuity, and any slip tends to be noticed within hours of a demo going public.
Internationalisation was the real subtext
The official business programme made the subtext explicit. It included sessions on growing Japanese games in overseas markets, on internationalising Japanese indie titles and on supporting international growth, plus business matching and networking between Japanese and international companies.
The numbers explain the emphasis. Business-matching requests grew from around 11,000 in 2022 to nearly 90,000 in 2025, and foreign exhibitors now outnumber Japanese ones.
The keynote put the cost on the table. Haruhiro Tsujimoto, speaking for CESA, described culturalisation and localisation as two critical elements of going overseas, and as expensive. Capcom alone supports text in 14 languages and voice-over in nine.
He argued that indie developers can hardly manage this alone and proposed government grants. Whatever one thinks of the proposal, localisation is being discussed as an investment in market entry, not a line item at the end of production.
What we take from TGS 2026
The three themes point the same way. Tools are changing faster than trust, familiar franchises raise the bar for continuity, and going global is a strategic decision made early rather than a translation job handed over at the end.
That is how we work at 1Stop Translations. Game localisation, culturalisation, LQA and FQA sit in the same conversation as market choice and store-page strategy, so a game’s identity survives the crossing. If you are deciding where your next title should land, we would be glad to compare notes.