To give you a sense of things. We spent a year on localizing Saints Row (a US game) for Japanese release. One its a really different language so you run in to the issue of finding the English that fits what the Japanese are trying to say. On top of that you also have to make sure anything you changed in the game for the localization didn't break anything in the game. You'd be surprised how a game can break on you when you think something as a simple text change isn't going to hurt anything. Then there is more things. The biggest difference between fansubs and a localization, someone is doing it as a hobby and someone is doing it for money and to make money. How many fansubs have you seen with bad spelling or grammar? You don't really care too much because you know its not official. However, the game company has to do things right or they'll get hit in sales and reviews, not that it still doesn't happen.

Plus you have to re-record all of the voices. That takes time, sometimes a month or more depending on how much you're dubbing. And RPGs are even worse any other game because of the sheer volume of text present in the same. An anime has 22 minutes of dialogue possible, and its going to be rare that they fill the whole thing with dialogue. So you'll come out with hundreds of lines possibly. An RPG counts theirs in thousands, usually tens or hundreds of.

Even after you've translated everything you have to go into the game and actually confirm that it has been changed. All of the testing required for all of that text has got to take a lot of time to do. Then if anything is wrong, it has to be sent back to be fixed.

And we're actually lucky on FFXIII, because SE is giving us lip-sync on in-game cutscenes. I believe that the FMVs aren't being re-rendered for lip-sync. Almost no game you're going to find re-syncs dialogue for foreign languages as far as I know, especially not RPGs. And we're fortunate its SE, who has people to throw around for these things.

Anyone that looks for the smaller games from like Atlus and NIS. We count ourselves lucky to see them inside of a year.