North American Wii owners let loose a deluge of Operation Rainfall requests over the internet last weekend in an attempt to convince Nintendo to bring three high-profile Japanese games (Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower) over here. Nintendo was caught off-guard by the campaign, but promised that they would eventually release a statement in response. That statement is finally here, but it’s the complete opposite of what their fans were hoping to hear.
Addressing the matter via its Facebook page, The Big N said that there are no current plans to bring the games to North America. “We never say ‘never,’ but we can confirm that there are no plans to bring these three games to the Americas at this time. Thanks so much for your passion, and for being such great fans!” Massive amounts of responses quickly pored in — most of them negative. One poster even sarcastically asked for Reggie’s (Nintendo of America President) head. So, yeah, fans are understandably upset over the news.
Over on the Twitter front, Nintendo echoed the same sentiment: “@OpRainfall Thanks for being such incredible fans! Unfortunately, there continues to be no plans for NOA to release these 3 games right now.” Nintendo, it would seem, believes that there just isn’t a large enough audience that would purchase the games to justify all of the money they’d have to invest in localization, marketing and the likes.
Obviously there is a very vocal group that is clamoring for the games, and they even put their money where their mouths keyboards are by preordering on Amazon. However, Nintendo obviously thinks that too many of the hardcore JRPG and action game fans have moved on to other platforms and forgotten all about Wii. That may very well be the truth, but it’s still a shame that not even one of these games are being brought over to fill in the Giga Bowser-sized gaps in the Wii’s release schedule. Still, keep in mind that they didn’t completely rule out localization, they just said that they’re not planning on doing it at the moment. Who knows, perhaps they’ll change course down the road and announce the games.
[Sources: Nintendo Facebook Page and Nintendo Twitter Page]
[Image via MMGN.]
