According to a Destructoid reader, a Nintendo Customer Service Rep has confirmed that the long-awaited Xenoblade is headed to North American shores. The game will go by its original name of Monado: Beginning of the World. Originally released in Japan in June of last year, and scheduled to hit Europe this September, Monado/Xenoblade is a JRPG from Monolith Soft. Note that while Nintendo has yet to publicly refute the rep’s statement, they haven’t acknowledged it either.
Destructoid has also cited Nintendo France as again confirming that the other big Wii JRPG, The Last Story, will make it to European shores. Speaking about both games, the Nintendo subsidiary clearly stated: “Xenoblade will arrive after the holidays on Wii, like The Last Story in 2012.” Last Story is the ambitious action-RPG from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker Studios.
JRPG fans in North America have long pleaded with Nintendo to localize both of those titles and Pandora’s Tower, another action-RPG, for NA. But coinciding with this latest round of news and rumors, the fan campaign known as “Operation Rainfall” went live. The campaign has been brewing over on the IGN Boards for a bit now, but finally took action this weekend. Their blog and forum thread encourages Wii and JRPG fans to bombard Nintendo and the internet at large with e-mails, tweets, Facebook postings and physical letters asking that the three titles be localized for North America.
Unlike most campaigns, though, they didn’t stop there. Rainfall is so devoted to the cause of bringing these promising games over here, that they managed to push Monado: Beginning of the World to the top of the video game bestsellers list on Amazon. They were able to exploit a bit of a loophole in sending the unreleased game skyrocketing to the top of the charts. Nintendo announced the game at E3 2009 as Monado, which prompted Amazon to put up a page for it. After basically nothing happened with it for two years, Rainfall operators flocked to the page and put down real money on reserves. There are now tens of thousands of dollars just sitting out there in Amazon limbo.
In response to all of this, Nintendo finally stepped forward and acknowledged the movement. “Hey fans, we appreciate your enthusiasm. Look for more updates to come soon!” the official Nintendo of America page tweeted. So while nothing is solid for North America yet, the release of the game(s) here now seems like more of a reality than ever before. Considering how barren the Wii’s future release list is, that’s a very good thing.
[Sources: Destructoid, IGN, Joystiq, Operation Rainfall Blog, IGN Boards, Operation Rainfall’s Twitter, Nintendo of America’s Twitter and Operation Rainfall’s Facebook]
[Image via Robo Awesome.]
