Never Say Never: Xenoblade and The Last Story

Anyone who’s ever cared about Japanese games featuring effeminate men with ludicrously oversized swords has been following the saga of Xenoblade and The Last Story. Nintendo has had an on-again, off-again affair with localizing these two titles from prominent studios Monolith Soft and Mistwalker, going so far as to announce the former in America at E3 2008. Fan support has been pretty immense, with Operation Rainfall having collected a couple thousand twitter followers in a short span, organizing a letter writing campaign, and pushing Xenoblade’s pre-order into the top ten sales on Amazon.

With all this attention, Nintendo has seen fit to respond, and while they’ll never say never, they aren’t going to bring it over. Operation Rainfall still plans to go ahead with their letter writing campaign, which I encourage all of you to participate in, but it’s still dark days.

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn, but I don’t know if it’s the case this time.

Nintendo has a laundry list of reasons why they don’t want to release these games in the United States. Translation is costly, and they need all their translators to accommodate the many and varied 3DS games they have coming out. They’d need to hire voice actors, and unlike a company like Atlus they don’t have a stable of voice actors they keep in contact with (since, you know, so few of their characters talk). They don’t want to publish any games that won’t move millions of units, because that’s how you make a profit in this business anymore: you sell millions of games.

Of course, none of these reasons particularly matter when you look at the Wii and see a console in its death throes. No games have been released for seven months now. There are two games on the horizon, Skyward Sword and a new Kirby game, but it’s bleak after that. The WiiU won’t launch for a year at least, and the 3DS is equally dead and dilapidated, with its only game being a port of a decade old title.

If we look at the Wii sales on Amazon, we see a console that has 6 games in top ten of sales that are dance games. Three others are old Mario titles that are still hanging around despite being years old.

The other game is Monado: Beginning of the World, which is the original name of Xenoblade. This isn’t a game no one would buy: it wouldn’t sell a million copies, to be sure, but something has to be said for ameliorating your hardcore fan base when a new console’s coming out.

Because that’s the real trick: hardcore gamers are the early adopters of new consoles. If the core is enthused, and your product is good enough, you can have a situation like the Wii, which is what made Nintendo all the money they’ve lost over the past couple years. The Wii succeeded because hardcore gamers bought into the pure potential of motion control while the casual gamer bought into the cool new device that did something entirely different from other consoles. This two pronged approach is the way to sell consoles, and Nintendo, without a truly novel new device to shop, is in danger of missing on both fronts.

You get the impression from this that maybe there’s an increasing plurality of Nintendo shareholders who are like the one who declared games are a waste of time. The only game he seemed to know Nintendo made was Wii Fit, and that seems to be the company line these days: they make Wii Fit and titles that cater to the nostalgia market that will sell a million copies based off of brand recognition alone. No need to care about gamers, because it’s not like gamers are what made those games household names in the first place or anything.

No one is saying, financially, that The Last Story and Xenoblade wouldn’t be risks*. What we’re saying is that they’re good investments. Nintendo can say, as a company, that they’re behind the core gamer as much as they like (and it’s been the mantra of the past two E3’s), but it takes games to convince us that they’re sticking to their words, and these two titles would be all the convincing we need to realize Nintendo isn’t completely out of touch.

Because that’s where they seem to be right now: out of touch. Sony and Microsoft, for all their faults, wouldn’t waste a second on two highly rated Japanese imports. They’d probably try to make them day and date in America, not necessarily even for the money but for the prestige. One thing we cannot say about Nintendo’s two competitors is that they do not try to court fan favor. They want to make money, but they also realize that happy fans buy more games. They buy more new games. They get more excited about major games because they feel like they’re not just living by the whims of some out-of-touch corporate giant who might doom their favorite game to obscurity.

That’s where Nintendo is right now: fans don’t feel like they can trust them to make the best decisions about games they want. I know I don’t trust Nintendo to do anything even remotely good for me, and this mistrust has led me into the arms of other waiting platforms, who promise me everything’s going to be okay. They’re not going to do the things Nintendo does.

They seem to care, and Nintendo doesn’t. They care about money, but they don’t even seem to know how to go about that, considering they’ve gone from in-control titan to losing money hand over fist in the span of a couple years.

Personally, I encourage all of you to write letters with Operation Rainfall’s campaign, tomorrow if you are on the east coast or later if you are on the west. We need to tell Nintendo how they can help themselves and how they can win us back. Otherwise, I’m afraid they’ll wander about in the dark forever, looking for firewood inside their wooden house.

*You will notice me leaving out the other games that have leapfrogged onto this bandwagon, most notably Pandora’s Tower. I’ll be honest, and I’ll take Nintendo’s side: Pandora’s Tower is a bad risk because it doesn’t have the name value to move even a hundred thousand. Sorry, fans, but I get the impression no one’s all that amped up for it. Which is a shame, I freely admit. I’d buy it on launch. But it would not be a practical risk for Nintendo.