Last week, Wii owners in North America desperate to play games like Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower, games already released in Japan, pleaded with Nintendo of America to bring those games stateside. Today, Nintendo has responded with a resounding, "Eh, probably not gonna happen."
Those passionate, motivated Nintendo fans showed their support for those games to be localized in the form of a letter writing campaign. They pre-ordered a placeholder listing for Xenoblade, at one point announced by Nintendo of America as Monado: The Beginning of the World, on Amazon.com en masse. They cried out to Nintendo, "American Wii owners cannot live on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Rhythm Heaven alone!" They called this campaign "Operation Rainfall."
Well, Nintendo had heard those polite requests loud and clear, Wii fans. And nothing's changed.
"Thank you for your enthusiasm," Nintendo of America wrote on its official Facebook page in response. "We promised an update, so here it is. 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!"
That enthusiasm was met with an unkind response from the Facebook-going Nintendo crowd, which is rattling off unhappy comments numbering in the thousands.
Granted, when a PR mouthpiece says it has "no plans" to do this or that, it rarely means it actually has no intention of doing so. It's usually bullshit language employed to avoid having to outright confirm or lie about unannounced software. But we're inclined to believe Nintendo of America in its dismissal of Wii fans' wishes at this point, mostly based on its past failures to bring notable Japanese games to American audiences.
While we'll join NoA in never saying never, it's probably for the best to resign oneself to never seeing games like Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower—or any other Nintendo DS or Wii game you've been dying to see localized—if you're a Nintendo enthusiast living in North America.
Don't worry, there's Mario Party 9, Kirby Wii, Fortune Street and a long, long list of fantastic, licensed third-party shovelware to keep that Wii busy for the rest of the year.
Nintendo [Facebook]